I had all weekend to rest up. I spent most of it in bed. I didn’t even want to think about a full week of training. My body was sore and brittle. I staggered to the bathroom and then back to bed.
As painful as it was, I never even thought of quitting. The guys who washed out of Granite Mountain had a tradition. They didn’t walk into the station and resign to Eric. That would have been too humiliating, like failing manhood. Instead, rookies drove down Sixth Street late at night, hauled their gear out of their trucks, and threw it over the station’s back fence. They were too ashamed to face the hotshots.
No way was that going to be me. On Monday morning, I pulled my shirt on, feeling like I was dislocating my shoulder, then thrust my legs into my pants like a senior citizen.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Are you sure you want this?
Yes, I wanted this.
I drove to the station, walked in, and said “Hey” to the guys in the locker room. No one said anything. Just nods. At best.
After a quick briefing, we got in the buggies and went right out on the trail.
When we lined up, I saw Chris fall in behind me.
This is bullshit, I thought. I’m going to lose it and crack this man right in the mouth.
I was even slower than I’d been on the first day. Every tendon in my legs felt like it had been sanded down, leaving the nerve endings exposed. The stiffness lasted for a mile, then I felt heat rippling up through my thighs. Then waves of pain.
Sweat was pouring down my face. Someone was charging up behind me. I stumbled and nearly fell to the ground. I heard Chris’s voice.
“What the fuck, rook?”
I could feel my Irish temper burning. Short fuse. On any given Friday night, I would have turned around and it would have been on. But I had to control myself.
I straightened up and staggered ahead. Mile after mile. I could feel Chris getting more and more furious behind me.
Later, I would learn more about him. He was from Southern California and had been a hotshot there. He had the pedigree: engine work, helicopter work, seen every kind of wildfire. Cali has the oldest and the baddest crews in the country, because they have the big fires and the big populations and they have a tradition. So they’ve always set the standard for the nation.
Cali guys don’t tolerate bullshit. And maybe Chris, seeing a fellow expat on the trail, was doubly disgusted: Not only was I a disgrace to hotshottin’, I was a disgrace to SoCal hotshottin’. I was making his ass look bad.
Cali crews have a make-or-break attitude. They grind rookies until they snap or until they find a reason to like them. And one thing was for sure: Chris MacKenzie was finding no reason to like me.
“Get off this trail, rook.”
“Fucking deadweight.”
“Move, bitch!”
No one on Granite Mountain wanted me there. They weren’t going to risk their necks to help me. Why should they? Case in point: my inhaler. I’d gotten one because I’d known we’d be out in the wilderness and I didn’t want to have an asthma attack out there. At the station, it was easy enough to hide. Keep it in a pocket or in my locker and take a quick shot when no one was looking. But out on the trails, that’s hard to do. There were a couple of times I had to use it. I literally could not breathe.
That afternoon, a hotshot named Jesse Steed walked over to me.
“Hey, Brendan. Do you use an inhaler?”
I felt caught out and a little embarrassed. How did he know? Someone must have told on me.
“Yeah, I do.”
“You got asthma?”
I nodded. “Listen, are you gonna tell Eric?”
“I don’t care that you have asthma,” Jesse interrupted. “I care that you hid it from us. We’re here to support you, Brendan. Seriously, what the fuck were you thinking?”
I shrugged. “That someone would find out and I’d lose my job?”
“If you’ve got a problem, especially a problem that affects the crew, we need to know. We’ll help you all we can, but you’ve got to trust us.”
“I’ll throw this away, then.”
I meant it. I’d rather take the risk of having an attack out in the woods than lose the job.
Jesse shook his head. “That’s not what I’m trying to tell you. Keep it. Stay healthy. But don’t keep things we need to know secret.”
I nodded and stuffed the inhaler back in my pocket. I looked around, wondering who’d blown me in.
But it was my fault, really. I didn’t have enough trust in anyone to admit I had a weakness. Addicts keep secrets. They lie. That was the code I knew.
That night the pain in my body was so intense I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. I’d gone to bed at ten p.m. but at midnight I was still staring at the ceiling. I had to be up at seven and if I didn’t get any sleep, there was no way I was completing training.
Most people who detox from drugs do nothing for a week. I was doing it by working my ass off. My body was crying out for some relief.
You can do this, I said to myself. You’re worthy of being on this crew. Do not give up.
The desire to be part of this brotherhood, to have a chance at the new life right in front of me, was overcoming my craving for drugs. I’d beaten my drug addiction, and it would never come back.
We ran endlessly, all over Prescott. People who were out hiking had no idea who we were. Some of them thought we were a soccer team training for a tournament. Some locals would be like, “Hey, thanks for what you’re doing out here.” But nobody really thinks about hotshots until they see a wildfire on the evening news, and even then we’re hidden in the high timber, just doing our job.
Those first two weeks, one of the full-time veterans was paired up with me to make sure I didn’t run off a cliff or collapse. These guys—I didn’t know all their names yet—knew how to get inside your mind. But, unlike Chris, they were actually trying to help me, getting me to fight for the job.
“You done, McDonough? You had enough?”
“No, sir.”
“You look like you wanna give up, rook. Go home and grab a beer. No one’s gonna hold it against you, dude. You wanna go home?”
“No, sir!”
I asked myself, Why are these guys trying to break me? They were searching for my weak spots, and when they found one—my druggie past, my fucked-up family life—they pressed it until it was numb. These guys want to know my deepest, darkest fears. Why, to use them against me?
By Thursday I was feeling awful. My body was worn out. I was questioning whether I’d be physically able to even get through the training, never mind a wildfire.
We headed to Brownlow Trail for a run. I quickly dropped back to the end of the line. I was wheezing along, trailing far behind the other guys, even the other rookies.
Chris didn’t bother to hassle me anymore. It was like he’d given up on me. Why waste time on a rookie who isn’t going to make it? Weirdly, I almost missed his abuse. At least before, I had the feeling the other guys saw me as a threat to make the crew. Now they’d written me off.