I’d broken my cherry. Back in Prescott, if someone asked me if I’d been on a fire yet, I told them yes. I felt good about it, but it wasn’t like I went around bragging. I was working with hotshot legends on Granite Mountain. One fire meant nothing.
Five days after Yuma, we were in the station when Eric walked in.
“We’re going to Chiricahua,” he announced.
I knew there was a wildfire burning out of control in southeast Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains. Now we were being called in.
“Woohoo!” I shouted. I grabbed my bag and headed for the buggies.
We drove to the foot of the mountain range and checked in with Incident Command. It was evening, so we got our gear ready for the morning, then sacked out.
The Chiricahua Mountains are made up of a bunch of sky islands, tall rocky peaks surrounded by completely different terrain, like high desert or wild grasslands. It’s a bunch of radically diverse habitats squeezed together. Perfect for Granite Mountain.
As we turned in, the guys were talking about the job. This was a real fire, a big one. Yuma had consumed 10,000 acres in a few days. Chiricahua was doing that every hour. It would soon grow to almost 250,000 acres, almost 400 square miles, thirty times bigger than Manhattan. And it was showing no signs of slowing down. There were hotshot crews from all over the Southwest already battling it. The elevations were crazy: The fire was burning from 1,000 feet to 10,000, up the steep, pine-studded mountain slopes. This job wasn’t like going just outside Prescott and chopping down some trees. This was mountain-climbing country and hot desert and fast-fuel grasslands all packed into one mission.
The next morning, we were supposed to transport to the fire line. “We’ll be taking a chopper in,” Eric announced.
“Whaaaat?” I said. I’d never been in a chopper. Because I hate the damn things.
I had good reason. A lot of hotshots have died in copter crashes. For years, the toll for aerial accidents was higher than that for fire-related deaths. In 2008, nine firefighters being flown in to battle the Buckhorn Fire died when their Sikorsky S-61 went down in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. A lot of hotshots fear helicopters.
We loaded up on the aircraft, a little four-seater. The guy next to me, Travis Turbyfill, had been in the Marine Corps, and he nodded at me as I dropped into my seat.
The blood had completely drained from my face. I guess I looked pretty anxious, because he slapped me on the knee and gripped it.
“Don’t worry, dude,” he yelled over the rotor. “I was in one of these in the marines.”
“Awesome!” I said halfheartedly.
“No big deal. If we go down, just keep your head tucked between your knees.”
I gritted my way through the chopper ride, my gut like a yo-yo. When we landed, the crew gathered up, trekked out to the fire line, and set up camp, organized our gear, got a campfire going, and sat around it, telling stories. The sky above was so big it felt like you were floating in it.
The hike to the fire the next morning was a bitch of a trek. The sawyers had chainsaws on there shoulders, and the rest of us had extra water rations, extra chains, fuel and oil for the ’saws, plus our work tools. Each man was carrying at least forty-five pounds. We didn’t have UTVs (small four-person off-road vehicles) or four-wheelers to bring stuff in. What we needed, we had to carry ourselves.
As we got closer, my body started feeling weird. Like woozy. I didn’t know what was going on. Is this fear?, I thought. Am I scared to get close to a big fire?
Ever since I was fourteen, I’d thought of fire as violent and malevolent. I thought of it as a living thing, almost, something that was out to hurt me and the people I was trying to protect. I didn’t think of it as evil, but to me it was kind of a predator.
But Chiricahua was my first time really seeing fire as something almost beautiful. To see it in this majestic place, away from humans, leaping from tree to tree, was to see fire as it had been before man ever existed. It was here at the beginning of the world. It was ancient, and it was so alive.
I guess it’s the difference between seeing a Bengal tiger in a zoo, staring at you with hatred from between steel bars, and seeing it out in the wild, chasing an antelope. It’s an awesome thing.
My hatred was slowly being replaced by respect. Chiricahua let me see fire as it had been forever.
That first day we dug line, with the fire a whole ridgeline away. But the following afternoon we got closer; we could hear the fire ahead of us. Feeding. A loud crunching, crackling sound, hundred-foot trees going up as the flames ate through them. Everything was bigger here: the timber, the distances, the fire.
Even the sounds. The flames out here in the forest sounded crisper, louder. I could see them crowning the trees a hundred feet up in the air, tongues of orange five and six hundred feet long against the blue sky, rolling and crashing through the treetops like fire dragons.
We split off into teams, and I went with Travis Carter, who was known to be a good sawyer—that is, good with a chainsaw. Andrew Ashcraft was his swamper, and I would help Andrew out. We started to cut a fire line, our chainsaws buzzing and revving as we went indirect to the fire—cutting line around the fire and then burning out that section of forest, which robs the fire of fuel. When I wasn’t helping the swamper, I was cutting through the thick brush with my Pulaski and the dig team.
We started our burn with our drip torches, the first burn I’d ever witnessed. The brush went right up, WHOOOOSH. The temperature out there was hovering near a hundred degrees, and the radiant heat from the flames made it even hotter. I was sweating buckets under my yellows, and the odd feeling came back again. A strange, disembodied, out-of-body feeling, as if my mind were floating away from my skull and riding the wind.
I know this feeling, I thought as I slammed the Pulaski into the base of a thick shrub. Where I have felt this before?
Then it hit me. At parties. When I was on X.
I began to panic. Something in my body was releasing Ecstasy into my bloodstream when I was supposed to be fighting a fire. I felt like my head was expanding and getting lighter. I was rolling for sure.
“I’mgonnadie I’mgonnadie I’mgonnadie,” I muttered. I broke out in a cold sweat. I looked down at my hands and they seemed to be two miles away, attached to some other body.
Shut the fuck up, I said to myself. Keep your head down. These guys will get you through it.
I could think of only one possibility: I’d done so many drugs in the past that some of their residue had been stored in my muscle tissue. Now that I was working and sweating and testing my body to the limit, those chemicals were being released.
Maybe there was fear in there, too. And self-doubt. I’d never been to a place so remote and forbidding. What if I failed my brothers? What if I let them down?
I worked in a daze for hours with one hour-long break for lunch. I managed to make it through the day and we stopped the fire from spreading into our sector. I missed my family. I missed Michaela. And I was scared someone would look in my eyes and say, “Are you fucking tripping out here, Donut?”
As we walked back, I heard and saw animals fleeing the fire. Most of the wildlife had gotten out when they smelled the first whiffs of smoke, but a few were still left. I saw a pack of rabbits, their paws singed from the burning brush, rushing through the undergrowth. I thought, I’m just as scared as they are.
I was zombified, totally spent. Chris was behind me on the hike back to camp, and he was fuming. “Move your ass!” he was shouting. Finally I saw one of the other hotshots, Boone McCarty, come back toward us. He had a concerned look on his face. He pulled Chris out of the line and I could hear them having a conversation. I didn’t know what it was about, but I guessed it was about me.
Later, I found out that Boone had told Chris there was a fine line between motivating the rookies and abusing them. Chris laid off for a while.
When we got back to our camping site, I sacked out. I was so exhausted that all I had time to do was take off my boots and get into my sleeping bag before I blacked out. And then the coughing started. My allergies kicked in and I was coughing up a storm. My body was sick. It was like I was going through withdrawal.
But from what? The last time I’d done heroin was about a month before.
The trip was doing strange things to me. My body cramped up so bad I cried in my sleeping bag. I tried to stifle the sobs. I got out of the bag and started slamming my fist into my thighs, trying to get them to unclench.
I hardly slept the whole night, and I watched the sun coming up through the pines, miserable and thoroughly spent. But we had to go back to the line. Eric was getting updates on the radio and we hoped the fire had lain down overnight. No such luck. We ate a breakfast of Frosted Flakes and tramped back to the fire.
It was another horrible day. Even the intense training we’d been through hadn’t prepared me for sixteen hours of all-out effort. I found myself on the edge of blacking out. And the fire seemed too enormous to even conceive of. How do you stop something that big with an ax and some saws?
That night Eric came up to me as I was eating. Even if you did something stupid or lazy, Eric never yelled. He was quiet, and some of the guys who went before me mistook that for his being standoffish or distant. Like he didn’t care. But he did. He just gave you this look, a look of disappointment that sank right into you.
He didn’t look disappointed now, just concerned.
“Hey, Donut.”
“Yup?”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night with you hacking. You okay?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. That was a lie.
“Maybe you should find a spot farther away from the guys so you don’t keep them awake all night.”
“Got it.”
Eric wasn’t being a dick; he just needed the crew to sleep.
Boone McCarty heard us talking. After Eric left, he came up to me. “Why don’t you stay in the medical tent?”
I nodded, but by now I was paranoid. I thought Boone was testing me, trying to get me to quit for medical reasons. The worst thing you can be on a fire line out in the wilderness is a liability. Even if you’re not kicking ass as a hotshot, you cannot be a burden on your brothers. I felt like I’d come out to Chiricahua to prove myself and get my respect and I was blowing it.
“Yes, sir,” I said. But instead, I dug into my pack and found some NyQuil.
This’ll do it, I thought. Knock me right out. I unscrewed the cap and glugged the nasty liquid. But in my eagerness to get some sleep, I overdid it. I drank most of the bottle before passing out.
Later, I realized Boone was just worried about me.
I threw up once in the middle of the night—on all fours—but at least I slept. I woke up to the sound of men screaming at me.
“Shut that fucking thing off!”
What were they talking about? I heard music and someone singing. Something about hats and clothes and what you want.
Oh God. It was “Tie Me Down,” the song that acted as my cell phone alarm. I’d taken so much NyQuil that I’d slept through it. Twice. I grabbed my phone and thumbed the volume down. The boys were not pleased.
That day I was out on the line with Boone. We were walking down a dirt road, the fire roaring off to the left.
“I’m going interior,” Boone said.
“Okay,” I said.
He turned away and headed toward the tree line.
Boone shook his head.
“I’m going that way”—he pointed into a stand of tall pine—“to burn some. We need to get some heat established in there, suck the fire away from the road.”
That was the first time I realized that hotshots actually shaped wildfires. They cut lines to stop them and started blazes to suck energy away from the places they wanted to protect.
I gave Boone the thumbs-up. He unslung his torch, and ten seconds later he’d disappeared into the brush and I was left standing on the road.
Boone knows how to lead the fire with his drip torch, I thought, like getting a dog to follow you by dangling a steak in your hand. Just by listening, he knows where the fire is going.
I listened. All I could hear was the sound of wind followed by a crunching roar. Every time the fire hit a pine tree and ate through the dry needles, it made a sharp swirling sound, like an animal clicking its tongue in its throat.
I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I didn’t know if the fire was coming toward me or heading west. I caught a glimpse of Boone setting fire to the forest floor, and then he disappeared again.
The rolling from the Molly had subsided somewhat, but now it was replaced with fear. If Boone calls on the radio and says he’s hurt, you have to go in there, I thought. But I was sure I’d run into the path of the fire like a dumb fuck and get burned up before I was ten feet in. Damndamndamn this is nuts. This is nuuuuuuts…
The radio was silent. Ten minutes later—though it felt like an hour—Boone walked out and nodded to me. His face was blackened by smoke. He acted like he’d just gone to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee.
I was trying to learn the job, watching and listening. That week on the line, with my body still feeling bizarre, I listened to Eric brief us about an upcoming burn. We would use our drip torches on a stand of trees that rode up a mountain and down the other side.
That’s like fifty thousand acres, I said to myself. What the fuck are we doing? Later I would come to realize we were burning fifty thousand acres so that we could save five hundred thousand.
I was in awe. We were specks in these hundreds of thousands of acres. Yet we were in control of them. We were like gods, deciding which parts of the forest would live and which would die. And there was no one to tell us “Stop!”
Later that week on the fire, the fire got so bad that Eric told us that we had to work through the night and the entire next day. A thirty-two-hour shift. Otherwise, the thing was going to get away from us and burn up half of southwest Arizona. We couldn’t have that.
The teams headed indirect to the fire. A few teams were cutting and swamping brush, others were digging with their Pulaskis, and a couple of guys were scouting ahead, looking for the next firebreak or acting as lookouts. That day, Travis Carter, Andrew, and I were clearing a firebreak along with three other sawyer teams. The fire was off to our west, and I could see it eat through the tops of pines, which seemed to dance, swaying back and forth as the flames consumed them. Maybe it was the heat haze. Or maybe it was my brain.
Smoke filled my nostrils and my lungs itched. I felt like a robot. The muscles around my shoulders were two knots as I swung the Pulaski. I began to lose track of time. My vision was covered in blackness.
“Hey, Donut!”
I snapped back.
“Donut!” It was Travis.
“Yeah?” I said.
“What’s up with you?”
“I’m good, bro.”
Please just let me make it through this, I pleaded with God. Don’t let me fail in front of my brothers.
It was as if my partying days were trying to pull me back. They were getting revenge on me for abandoning them. There were times I wanted to black out, to drop down onto the dry brush and be carried to the medical tent and then choppered out.
You ain’t got what it takes, I said to myself. These guys are hotshots. You’re a tweaker.
With a different crew, I might have bugged out completely and given up. But Granite Mountain was a family, and I could tell that the guys were starting to warm up to me. That night, though I was still sick as a dog, I was picked for a food challenge. This was part of the initiation process: making rookies compete to see who could eat the most of a chosen type of food. That time, the selection was Frosted Flakes. I downed eight boxes before my stomach clenched up. The other guys thought I couldn’t eat any more because I was skinny. But it was also because I was drug-sick.
“You almost had it!” Travis said as I admitted defeat. The boys were gathered around me, slapping me on the back and laughing. It felt good.
No way was I going to let them down.