We worked the fire for two weeks, the maximum allowed. We dug firebreaks and cut tons of brush and we held the line against the fire.
I began to realize that my fears about the veterans were misguided. During training, they’d made every attempt to find out what made me tick. They really wanted to learn who I was. I’d worried they’d done that so they could break me when the moment was right. Expose me. But I was wrong. That wasn’t their intention at all.
Guys covered for each other all the time. Travis Turbyfill was one example. He was an ex-marine who could do just about everything. If we needed to modify one of the buggies to carry a special piece of equipment, we went looking for him. He fixed and modified our tools. Communications equipment, too—Travis had hucked a radio all over for the marines, so some days you’d come back from the fire line and find him with all the parts of our radio spread out over a blanket as he patiently put it together.
But while serving, Travis had suffered a serious head injury. A training exercise was what I heard, but I never talked to him about it. People’s pasts were their own: If you wanted to talk about it, that was your call. If not, we respected that.
That head injury had left Travis with a strange symptom: lack of balance. Maybe his inner ear thingy had gotten knocked out of whack, but if you just looked at the man wrong, he’d fall over. If we were in camp and we heard a thump, we’d call out, “Travis, you all right, dude?” Howling with laughter.
But if we were on the trail, especially with a drop to one side, the guy behind Travis would keep close to him. Nobody had to say anything, it was just something we became aware of and all took as part of our duty.
I started to get to know the guys. I was still in awe of Eric. Was there anything the motherfucker couldn’t do? Ice climber, surfer, mountain biker, and a college grad. Being so calm and so even-keeled, though, he had a weakness for goofballs like me. I made it my mission to crack that man up every chance I got. I’d play some hard-core techno and start dancing like I was back at a rave.
“Hey, Eric, check this shit out!”
He’d look at me, take a sip of coffee out of his camp cup, and just shake his head.
Jesse Steed was a full-on meathead. Ex-marine, super into fitness, really good with a chainsaw. If you got past his leatherneck stuff, he was a teddy bear.
Robert Caldwell didn’t look like a hotshot. He was balding at twenty-one. Looked like he was going to ask you if he could do your taxes. But his famous quote to us was: “I’d rather die in my boots than live in a suit.” He had a weird strength. We weighed the same, but he’d disappear down the trail ahead of me quicker than a gazelle being chased.
One day we were walking in to a fire and Robert went past me with a chainsaw on his shoulder. I looked over and he had a cigarette in his mouth underneath his mustache.
“Are you serious? You’re gonna kick my ass on the trail and smoke?”
He grinned at me.
If you looked at Clayton Whitted, you’d think he was a truck driver or a former college tight end. Big dude, big smile. But Clayton was a man of God. He was the real deal, a Christian through and through. He always had his Bible with him, and back in Prescott, he worked as a youth minister. Led Bible classes.
I wanted to be like that. But not yet. I was only nineteen.
But if you had any spiritual questions, Clayton was the guy to see. He seemed to know what to do with his life, had that focus that I was looking for. Sometimes it got him in trouble. There was a story I heard pretty quickly about Clayton and another hotshot working on cutting a big-ass tree out of the fire line. The roots went deep, and neither of them noticed how close the fire was until their backpacks started smoking and lighting up. Clayton calmly turned, grabbed the packs, threw them to safety, then turned back to see the tree falling right at him. He stepped out of the way and the thing came down—WHOMMMMP!—right where he’d been standing. Clayton carried on like nothing happened.
The fittest dude on the crew was Travis Carter. He’d grown up on a ranch outside of Yarnell. Quiet as all get out. But the man was half cyborg. He’d get up in the morning, go to CrossFit, do their insane workout, show up to work, rip on a ’saw all day, then hit CrossFit again on his way home to his wife and two young kids. He’d say two words the whole day, but he could serve up anyone on Granite Mountain.
I’d spent most of my teenage years around guys whose main ambition was to score some primo weed and tasty nachos, all on the same night. Just being around Granite Mountain expanded my horizons.
I didn’t like everyone at first. Later on in my career, Billy Warneke joined the crew, and he was one of the ones I didn’t get along with right away. He just rubbed me the wrong way somehow—it was almost a chemical response. During PT, he’d be trailing me during our hikes, mile after mile with this blank expression on his face, and I’d be like, Go ahead and pass my struggling ass, damn it, but he never would. Then one day we were out on a fire and he was carrying someone’s pack who was feeling sick that day. Did it without being asked. On top of that, he was a badass ex-marine, and I respected that. I went over and started talking to him that day and learned that he was expecting his first child. A girl.
We had a resident thug-life character, Anthony Rose, who joined up in 2012. Originally from Chicago, he tried to play it like he was a gangster. Then his girlfriend would call and he’d turn into a proper gentleman on the phone, while we wilded out in the background. A hard worker. Smart as hell. Baby on the way, too.
What did we have in common? We’d all been down different roads searching for a decent life. Some had become drug fiends for a while; some had tried the military and seen things they couldn’t unsee. But most of us had found what we wanted in Granite Mountain. A steady job. Service. Adventure.
I was learning the job. A few days into the Chiricahua fire, the boys let me do the weather. Out in the wilderness, weather and fuel are what drives a fire. To know how a fire might act in the next ten minutes, you need to get extremely localized conditions, so a few of us carried a belt weather kit in a little pouch. In each kit are a sling psychrometer for measuring humidity, an anemometer for measuring wind speed, a small bottle of distilled water, and a compass.
The psychrometer is the most important tool. It has two parts: a wet-bulb thermometer and a dry-bulb. You find a spot typical to the terrain and the fuels that are burning nearby. You stand in a shady spot (or block the sun with your body if there’s no shade) so that the radiant heat doesn’t affect the reading. Then you dab some of the distilled water on a wick attached to the wet bulb, let the bulb down on the metal chain it’s attached to, and start swinging it in a tight circle. You face into the wind so your body temperature isn’t throwing off the reading and you swing for a full minute. Check the temperature, taking care not to put your finger on the glass. Swing again. After a minute, check. If the temperature hasn’t changed, you have your wet-bulb reading. Then you look at the dry bulb and get a number. With those two readings and the humidity chart you carry on a piece of laminated paper, the psychrometer will tell you what the humidity in the air is. Then you find the air movement.
You check the weather every hour. If the conditions are changing fast, you reduce that to every thirty minutes. Then you get on the radio frequency the crew is using and say, “Granite Mountain, stand by for weather.” You pause a minute to give anyone who wants to write the stats down a minute to whip out their pens and paper. Back on the radio: “At oh one hundred, temp is ninety-six degrees, up two degrees over the last hour. Humidity is fourteen percent, down three. Wind is twelve miles an hour from the south-southwest. Anyone need a repeat?”
The man doing the weather is on the lookout for invisible things. He’s watching his brothers’ backs for the storm winds that can drive a fire at fifty miles an hour and engulf them in a wall of flame. He’s key to keeping everyone alive. The fact that Eric let me do it meant a lot to me.
Toward the end of the roll at Chiricahua, we were being rotated back down the mountain for some sleep and a shower. We’d just finished a thirty-two-hour shift and I was clean worn out. As we were getting ready for the chopper, I felt relief flow through me. I saw Chris looking at me strangely. Chris, my old tormentor, my number one nemesis. He hadn’t said much to me on the trip.
“Where’s your chin strap, rook?” he yelled.
I felt under my hard hat. Damn it. The plastic chin strap—I could have sworn it had been there this morning. Now it was gone.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Can’t get on the chopper without a strap,” Chris said. I saw a gleam in his eyes. Was he happy I’d fucked up at last?
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
The guys around me shook their heads. We heard the chopper in the distance, making that whomp-whomp-whomp noise.
“What should I do?” I yelled.
Chris frowned. “Tell you what. I’ll fix you up. Shut your eyes.”
I closed them and heard a tearing sound. Something pressed against my helmet and I felt something sticky hit my chin, then wrap around. More tearing sounds. I felt grateful; Chris was looking out for me, showing me some respect.
Finally, the tearing sound stopped. I opened my eyes and Chris was backing away, a smile on his face.
“Thanks, man!” I called out.
“Oh, you’re welcome, dude.”
Christ started laughing hysterically. The other guys were hacking up a lung as well, even Eric. Someone took a pic with his cell phone and handed it to me. Chris had used about half a roll of fiber tape to attach the helmet. I looked like a total dork with a hard hat taped to his head.
I found out later that Chris had stolen the strap so he could fuck with me. Didn’t matter. I was smiling ear to ear. In hotshot crews, you only torture the ones you love.
Leaning back against the vibrating seat in the chopper, I felt I’d achieved something: I’d helped save thousands of acres of God’s green earth for bears, mountain lions, rabbits, and red-winged blackbirds. I’d withstood the last traces of drugs in my body. And I’d proved to the nineteen men around me that I wouldn’t give up on them, no matter what.
I was part of the brotherhood.