One morning, we got a call to southern Arizona. A fire was burning out of control in what we call the wildland-urban interface, the point at which the wildlands meet human habitation. We were being called in to save people and their homes.
When we arrived, we pitched right into the fight the first day. But the blaze kicked our ass, plain and simple. It was unstoppable, roaring up and over the sides of hills. And on those hillsides were houses: ramshackle cabins, million-dollar mansions, and everything in between. People were getting burned out.
The fight was more personal here. We were on a quest to save lives and homes. We worked the brush, cutting and swamping, constructing fire lines and trying to rob the blaze of fuel before it reached the condo developments that were all over the hillsides. But it was being driven by strong winds; it was a shifty fire. I swear to God you got to thinking that it was alive, trying to find a way around us so it could feed. We’d get a break cut, and spot fires would appear past our break. New fires would pop up.
It was backbreaking work, sixteen hours straight. I was ready to drop by the end of the second day. We knocked off around eight p.m. and headed back to where we were sleeping that night. We got to camp and were horsing around, trying to cheer each other up after a bitch of a day. We wanted to go home and see our kids. I, as the crew’s class clown, was doing some dance moves as I waited for our meals to heat up.
I got a few of the boys laughing.
“Donut,” Chris said, “you ain’t all there, boy.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s just fine. Check this one out.” And I went into some techno robot moves. Awkward as hell. I can’t really dance. But the boys were loving it.
Finally, the grub was ready. I sat down and rubbed my hands together, ready to dig into my plate. I heard something to my right, at the edge of the camp, and looked over. In the flicker of the campfire, I saw a bunch of people—men and women, even a few children—huddled around wooden picnic tables. They were wearing civilian clothes. The adults weren’t hotshots, for sure.
What the hell are they doing out here?, I thought.
I took a bite of the chicken. Delicious. “Hey, Boone,” I called. “Who’s that?”
He looked over. “Those,” he said quietly, “are the people who lost their houses today.”
I looked again. These people were homeless because the fire had outwitted us. Because there weren’t enough of us, not enough hotshots, tankers, and dozers. Because we’d failed.
I put my plate down. I felt a mixture of anger and shame. I’d lost my appetite. I wanted to go back out to the fire line and start up all over again. We all felt the same way. Those people had nowhere to go and we were sick about it.
What was worse, after we’d finished our dinner, some of the residents came over to talk to us. One older gentleman with a deeply lined face was wearing a blue jacket and some faded jeans. I wondered if they were all the clothes he had. He came over to me and shook my hand, smiling.
“I want to thank you,” he said.
I dropped my head.
“Sir, we didn’t do anything. We didn’t save your house.”
His hand gripped mine tighter.
“You tried. Do you know how much that means to us? You tried and we thank you for that.”
I spent a few more minutes talking with him. He’d lost everything. He was going to drive out to Tucson to stay with his daughter, then hopefully come back and rebuild. He loved the landscape. He loved the sun in the morning.
It was a good plan. But what if the insurance wasn’t as much as it should have been? What if he ran out of time before he got to live in the desert again? Then he was fucked. Game over.
The civilians left and we were standing there with our half-eaten food. Everyone was silent, deep in their own thoughts.
What were we doing out here if we weren’t saving people’s houses?
I went back to my sleeping bag, unrolled it, took off my boots and my jeans and my yellows, and climbed inside. I felt the tears coming. I knew they would.
I will work harder tomorrow, I thought. I don’t want to meet any more homeless people out here because I got tired or needed some chow. Fuck that.
I thought of my first real introduction to firefighting, that textbook back in Fire Explorers. That passage that had gotten me excited, something about those men and women who sacrifice their all to protect the lives and homes of their fellow citizens from the ravages of fire.
Were those the words? I couldn’t remember exactly. But I felt it was the oath we’d taken, to give our all. And now these people’s photo albums and pets and shelter were smoking ruins. I hated that there were people who’d lost everything sleeping out in the open. Their memories, the places where they were going to live out their lives. Gone.
A month later, we were called to New Mexico. A fire had just blown up in a populated area called Ruidoso. It was a typical situation: a nothing fire that became a big one because there were too many blazes to tamp down. It was called the Little Bear Fire.
On June 4, a lightning-sparked fire was spotted on the western slopes of the Sierra Blanca mountains, in the Lincoln National Forest. By June 7, four acres were burning, in dense mixed conifer—pine trees and other species. The Smokey Bear Ranger District sent out a bulletin to local residents that a lightning strike had set some timber ablaze. “Based on fire acreage and conditions, we’re not expecting this to be a large, complex fire,” the bulletin read. “We’ll probably see smoke for a while, but fire behavior is low to moderate.”
“Fire behavior” means what the fire is doing. Is it being driven by a strong wind? Is it finding new fuel sources and growing quickly? Is the smoke turning from a fairly harmless white to gray to dark gray? The darker the smoke, the more intense the fire.
These lightning strikes happen all the time in the Southwest. It wasn’t considered a big deal.
A crew of firemen from Mescalero had been flown in by helicopter to stop the blaze. They turned the job over to a bunch of hotshots from Sacramento, a crew of twenty, just like Granite Mountain. They partially contained the blaze and determined that it wasn’t threatening any structures.
But the fire was stubborn, inventive, and it was burning in tough terrain where it was hard for the hotshots to maneuver. It kept growing. By the next day, it was a hundred-acre fire, having gotten a footing in the grasslands while still burning among the conifers. A grassland fire is the fastest fire out there. The hotshots built a fire line around the blaze, but it kept tossing off spot fires, blown by a wind that was now gusting to twenty miles per hour.
That afternoon, the fire began to “run.” That is, it broke containment and started moving fast. It had turned into a thousand-acre fire. More hotshot crews were called in from Texas. It started to threaten housing tracts across a wide area, and people began to flee their homes. Mandatory evacuation was put into place.
The flame lengths had reached 150 feet. The fire was “out of control.” That’s a bit of a misnomer. The fire was in perfect control. It was controlling people’s lives and the strategy of the hotshots.
The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning, and we got the call in Prescott that afternoon. We piled in the buggies and tore ass toward New Mexico. We were coming in toward Ruidoso on New Mexico State Road 48, a four-lane highway. We could see an advancing flank of the fire straight ahead of us, crimson-to-pink flames thirty and forty feet high. As we pulled up to a roadblock, we saw hundred-foot flames crowning over the highway. The flames were eating into a large two-story frame house on the right side of the road, just tearing that thing up. Behind the house was a big propane tank, which many homes in the rural parts of the Southwest use for heat. It was going up like a firework, spewing flames sixty feet in the air and getting ready to blow. It made this insane hissing noise as it got hotter.
Propane tanks are a bitch. They can wipe out a city block if one goes off. Dangerous as hell.
“No way we’re getting through that,” Eric said. “Let’s find another way in.”
We did a U-turn and swung back, looking for a road heading north that would take us to the fire. It took us two hours to get close. The fire kept moving and shutting down roads just before we got through. Finally, we reached a makeshift HQ and pulled in. Eric ran inside to get our assignment. Five minutes later, he came back out.
“Fire just burned up a housing complex. Complete loss. They’re trying to reorganize, so they want us to hit town and grab lunch so we’ll be ready later.”
“Fuck,” someone said. We were the cavalry and we were supposed to save the day, but the enemy was burning up everything in sight.
We couldn’t do anything until we were assigned a sector; if you rush into a fire without a strategy, you’re doing more harm than good. We went into Ruidoso, looking for a restaurant. We could see it was a mountain town a lot like Prescott, though somewhat smaller. People were running around with these worried looks on their faces, gathering up kids from school, running out to retirement homes to get grandparents. Some of their cars were loaded to the gills.
And here we were, the badass hotshots of Granite Mountain, stuffing our faces with roast beef sandwiches. As much of a bitch as it is to fight an out-of-control wildfire, we would have rather been risking our lives than sitting on our asses.
“Thank you,” someone said as they passed our table.
We nodded, but inside we were like, Please don’t thank us until we’ve actually done something. This sucks.
We were amped. Pissed off. Ready to go.
And we did. At Ruidoso, over the next six days, we kicked ass on the Little Bear Fire. We picked the right slopes to dig our firebreaks. We outworked it on its flanks and hemmed it in, one direction at a time. When it was threatening a development, our ’saws ripped through the chaparral and starved it of fuel. We worked flat out.
Ruidoso turned into the most destructive blaze in the history of New Mexico. It eventually took 242 homes, burned 44,000 acres, killed livelihoods, and cost a quarter of a billion dollars. It changed the lives of a lot of people.
But in our little sector of the blaze, we won. We saved the houses we were assigned to save, about a hundred of them, by my rough guess. And it felt incredible.
People came out on the fire line with home-cooked meals in their hands. The owners of motels in the area offered us free rooms if we wanted to rest and have a shower. (They were also offering the same to families who’d been burned out.) That wasn’t new to us, but we were moved regardless. On some fires, we’d drive out and we’d see THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS painted on the sides of barns in four-foot-high letters. It doesn’t make the national news, but the local people will do anything for you.
Whenever you see a report about a wildfire on the news, you end up hearing the same line about what’s been lost: “They’re only things.” You can replace a TV or a bed or a bunch of books; just go and buy new ones with the insurance money.
But I’ve come to believe that’s bullshit. When you find a woman who’s snuck through the roadblocks to get to her burned-up house and she’s inconsolable when she sees it, those aren’t just “things” she’s crying over. When you find a grandfather and he doesn’t want the stereo or the strongbox with his life insurance in it, he just wants to find the American flag that the military gave him at his son’s funeral—that’s not what I call “things.” It’s their memories.
After Ruidoso, we drove back toward Prescott. We’d arrived on a fire that was ripping and now it was nothing at all. We were feeling good in that buggy, hooting and hollering about what we were going to do when we got home.
We passed by some roads where the fire had won. I saw people picking through the charred-out remains of their houses.
“Hey, guys,” I called out. “I don’t wanna kill your vibe, but especially the guys who are new, take a look around. These houses are burned to the ground. Stay on top of yourself out here, because that could be you. That could be your mom. This is why we train so hard. To make sure this shit doesn’t happen.”
Now that I think of it, maybe I’m more sensitive than most to the idea of home. Growing up practically a nomad with my mom, I was always searching for a place to call my own, where I could be with my family. A place that no one could take away from me.
The scary thing on the way back was driving through all those mountain towns strung along the highways of the Southwest and knowing any one of them could go up like Ruidoso, at any time. The hills were dry as dust. The drought was everywhere.