The Doce Fire kicked off on June 18, 2013. It ran fast and hot. It was unstoppable, eventually burning upward of eleven square miles of terrain. Some guys made a joke that it was eating the brush like Hungry Hungry Hippos. And it was threatening Prescott. Our home.
This was the fire where Chris and I nearly got caught by the fire wall; we tossed our drip torches into the flames and barely made it out alive.
We fought the fire for three days, and most of that time, it straight-up kicked our asses. It would slop over our containment lines, jump our breaks. On the third day, as we were heading back from the fire line, the situation went from depressing to ridiculous, or so I thought. “We’ve been asked to save a juniper tree,” Jesse told us.
We were tired, our eyes red from constant smoke.
“A juniper tree?” I asked. “What the fuck for? There’s billions of ’em out there.”
“Not like this one,” Jesse said. “It’s the world’s largest alligator juniper and it’s right in our backyard. It’s like a national treasure, okay? Tomorrow we’re going to go in there and assess and see if we can save it.”
That piqued my interest. I jumped on the Internet and started looking up this bad boy. I found one story about this guy who made a pilgrimage and came to Prescott to find this amazing tree. He asked around, but there were no maps or coordinates to tell the visitor where to look. Finally, he stumbled on a local who knew where it was and agreed to take him there. Together, they hiked out to the spot and found the tree and took pictures. The man was overjoyed.
The next day, we parked the buggies and hiked in. The tree was about a mile and a half from the trailhead. When we found it, it was big and beautiful: a thick-trunked old boy with low, spreading branches. I wondered how many of the junipers in this area it had spawned. It was like being in the Garden of Eden, Southwest style, with the original juniper.
We got our ’saws out and began cutting brush and digging line around the tree until we had a nice containment zone. Now we needed to burn it out so that any wildfire approaching the place wouldn’t be able to burn through. Andrew and Dustin Deford got the job, and we could see the smoke rising as they lit the fire. We worked all day until darkness had fallen, then jumped in the buggies and headed to a Red Robin for dinner.
We were all chowing down on our hamburgers when a guy from Prescott Fire walked over. He asked us what we’d been working that day and we looked at each other a little sheepishly. “Actually, we were saving the world’s oldest alligator juniper,” Jesse said.
“Are you serious?” the guy answered. “I asked my wife to marry me under that thing!”
This juniper was sacred to people. We’d spent our careers destroying juniper—it was like the number one fuel in the Southwest.
We followed the reports trickling in from the field that night. We knew the fire was blitzing the hills near the oldest tree, and we were downhearted. Not too much was going to survive a wildfire on parched high desert. The next morning, we woke up worried about the damn thing. Is the tree okay? Did it make it through the night? We felt a sense of ownership now. As the rest of the crew headed off to work, Jesse hiked in to the tree to see if the thing was still standing.
“Granite Mountain,” we heard Jesse on the radio at about ten a.m.
“Go ahead.”
“She’s standing, all right. Just one big branch burning from an ember. But I dug it out and everything’s cool now.”
After that, the juniper became like a talisman for us. The next day my squad hiked out there to eat lunch next to it. It threw a lot of shade and we sat under it and ate our packed lunches.
Don’t ask me how, but we got on the subject of Job, from the Bible. Maybe the antiquity of the tree, everything it had seen, got us thinking on deeper things. Maybe someone in the crew was talking about how nothing was going right for them, how they felt like Job, facing one calamity after another.
There were a bunch of Christians on that squad. I was a believer, someone who tried to follow Jesus as best I could. Clayton, Dustin, and Wade Parker were all men of faith. So the discussion went around and around about Job and what he meant.
“What would you do if you lost everything?” I said to Wade.
“I’d trust in God,” he said.
“If you lost your family, all of them? I mean everything, Wade.”
“So do I.”
I looked at Wade to see if he was fucking with me. But his face was calm. He gave his answers without a moment’s hesitation.
I was so struck by that. Wade and the boys were ready for any disaster, for any loss, no matter how painful. Because they had something bigger behind him—their love for God. That idea of giving up everything to the Lord, and doing it easily, with a glad heart, that just floored me. I vowed that day to be a better Christian. To be more like Clayton and Dustin and Wade. I wanted the serenity they had.
Our half-hour lunch turned into an hour before we had to pack up and walk out.
“Man, that was the most I’ve heard about God in my entire life,” Grant McKee said as we marched single-file along the trail.
I was fired up. “If you want, I’ll go to church with you,” I said. I felt closer to Jesus than I had since I was a child.
Saving that ancient tree, that part of God’s creation, had brought me closer to Christ, and I wanted to share it with my brothers. Grant and I made plans to go to Mass together in a few weeks when we both had time.
It still bothers me that we never made it.