One morning in late July, I stood on the rim of the box canyon in Yarnell. The wind moved fretfully around the ridgeline. Down below, a number of silver foil sheets flashed as the wind blew them here and there, and the saguaro cactus on the next ridge a half mile away appeared to waver in the heat. On the floor of the canyon, the earth was dark, as if it had been singed.
Officials from the Arizona State Forestry Division were moving around on the canyon floor, stopping to take notes or measure a distance. I watched them for a few minutes, then stepped down the gentle gradient. The air cooled as I dropped lower.
To the civilian eye, there was little to look at as I moved across the rough terrain. Some carbonized shrub and that was all; the canyon was moonscaped. When I reached the floor of the shallow canyon, I bent down and touched the char that covered the dirt, as if I were feeling a child’s head for fever. Then I began to run my fingers through it.
My hand came up black. Nothing.
I moved to my left, studying the earth and occasionally bending over to scrabble my open palm in a wide arc, feeling the cool ground beneath my skin while the burned material filtered between my fingers. The sun beat down on my back. After a few minutes, my thumb stubbed against something sharp and I drew it back quickly. My hand was bleeding. I ignored it and reached for the thing I had touched: a piece of partially melted glass. I studied it, then I wiped the blood on my pant leg and moved on.
I walked a rough circle encompassing about thirty yards. It was the same area the investigators had concentrated on. By the time the sun was high and the temperature had risen to one hundred degrees, I’d uncovered ten objects, among them a scorched coffee mug, a broken tool head, and a miniature drip torch.
I recognized each of them. Half of the boys had left something behind.
I could picture the events that led these objects to be here. I didn’t want to, but the images had been coming to me unbidden for the last month and there was no stopping them.
I looked up at the saddle where Granite Mountain had stood before coming down. What did they see when they peered out at the fire before descending into the canyon? Why did they come down?
I tried to get inside Eric’s head. Which way to go, along the two-track road or down into the green box canyon? He saw the fire moving parallel to the crew and thought they had plenty of time to cut through the canyon and make Boulder Springs Ranch. They’d save time. Would he rather be marching for those minutes or fighting the fire, saving homes, maybe saving lives?
We don’t know what the canyon floor looked like that day. All we know is the nuked landscape we found after the disaster. How high was the brush? How many twenty-foot trees were in front of them, exactly?
The strong outflow winds that had been predicted fifty minutes before hadn’t arrived at 4:15 p.m. Maybe Eric thought they had dissipated. He’d scanned the terrain and decided to take a risk, based on years of experience. He brought his men into the canyon.
Then there was a second decision, once they were deep into the chaparral and they could hear the fire approaching from the east. They had three options: head back up the wall of the canyon to the two-track road, deploy where they were, or make a run toward the ranch.
Heading back up the way they came would have been a nonstarter. The slope would have been covered in flames by then. Option number one was out. And the thickness of the chaparral would have made running impossible. Obviously they hadn’t spotted the wash that now lay to my left. It was clear as day to me, with the juniper and the pine burned away. But they hadn’t seen it from the saddle.
Did the guys think of dropping their packs and running? Did they debate it there on the canyon floor, shouting to each other as the fire drowned out their voices? From the positions their bodies were found in, I know that each of them made the decision to stick with his brothers. No one ran.
Another thing I do know: Eric would never have brought Granite Mountain into the canyon if he thought it presented a real danger to the men. That’s nonnegotiable. Eric Marsh didn’t take stupid risks.
But he did take risks. We all did. It’s intrinsic to the whole idea of hotshottin’. And it’s not as if you’re taking on these risks to climb Everest or shoot some Class VI rapids in a canoe. You’re trying to save something: a house, a forest, a community.
I thought back to that dedication in my firefighting manual I’d first opened when I was fourteen:
to the members of that unselfish organization of men and women who hold devotion to duty above personal risk, who count on sincerity and service above personal comfort and convenience, who strive unceasingly to find better ways of protecting the lives, homes and property of their fellow citizens from the ravages of fire and other disasters… THE FIREFIGHTERS OF ALL NATIONS.
It didn’t say anything about firefighter safety in there. Or about self-preservation. Not that those things weren’t taught in my training. But they weren’t the focus of what we did.
Yes, every hotshot is taught not to go into the green, especially into a box canyon bristling with chaparral, with a flaming front approaching you. That is undeniable. All I can think is that they thought they had the time. And in a normal fire, they would have. But this was far from a normal fire. Thirteen or fifteen miles per hour doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re moving at five miles per hour and in no way can you go any faster, it’s fast as hell.
I looked again at the objects at my feet. The piece of glass had belonged to Jesse, part of a jar filled with coffee that he always carried. The tool head had belonged to Chris. There was part of a mug that Eric had carried with him to every job, and here it was, still intact, though black as pitch.
I closed my eyes. I could see the guys desperately cutting down brush to create a deployment site, heaving away their tools as the fire reached the canyon floor. I knew they were probably gasping for breath, struggling out of their packs to get to the rolled-up fire shelters, all as the wildfire bore down on them from above. Their thoughts quickly grew confused, their brains starved of oxygen. The noise would have been deafening by then. The smoke would have been thick and bristling with cinders, a solid black river eight or ten feet tall, scorching their lungs as they breathed.
Then the superheated air that rushed over them as if a blast furnace door had been thrown open incinerated their special Nomex clothes as they crouched inside the shelters. The objects made of more durable material were freed from their pockets and dropped to the ground. And there they were, all that was left of June 30.
I touched the objects one by one, turning them over in my hands. I took each one and pictured the face of the man it belonged to and held that picture for a moment before relinquishing it. My hands were thick with the black soot that I knew contained trace amounts of the bodies of my friends. It didn’t repel me to touch this dust.
I missed the guys so much. I just wanted to be near them. But this would be as close as I could ever get.
I was tempted to slip one or two of the items into my pocket as keepsakes. But the investigators wanted everything connected with the wildfire. They came over, bagged the things up, and stood up. They promised me they’d pass them on to the families. I nodded.
They left me alone.
I was glad I’d come to Yarnell. The last things left by the men were on their way back to their families; perhaps they’d bring them some comfort.
But the questions that had obsessed me since the tragedy, and which had brought me to the canyon a month after the fire, hadn’t gone away:
Why did my brothers die and leave me here? Why didn’t they take me with them? Is it possible to continue on without them?