Smokejumper
by
Kenny A. Chaffin
All Rights
Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin
They call us
smokejumpers but that’s a misnomer, we never jump into smoke if it can be
avoided and it can always be avoided. It’s just a sexy, headline-grabbing moniker
for what is a dirty, difficult, dangerous job.
After the Crystal
Mountain fire Janie left me again. She said she couldn’t deal with not knowing
if I’d be back or not. I sometimes think she doesn’t understand my work, how important
it is and the care, safety and conviction we take in doing it. We almost always
come home. I love her. I do. With her it feels more real than ever, but I’m
torn by her reluctant support. Can’t she see this is my passion, my love? I’m a
smokejumper. We save lives, the environment, perhaps even the world from global
warming.
My dreams are of
fire. It does not frighten me. It is warm, welcoming.
At first you do it
for the thrill, the rush. Like wild passionate sex. It consumes you, draws you
in. There’s building anticipation as the plane makes its way to the drop zone, your
heart pounds as you step into the air and slows as silence engulfs you while drifting
towards the ground.
All relationships
are difficult, but more so when you’re a smokejumper. You can be called out any
time of day or night for unknown durations. Even the military has better
defined time-frames for deployment, leave, and duty. For smokejumpers it’s all
up to the fire. Almost all of us are single, some in relationships, a few married
– mostly the firebosses who somehow find a way to make it work. We don’t talk about
relationships. On the fireline there’s no time for that anyway. We’re
overwhelmed with clearing brush, digging firebreaks, setting backfires.
You do it for
those that died. The fourteen on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, the nineteen Granite
Mountain Hotshots on Yarnell Hill in Arizona, the twenty-nine at Griffith Park,
California; Three hundred in the last ten years.
A wildfire burns
at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. It can consume you. You must constantly be on
guard. We jump from planes to reach the fire in the backcountry before it gets
out of control. With a forest fire you know exactly what you are up against.
They drop us in
and once on site we establish a fireline, a perimeter. We fight the fire by
clearing fuel it would burn, often by setting a backfire. When our work is done
we pack out to the nearest access point. On rare occasions they transport us
out by chopper if there is a base nearby.
Before Janie it
was Mary. She was a vixen. We did it everywhere – in the car, in the shower, in
the woods, in the elevator and yes we joined the mile-high club on a flight
from Denver to Seattle. It was pure passion, pure raging sex. She was a
wildfire.
The cones of the
Lodgepole pine are sealed with a resin that requires fire to release the seeds.
This is an evolutionary adaptation to wildfire called pyriscence.
Fire can be fast,
passionate, intense, like first-time sex. Each fire has its own personality.
Some are torrid and tempestuous others slow and sordid but all have the power
to destroy. The first time Janie and I
made love I lost myself in her. It was a week after the Wind Ridge fire. She
said she could smell the smoke in my hair.
Have you ever watched
a wildfire move? It can be forceful, overpowering -- crowning, flashing and
torching trees as it races across the forest and up slopes in a vortex of
conflagration. It can be gentle like a first-time lover, moving slowly and
carefully across the forest; caressing, embracing and loving the trees with its
warmth.
The tools we use
are minimal, a pulaski -- a combination axe and grub hoe, our helmets,
protective clothing and fire shelters. That’s it. One-on-one, man against
wildfire, digging a firebreak, setting a backfire, working with air support if
we are lucky enough to have it.
It was the
Rawlings Ridge fire that got us, climbing the hill in a swirling blast-furnace updraft,
preheating and consuming everything in its path. We had only precious seconds to
deploy our shelters and the rocky slope was a poor place to survive a wildfire.
Jonathan didn’t. The rest of us are lucky to have made it, me with third degree
burns on my back, and right arm, the others with similar injuries. Only Carol
came away unscathed, having found an optimal place to dig in.
Janie was waiting at
the hospital when I arrived. She never said it, but I knew from the look in her
eyes, it would be the last time.
I’ve been through
the initial healing, the therapies. Will need additional grafting, regrowth and
recovery of muscle tone and I will never be as flexible as I once was, but I’ve
had time to think, to realize and to know that the only time I am alive and at
peace with myself is when fighting a wildfire. It consumes me, thrills me, centers
me. It makes me who I am. Janie is gone, but the fire still rages. I will jump
again.
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