Fire, page 13
But the sergeant still stood tensely, looking, and as the plane banked a little, the Supervisor had a glimpse of a swaying green parachute afloat in the air.
The sergeant relaxed. Without asking, the Supervisor knew that all the parachutes had opened and that perhaps the sergeant had even seen the men land.
Watching the next three jump was not so bad, and as they went out, the Supervisor saw a parachute on the ground squarely in the middle of the thin spot, and a man standing beside it waving.
As they went in for the third run, there was a tense moment when they saw one parachute hanging in a tree. But just afterwards they saw a rope dangling and a man sliding down it. The jumpers didn’t carry those seventy-foot ropes at their belts just to look pretty.
Four men went out on the third run, and then they circled twice more, as the sergeant and the only remaining private pushed out bundles of tools and food and bedding attached to yellow parachutes.
After the last bundle had been dropped, the plane circled to head for home, and the lieutenant came back from the pilot’s compartment. He and the sergeant settled down on the bench opposite the doorway, and lighted cigarettes. The Supervisor sidled up beside the lieutenant.
“Did all the chutes open all right?” he asked.
“What?” said the lieutenant, as if that were a funny question. “Oh, sure—they opened. Sure. Everybody got down fine.”
Just the same, there was a glisten of sweat on the lieutenant’s forehead, and he was not wearing a jumping-suit.
But the Supervisor felt a vast relief. Not only had they all got down safely, but also they would not take long to pull off their helmets and padded suits, grab their tools, follow down the ridge, and report to Bart. Ten fresh men on the fire-line would make a lot of difference, and they still would have a couple of hours to work before the hottest burning-period came, in the middle of the afternoon.
•
When Bart had got to the fire, he had seen immediately that it was out of control. Ugly as things looked, however, he did not seize a shovel and start to work. His job was to scout around the fire, and particularly ahead of it, and then plan strategy. So he merely told Slugger and his men to keep on doing what they were doing already; they were certainly not hurting anything, and no matter what they did, the fire was by now far beyond the power of six already tired men.
He had been scrambling through some underbrush when the big lumbering transport plane passed overhead. He heard it circling, and once from a clear space he saw three green parachutes suddenly open up right beneath the plane. When the plane headed home, Bart had just finished his circuit, and was mapping the fire on a form printed to show a section of land, with dashed lines for quarter-sections and forties. An ordinary person would never have been able to tell where imaginary lines crossed through this rough country of canyon and forest, but it was part of Bart’s business to know, and he had had twenty years to perfect himself.
So without hesitation he wrote DEFINITE on the dotted line after TOWNSHIP, and marked 7 in the middle of the map, to show that this fire was in Section 7 of Definite Township. Then, starting down in the southwest forty of the southwest quarter, he drew a curving line northward, into the northwest forty, and then back to the beginning. The area enclosed within the line represented the burned, and burning, area—as nearly as he could figure it. (By now the fire had lost its pistol shape entirely, and looked more like a short dangling sock tattered at the top, with the sole and bulging heel representing what had once been the under side of the barrel and the pistol butt.)
But Bart was thinking of distances. The area was somewhat more than a quarter-mile long. It would be longer before they could control it, and allowing for breadth and irregularities he would have to figure on nearly two miles of line to construct and hold in addition to what Slugger’s boys had already completed. For the whole job he had Slug-ger’s tired crew, plus ten (he hoped) jumpers, plus the suppression-crew of six, who should be getting there in an hour or so.
He planned quickly. The rear was already held; two of Slugger’s boys for patrol would be all it needed. Slugger and the three others could take the upper flank, where they were already, and he would reinforce them with the suppression-crew. That section of line would follow the ridge, where the fire was likely to burn low. He would throw the jumpers in along the lower flank. That was dangerous because of rolling cones and logs, and they would have to build under-cut line, well ditched to catch the rolling stuff.
Such tactics left the front of the fire wide open, but he was counting on the jumpers to work faster than the fire moved, so that they could get ahead and pinch it off. If not, the twenty mill-men would be getting in at dark when the fire was dying down anyway, and they should be able to close the last gap without difficulty.
With flames crackling ten yards away, Bart stood for a minute thinking. At best, any strategy for fire-fighting was only a balancing of chances. Some of them could be predicted with accuracy—length of line required, terrain and cover, number of men. You could make a fair guess at short range as to burning-conditions, and quality and condition of men. But beyond that, hovered the surrounding darkness of ignorance and the future. All you could do was to set a safety-factor against all those chances which might break against you.
Everything considered, the chances looked good. They ought to catch the fire—at best, some time in the late afternoon; at worst, not later than ten, after the mill-men had been on the line for an hour or two.
Now he heard the shouts as the jumpers came hurrying down along the ridge. He called back to them, and when they came up, he led them along, and posted them as he had planned, explaining the situation to the corporal.
It was a joy to him to watch the jumpers get to work. They were fresh; they were picked men; they had been specially trained for firework. Also, he guessed, any colored boy who volunteered for a jumper did it partly to show that he could do anything a white boy could do, and maybe better.
As he started to struggle up-hill again toward Slugger’s crew, Bart looked at his watch. At the start of a fire, time always rushed by and left you standing, and now it was already twelve-thirty. The suppression-crew should be here any time. Also, he realized, the sun was not quite as hot as it usually was at noon. Looking upward, he saw a faint white veil of high cloud over the western sky, just beginning to dim the sun a trifle. He remembered a forecast of possible rain. Well, they could use a rain, and if the sun went under, burning-conditions for the afternoon would not be quite as bad as he had figured.
5
By mid-afternoon the Dispatcher at Weaverville in the Trinity Forest was wearing a grin that would not come off; half his lookouts reported rain. Farther inland, east of the ocean-fronting ranges, the storm was weaker; even so, the west side of the Shasta had rain at Mt. Eddy and a snow flurry on Billy’s Peak. From the Klamath to the Mendocino fire-danger ratings were tumbling like stock-prices on Black Tuesday. A grass-fire in Colusa County, which had been running like a horse at noon, lay down and died of itself at two-thirty, smothered by rising humidity.
Working on his afternoon map, Dave Halliday was not grinning. Of course, from the scientific point of view which interested him most, a weather situation was merely that, and nothing either to grin or frown over. Still, two years in the Weather Bureau and four years in the Navy had taught him that the best scientist should also be a humanist. In meteorological terms the present weather-situation was nothing much—just an ordinary beginning of a California autumn. Even his old Chief in San Francisco would not consider it of great importance. But here in the Ponderosa Forest, to all these people who lived with fire in the back of all their thoughts, to his new friend the Dispatcher especially, the situation might mean everything, even life and death.
By now he had begun to realize his own place in the scheme. The others saw a fire as burning on a certain slope in a certain quarter-section. Or at most, like the Dispatcher and the Supervisor, they thought of a fire in terms of Forest and Zone and Region. But they turned to him—almost imploringly, it seemed at times, like villagers to a far-traveler—for news of the greater world. He must see a fire in terms of a spinning earth and a sun retreating toward Capricorn, of arctic against tropic and continent against ocean, of the flying spray from Pacific waves whipped up by winds and absorbed by thirsty air a thousand miles off-shore. Just when the breeze might eddy around in a certain canyon and give the signal for lighting backfires, any old-time ranger could tell better than he. But beyond the limits of his own horizon the ranger was helpless.
So now he studied the map. The front—that was nothing. It would doubtless bring some rain tonight, making good his forecast. Possibly it would douse that fire which was burning somewhere in Barlow District. But the front was a weak one, and after it had passed—would summer move in again for another month and heat go shooting up and humidity fall?
No—he hardly thought so. A much stronger storm, a genuine summer-breaker, was showing along the nearer Aleutians. It could mean nothing to the Ponderosa, however, for some days.
Letting his eyes swing again to the stations immediately behind the present approaching front, he noted light northerly winds, rather moist air, but—more strikingly—a sharp drop of temperature. Lookouts in the Trinity who could have sun-bathed in the hot early morning must now be wearing sweaters.
Then from the storm center in Montana he followed the blue line of the front southwestward. Over Oregon also, temperatures were dropping sharply as the cold air from the northern Pacific moved in behind the front, although barometric pressures had not risen much as yet….
The forecast was a difficult one. After he had typed it and left his assistant radioing it out, he walked over to the Dispatcher’s office. Arn was there.
“How’s your fire?” Dave asked.
“Had a message through from Bart half an hour ago. He’s got twenty-three men there now, counting himself. He’s cheerful. Expects to get his line all tied in before so long, in time to get his backfires going before the main fire gets there. Then we figure that rain you’re sending us will get here to make the mop-up easy. You’re not renigging on the rain, are you?”
“No-o-o.”
“You sound doubtful.”
“Well, there ought to be some rain all right, but I’m wondering about tomorrow. I couldn’t make a clean forecast. I’d like to talk to you about it.”
“Go ahead.”
“You see, I figure the pressure in eastern Oregon is the thing to watch. If we get a high in there, it’ll mean we have a big dome of cold air lying over the plateau.”
“What of it?”
“You know about water running down hill?’
“Read about it in a book once.”
“Well, cold air runs down hill just the same way, and if a lot of it piles up in eastern Oregon, it’s going to start sluicing down through these canyons until it fills the Central Valley of California like a bath-tub. And then—”
But he noticed that Arn was looking glum enough to eat worms.
“O.K.—Don’t go on!” said Arn, “I know all about it from here in. We used to call it a Santa Ana on the Angeles, and a Mono on the Stanislaus. Up here it’s not quite so hot, and that’s about all. Just our luck to have a fire already going when she hits.”
“Well, maybe she won’t. Can’t tell for sure yet!”
“She probably will all right. It’s the right time of year. Our chance is to get this Spitcat Fire out, before the wind hits.”
“There’s the rain, you know.”
“That’s right!” said Arn, suddenly more cheerful.
6
All afternoon the jumpers had worked along the lower flank. The big cones of the Jeffrey pines were devils for rolling, and so the line had to be carefully ditched. Building an under-cut line was slow work, and during the afternoon the jumpers never managed to get clearly ahead of the fire. All they could do was to pinch it a little and force it diagonally up-slope toward the ridge.
The Barlow suppression-crew worked the ridge. There were only six of them, but they did not have to under-cut, and so they kept up with the jumpers of the lower flank.
Slugger’s crew was all told off now for patrol on the already held sections of line, except for the boy with the bad knee whom Bart had assigned to stand by at the radio. One rolling cone jumped ten feet across the line and started trouble, but the patrol set up a shout and brought two of the jumpers down on the run. By fast work they got a line around the slop-over before it really got going.
After sunset the wind which had been steady all afternoon fell off to a light breeze, still from the south. Soon afterward both crews managed to get a little ahead of the fire, and Bart judged that this was the moment.
The jumpers were tired now, but as their corporal yelled at them, they sprinted again and swung the direction of their line-building straight up-slope.
There was a gap of two hundred yards to link up. From above, Bart heard the clank of shovels hitting rock as the suppression-crew, swinging back at a sharp angle, came down slope to meet the jumpers. Only fifty yards off, the fire blazed up suddenly as a clump of young trees went off.
Bart scrambled up the slope with the corporal, pointing out where the line could be put through most efficiently. Then he sent the corporal back, and went on to meet the suppression-crew, knowing that he would have to build his back-fires from the ridge down.
When the suppression-crew had cleared fifty yards, Bart pulled a fusee out of his pocket. He held a match to the end, and the fusee flared with a bright pink flame. He stuck it among the twigs of a dead branch that lay four feet inside the fire-line. When the twigs blazed, he pulled the fusee out, and went along inside the line starting fires in the needles and twigs. “Fight fire with fire.”
With the wind as it was, all the little fires blew toward the line, but moving only a few feet they had no chance to get big, and when they came to the cleared line they died. But on the other side, eating backward into the wind, the back-fires moved slowly. Still they moved, and as he watched, they spread sideways and gradually joined into a solid front. Then as the main fire grew closer, the back-fires caught the suck of the draft which the main fire pulled in toward itself against the light wind.
Suddenly the back-fires sprang to life, and went roaring through the underbrush toward the main fire. The two met about a hundred feet from where Bart was standing at the line. As in the head-on dash of two waves, the fires piled up. A clump of underbrush suddenly disappeared in white-yellow flames. Close by, a seventy-foot fir tree, its resins vaporized by the heat, exploded into a flame that towered a hundred feet upward. There was a long-drawn hiss that was almost a roar. For twenty seconds the dying tree stood out in the twilight, a white-hot torch of flaming gas. As it burned out, the tips of the level branches glowed red for a moment, and then the tall tree was nothing but a dark silhouette of branches against the fire-lit sky.
Bart stood watching. Unimpressed by the commonplace fireworks, he was trying to see what the sparks did. As far as he could tell, they went almost straight up and cooled to blackness high in the air without blowing across the line to spread the fire farther.
“Well, we got away with that one!” he said to one of the suppression-crew, and went on down to light the next section.
Before the two ends of the line were tied together, the fire was so close that there was no chance for a back-fire, and they had to hope that the line itself would hold. The fire jumped in one spot, but two of the suppression-crew, working almost in the flames, managed to hold it. One of them came out with a hole burned in the back of his shirt where a spark had lit.
Then, so suddenly as to seem queer, everything was quiet. Also everything was dark, for as they had worked, twilight had crept up, and now that the big blaze had died down, there was little light left.
In the excitement of the last few minutes the two crews had mingled, and now they stood, white and black, just as they happened to be, dog-tired, grimy and sweaty, leaning on their shovels, still watching but also letting rest soak into them. Inside the line hundreds of little flames licked up where cones and branches and logs were still burning, but they were all tiny by comparison and made little light and no noise.
The corporal scratched a match, and the flare seemed to light up the hillside. He lit his cigarette, gave a light to the suppression-crew foreman who stood beside him, and tossed the match into the burn.
Then, just as if to make things doubly sure, there was shouting from across the canyon and a show of lights, and Bart knew that the mill-men, fresh and twenty strong, had got up, and would be ready to take over for the night.
But as he started to relax, weariness hit him suddenly. It had been a long, long day. He remembered again that he had not really slept much since Wednesday night. He felt dizzy, and sat down on the ground for a moment to get hold of himself.
SEVENTH DAY
1
To the men on the line the fire was red glare in the eyes and reaching flame, roar and crackle in the ears, choking in the throat, fierce heat on the face. The fire possessed them, and beat in upon their senses. Yet, actually, what was that thing called the fire?
Like a man, a fire exists in time. First as a tiny spark, it lives faintly. A breath of wind might blow it out; some drops of water, quench it. But, if born in happy circumstances, it feeds lustily and grows. It takes shape and develops structure, drawing in fresh air along the ground, throwing off smoke and consumed air skywards. Where once it scarcely crept, now suddenly it walks and runs. The vigor and power of youth rises within it. It grows adult, and casts out sparks to kindle new fires.
Yet, even as it sweeps ahead in power and glory, the shadow lies over it. “This too shall pass away.” Failing to find food, rained upon, blown against by contrary winds, the fire loses vigor. Grown weaker, it searches less strongly for food, and so grows weaker still. It lies in the quiet of old age. At last, quickly or slowly, it dies.
