Young Men and Fire

If you live in the West, the difference between a forest fire and any other battle that man may wage, is that with fire, we, all of us, have a common enemy, and the same heroes.

In 1974, when author Norman Maclean started his book about the Mann Gulch fire, where 13 young men -- Smokejumpers who parachuted from the sky -- perished,  he, like the century, was in his 70's, and didn't realize it would consume the last decade of his life. Though that fact wouldn't have surprised him. The book is about mortality; an old man writing about what it feels like to die young.

And he started the book because,

"The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does, that will tell you that you are dead." NM

But facing fire is a young man's game. Because you can't be brave or courageous, you have to be fearless. You have to believe, as we all did at 19 or 22, that you are greater than any obstacle. And in this you'll be either right, or wrong.

"In 1949, the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as "ten o'clock fires," as they already had them under control before they jumped. They were still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy." NM

Maclean himself fought Montana forest fires while in his teens, and one time was trapped between a fire ahead and a fire below.

 "As a fire up a hillside closes in, everything -- fear, thirst, terror, a twitch in the flesh that still has a preference to live -- all becomes simply exhaustion. Burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times -- first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes, and if you are a Catholic about all that remains of you is your cross." NM

On a personal note, I'm sorry that I didn't use my fearless years for any better purpose than to please myself. Fearless firefighters saved us here, in 2009, when our hills were blazing. I walked around at night, and saw the older ones carrying supplies, and the young ones in exhausted heaps, lying by the side of the road, down from the thick of it, faces black with smoke.

While not religious, I'll say a prayer tonight to something -- the stars or the moon -- for the 19 who died battling Yarnell Hill.