I.
Wildland firefighting is not like urban firefighting. We drove an forty-five minutes on a mountain road only as wide as our truck. Looking out the window, the view carried endlessly, mountains covered in trees-- and immediately next to the truck, nothing, the nothingness of a sheer drop only feet away.
We carry a can of gas with a screw-on neck, kinked once like a twisty straw to keep the fire from climbing into the tank. The end has a nozzle and a wick like a flamethrower. When you tip the can forward, gas pours past the wick and flame drips out in a stream. We broke into two groups of three, and each group had one of the Forest Service guys lead them along the slope. There was a pile of thin pine branches and some thicker logs stacked like a bonfire up to my chest. Nate and I each had a drip-torch and we tipped them forward. The branches were up in flames faster than we expected. Starting that fire started a fire within us, and we were practically running from stack to stack, putting them alight.
We stood next to a bonfire admiring our handiwork when the wind picked up and shifted, washing Sergio and I with flame. I was closer to it than him, but we both turned and backed away. Half of my face was hot, and I thought I could feel it creeping up under my cap.
"Am I on fire?" I called to Sergio, a little too matter-of-factly. Nate started laughing and Sergio checked me out. My cap was singed, as was one eyebrow and the stubble on half of my face. My eye felt sticky, like I got gum in my lashes, and I realized they were burned together at the tips. I brushed the ashy bits of hair off as best I could. Once we realized I was okay we all started laughing, and I couldn't help but think it was smart that I cut my hair when I did, or I'd likely not have that ponytail anyway.
We burned more piles and then we went back to the first and chunked them-- we dragged the burning edges back into the middle. The last pile we chunked was unbearably hot and the smoke rolled up off the logs into our faces. More than once we had to run a few feet away, choking and gasping for air. Our lemon-yellow shirts and olive-green pants are more than fireproof-- they resist heat more than I would have believed possible. Only my face was hot, hot like what happens when you sit too close to a campfire. I remembered the shroud in my hardhat and unfurled it, wrapped it about my head. Only my sunglassed eyes were exposed, and it was the only part of me that could feel heat. I stood, one foot in the fire, pulling pine needles in, and nothing but the space in the middle of my brow could feel any heat at all but the heat there was intense.
The smoke seemed clairvoyant, accomplice to the wind, and wherever I stood the two of them shifted near-instantly to surround me. The wind wasn't terrible all the time, though: Sergio pointed out a little whirlwind of snow nearby, two spirally arms moving lazily, gracefully, down the mountainside.
I have a little stomachache from swallowing smoke, and I've been told that on bad days, in the amount we drink it, it's like smoking two packs a day. Still, if ever you wanted to make a career out of camping, out of hiking, this is the job for you.
II.
Loki is a trickster god and a fire god, and it's suddenly easy to see why the two elements are paired together. The stuff is insidious; it creeps along the ground, all these pine needles and cones spread about. Little tendrils of smoke peek out from the blanket and we have to pull it all back towards the bonfire. A fallen, termite-chewed tree is too close to the fire. It catches, invisibly at first, underneath and then inside. The only hint that it burns is the smoke pulsing out from the nest-holes, like an old man breathing on a cold day.
Rocks grab hold of any heat and lock it away but look no different until a shovelful of snow is thrown onto one. It bubbles and steams and boils the snow to nothing in a matter of seconds. The squarish rocks crack and splinter and turn into a pile of Indian arrowheads and flint knives. Our gloves are leather, white-- or once-white; they turn brown and ashy in a half-day's work-- and they make our hands invincible. We pick up branches by the cinders, carry them back to the pile, and drop them in.
The wind is erratic: it blows suddenly, fiercely, and in any direction. A sudden burst of it, and the column of smoke ran along the ground just inches over the snow off the backs of a few logs, and what was grey glowed again. Tiny embers were carried a dozen feet away to a rotten stump, and the stump went up. We piled snow on it and cleared away the brush. When the wind's gentler, white flakes would drift by us; snow and ash indiscernable from one another when both take flight.
III.
It's funny how much different this team is from my old team. I was reading in my bedroom, which is also Sergio's and Cristian's bedroom, while the others were playing cards in the living room. I went out for a moment and they invited me to play and I smiled and said I was fine. They asked me what my old team was like and I said that we never played cards together. We were a team of individuals. Chris would sit on the couch and strum, Jeremy would lay in his cot and read, Garrett would put on headphones and watch The Office on his laptop and I'd hear nothing but the occasional stark laugh. Will and Aaron, who conjoined themselves into one person anyway, sat at the computer and played flash games. If we weren't working or exercising or eating dinner we didn't see much of Carmella.
I dwelled on them a moment until I was pulled back to awareness by laughter, my new team socializing over Uno. It really does seem like they're a single friendly unit. They're more lighthearted, I think-- when someone does something dumb, we vote on whether or not they get an X on our white messageboard. At the end of the week the person with the most X's has to wear a black forest service jacket to work, its only discerning feature a patch on the sleeve: "Special."
They had a girl on their team, Beth, who traded places with me; she's on Carmella's team now. It doesn't seem like they have an active dislike for her, but they do seem to poke fun. Today Fusi (a last name, not some strange ethnicity you can't place; don't worry) made jokes about taking an assault rifle and running around Rocky Mountain National Park hunting elk without a license-- illegal and over-the-top on many fronts. The next thing out of someone's mouth when the laughter died down was, "Man, Beth would have left the dinner table by now. 'I don't want to hear anymore of this!'" Last night at dinner they pointed out that now that she was gone they had to decide who was next in the chain of cannibalism. They'd picked her because she eats a bunch of organic, healthy stuff. I called her "a free-range human." The joke was well-received.
We get to give our trucks radio designatons. It's possibly the most difficult decision we'll ever be faced with; the possibilities are endless. Ned said, "I think we should go with 'Maverick' and 'Goose'," and I said, "Way to be fucking original," and he was shot down instantly with a chorus of laughter.
After much deliberation ("blue steel" and "magnum," "Iron Man" and "War Machine," "blue moon" and "gold schlager," "Jesus" and "Lucifer") we've settled on "Han Solo" and "Indiana Jones."
IV.
I read and read and read. I've read so much since I've joined Americorps. I just finished "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. The translation was interesting; an American did it in short choppy sentences, feeling that Camus was trying to capture an American style in his original French writing. I liked the book, and all of the one-sentences descriptions of his other works listed in the back each sound philisophical and compelling and I'd love to read more.
I read my former teammate Chris's manuscript, "All the Broken Boys Go West," (formerly "The Insane Gorilla") a semi-autobiographical story about his fiance dumping him and his subsequent soul-searching road trip across America. It gave a lot of insight into him, perhaps a little too late.
I read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, the first of any of his books that I've read. Kat read the first half aloud to me one night over Christmas break, vibrantly and with adorable intonation, clearly enjoying herself. The characters take some warming up to but invariably will turn your heart in a single line. I realized halfway through how much the Glass family reminds me of the Tenenbaums, and there are other short story collections about them that I'm interested in now: "Nine Stories" and "Raise High the Roof Beams/Seymour: An Introduction." I guess I should read "Catcher in the Rye" too.
I read Joseph's book, an astonishing 450? pages written in two months: a fantasy story telling a war between humans and monsters from each side. The human side focuses mostly on a small adventuring party and the internal conflict of the main character Ithy; the monster side focuses on Grim, a newly-birthed monster, the only of his kind, who is compelled to unite the scattered monsters under one banner and give them a purpose in life. It's a first draft, a little rough around the edges, but conceptually strong. Joseph writes mysteries like no other, he develops characters well, ensures every action taken happens for a reason with no unseemly coincidences "saving" the cohesion and integrity of his book, and he writes fantastic final-line, cliffhanger-esque chapter-ends.
And I still have more but never feel like I have enough. My head feels elastic, like I could never fit enough books into it. I want nothing more to consume, chew on style and word choice, characters and messages, tone and theme and metaphor. Kat's instilled in me the need to read with a purpose. I peruse the dictionary for each foreign word in a novel that I stumble across (both in my travels and intellectually).
This is my address for the next six months. Send me things to read. Frank Herbert, Robert E. Howard, Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Henry David Thoreau, Hunter S. Thompson, Borges. The mountains are cold and lovely and my evenings are empty.
Robert Reeve
534 Ridge Road
Nederland, CO 80466
This is work. Every day I'm on the job I'm in the mountains, burning bonfires or checking on yesterday's bonfires to make sure they haven't gotten a bit too spunky.
In the mildly-subpar Japanese restaurant there was an adorable baby. We made faces at her and she was very happy for it. I'd ordered a one-dollar sake that was quite watered down-- I finished all 3 ounces of it and felt nothing. I made up for it at the bar right now, though. There's some reaaally tasty peppermint liquor here. Nate says it's called... Rumblemintz? He spelled it wrong. Rumple Minze. German, apparently.
