a walking stick. “We aren’t yet halfway to the ridgeline, and light is waning. Unless you want to dig into your MREs in the dark, I suggest you keep your heads down and your tools in the dirt.”
Meals, Ready-to-Eat. Bo had a chicken pasta with marinara sauce sitting in the top of his pack. He could eat it now or in five years, would still taste the same. Couldn’t be healthy.
A voice came from farther up the line. “How much line we cutting?”
“Forty chains.”
“Total?”
“Forty chains more.”
A collective groan let out from the crew. Forty chains meant half a mile. Half a mile of three-foot-wide line cut down to mineral soil. Eight guys dropped from the sky, fighting fire without water. It’s what they did. But this indirect route had the feeling of a fool’s errand. Why weren’t they in the thick of it—felling trees and backburning to halt the fire’s progress?
This felt like underutilization. They were the best at what they did. Or at least the stupidest to work so hard for GS-5 pay.
Sometimes Bo wondered.
Like the other guys, Bo didn’t have a family of his own. But unlike them, he worked to support his two little sisters in college. Since his dad’s death he’d taken something of a fatherly role. With overtime and hazard pay, the job brought home enough to pay a big part of the girls’ tuitions. They still had to cover their room and board.
The decision to become a wildland firefighter had saved him years earlier. When at a community job fair Pendleton talked Bo into applying for a seasonal position on his hotshot crew, little did Pendleton know that he had thrown a drowning man a line.
No college degree, between minimum wage jobs, scraping just to keep from being evicted out of his ghetto apartment. He never imagined he’d soon be out in the West, jumping out of planes and scraping through the dirt with a rabble of rednecks.
But he’d learned hard work from his father. Even after his mother left, his dad didn’t fall into the bottle or take it out on the kids. He always found a way to get food on the table. Lots of rice. Lots of unglamorous portions of animals boiled twice over. But food for the stomach.
“I can get you through high school,” he’d once said. “Then you gots to be providing for your own self. You understand? You a man, now.”
Not long after that his dad’s heart refused to keep working as hard for his own body as he always had for his kids.
At eighteen years old, Bo labored to finish school and make enough money to pay the house rent. Before long they were evicted—sending him to a studio apartment in the projects, his twin sisters, much younger, to their aunt’s to finish out school. Bo found himself cannonballed into life, the structure and familiarity of home and family unraveled. It all filtered away through the colander of existence, leaving him alone with a dim and desperate view for the future.
Dust rose and swirled in a cloud by his knees. Sunlight angled through the canopy across the fireline. They’d covered another sixty-six feet. One more chain.
Forty lashes minus one.
CHAPTER
11
C aleb finally found the chance to slip away. To hike without an entourage, using his combi-tool as more of a walking stick than a device to cut line. An hour before dusk, the sun painted a hundred different colors across cumulus thunderheads, mammoth vessels in the sky like nature-wrought warships.
Even though Pendleton had made the jump with them, Caleb was first on the jump list, first out the door, and that made him the jumper in charge. Fact was, he could size up circumstances and situations quicker than Pendleton. And where Pendleton deliberated—an attribute perhaps advantageous behind a desk—while holding a coffee mug and looking at a map, Caleb knew how to act decisively. It gave him an edge, despite the fact he was outranked by Spotter Pendleton. Caleb knew that the balance of respect in the crew swung his way.
While the guys set up a simple
Meals, Ready-to-Eat. Bo had a chicken pasta with marinara sauce sitting in the top of his pack. He could eat it now or in five years, would still taste the same. Couldn’t be healthy.
A voice came from farther up the line. “How much line we cutting?”
“Forty chains.”
“Total?”
“Forty chains more.”
A collective groan let out from the crew. Forty chains meant half a mile. Half a mile of three-foot-wide line cut down to mineral soil. Eight guys dropped from the sky, fighting fire without water. It’s what they did. But this indirect route had the feeling of a fool’s errand. Why weren’t they in the thick of it—felling trees and backburning to halt the fire’s progress?
This felt like underutilization. They were the best at what they did. Or at least the stupidest to work so hard for GS-5 pay.
Sometimes Bo wondered.
Like the other guys, Bo didn’t have a family of his own. But unlike them, he worked to support his two little sisters in college. Since his dad’s death he’d taken something of a fatherly role. With overtime and hazard pay, the job brought home enough to pay a big part of the girls’ tuitions. They still had to cover their room and board.
The decision to become a wildland firefighter had saved him years earlier. When at a community job fair Pendleton talked Bo into applying for a seasonal position on his hotshot crew, little did Pendleton know that he had thrown a drowning man a line.
No college degree, between minimum wage jobs, scraping just to keep from being evicted out of his ghetto apartment. He never imagined he’d soon be out in the West, jumping out of planes and scraping through the dirt with a rabble of rednecks.
But he’d learned hard work from his father. Even after his mother left, his dad didn’t fall into the bottle or take it out on the kids. He always found a way to get food on the table. Lots of rice. Lots of unglamorous portions of animals boiled twice over. But food for the stomach.
“I can get you through high school,” he’d once said. “Then you gots to be providing for your own self. You understand? You a man, now.”
Not long after that his dad’s heart refused to keep working as hard for his own body as he always had for his kids.
At eighteen years old, Bo labored to finish school and make enough money to pay the house rent. Before long they were evicted—sending him to a studio apartment in the projects, his twin sisters, much younger, to their aunt’s to finish out school. Bo found himself cannonballed into life, the structure and familiarity of home and family unraveled. It all filtered away through the colander of existence, leaving him alone with a dim and desperate view for the future.
Dust rose and swirled in a cloud by his knees. Sunlight angled through the canopy across the fireline. They’d covered another sixty-six feet. One more chain.
Forty lashes minus one.
CHAPTER
11
C aleb finally found the chance to slip away. To hike without an entourage, using his combi-tool as more of a walking stick than a device to cut line. An hour before dusk, the sun painted a hundred different colors across cumulus thunderheads, mammoth vessels in the sky like nature-wrought warships.
Even though Pendleton had made the jump with them, Caleb was first on the jump list, first out the door, and that made him the jumper in charge. Fact was, he could size up circumstances and situations quicker than Pendleton. And where Pendleton deliberated—an attribute perhaps advantageous behind a desk—while holding a coffee mug and looking at a map, Caleb knew how to act decisively. It gave him an edge, despite the fact he was outranked by Spotter Pendleton. Caleb knew that the balance of respect in the crew swung his way.
While the guys set up a simple
Similar Books
