Read Online Fire by Sebastian Junger - Free Book Online

what a fire will do.
    â€œNothing we’re doing today is more important than a human life,” one incident commander said at a 6:00 A.M . briefing.
    That sentence—more than fire behavior models, lightweight fire shelters, or advanced meteorology—explains why people no longer die in the terrible numbers they used to on wildfires in the United States.
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    I n the middle of the afternoon we moved down off the ridgetops toward H-6. Helicopters were to lift us and the three crews down to the fire camp for the night. I was in no hurry to leave the mountains, but the Union, Negrito, and Smokey Bear crews were being replaced by type two outfits that hadn’t spent the last two nights spiked out. We clustered around the helispot and then piled onto the helicopters with our line packs and were shuttled back to camp.
    That night I heard that a fire had just leaped the huge Salmon River Canyon up by McCall; a fire had started north of the river and a backburn had been set by dropping flaming Ping-Pong balls from a helicopter. (The Ping-Pong balls are filled with potassium permanganate and ignited by antifreeze. A needle injects the antifreeze at the moment of release and they ignite after thirty seconds, usually after they hit the ground. The helicopter pilot had circled to check his work, and one of the balls had accidentally released over the south side of the river. That was all it took. Within hours the new fire was fifty acres in size and crowning through heavy timber.
    I drove up to McCall the next morning to see if I could get on the fire, but by then it was so far out of control that no one was allowed near it. Crews were cutting indirect line miles ahead of the fire and cold-trailing their way southward from the river, but that was it. The town of Riggins was filled with smoke; there was a mushroom cloud of smoke pumping out of the canyon; the airfield at McCall was crammed with reserve helicopters. But I wanted to see real flame. I slept on a sandbar along the North Folk of the Salmon River and drove back to Boise the next day. There was another fire north of town, I was told. It was racing through the dead-brown hills, and hotshots were getting pulled off Foothills to deal with it. It was bad, and it was moving fast.
    There’s a little river that runs through Boise, and from the cafés that line the river walk, I could look up and watch the mountains burn. A big head of smoke was pumping out of the hills to the north, and retardant-streaked air tankers were making nonstop runs to and from the tanker base at the Boise airport, south of town. According to dispatch, bulldozers were trying to save a subdivision off Highway 21, wind-driven flames were racing through the terrifically dry sagebrush and cheatgrass around Lucky Peak Reservoir, and fifty crews left over from the Foothills fire were waiting to go in. I picked up a pass for the roadblock and headed north up Highway 21, toward the smoke.
    Manpower was so short that the roadblock was guarded by a middle-aged couple in lawn chairs. I showed them my letter, and they waved me through. Soon I was alone on the dirt road that led into the burn zone. A line of flame hung like a necklace along the parched flanks of the hills. Smoke had turned the sunset blood-red. After three or four miles there was a hand-written cardboard sign that read: AREA CLEARED @ 19:30 HOURS 9/2— U.S.F.S . Just beyond that was the fire. It had reached the road and was swirling around a utility line that continued on up into the hills. I stopped the car and got out, completely alone with the fire and the mountains and the huge dead sky. Ten-foot tongues of flame licked the guardrails and shot into the sky. The vegetation died loudly, as if in pain, popping and exploding in the thickening dusk.
    I took a few photographs and then went back to my car. The fire was about to jump the road. It would eventually move up into some timber and end up torching over thirteen thousand