The Smoking Mountain, Part I

It was August and I was cleaning campground bathrooms for the United States Forest Service between semesters.  I guess when you clean toilets for a living you get used to looking down because I didn’t notice the white smoke billowing off the upper plateau of Wilson Mountain as I drove to work.

This was in 1993, when the USFS still handled recreation in Oak Creek canyon.  The next year the area was contracted out to a private company.  Fortunately, by then I had other prospects and didn’t have to go back to clean toilets in Sedona because that private company paid a lot less.

Anyway, in that heyday of overpaid government jobs, the Forest Service paid me seven dollars an hour, forty hours a week.  I also got to stay in the barracks for free and, to be honest, it only took about five hours to clean every one of the fifty-two bathrooms in the Canyon area, so I had a lot of time to goof off.  The major draw back, and what made up for all the free time the job allowed me, was that all I did was clean bathrooms and scrape feces off plastic toilet seats.  But I made a lot more money than I could have working on campus or in some fast food joint while trying to pay rent, electricity and water. 

But the money was just an excuse I used in letters I wrote to my friends when I felt embarrassed by my job.  The truth was that I hadn’t known what I was getting into at first.  My brother, the local County Sheriff’s deputy, told me about the job and convinced me to come all the way from Austin to take it for the summer.  Well, he told me about a job.  The job description was ‘Forestry Aid’, but it was the seven dollars an hour and free rooming that caught my attention.  There was no further information given.  At the time, minimum wage was $4.25 and I’d never made more in my life.  So I finished Spring semester, packed my stuff into my Volkswagen and headed for Arizona.

Not until I had moved into the barracks did they tell me just what the job entailed; by then it was too late to look for anything else.  So I decided to hate my brother, hunker down and hope that the summer would pass quickly.  It didn’t.

Anyway, I got to the ranger station on this particular morning, driving up from the barracks in the desert to downtown Sedona without noticing that one of the many nearby mountains was on fire.  I was too busy thinking about school and about going back there in only two weeks.  After parking I made my way toward the back entrance of the building.  Though it was only five minutes before seven the temperature had already begun to climb and inside my work shirt, jeans and boots I was beginning to sweat.

Doug Jones, the fire boss for the Sedona district, emerged from the backdoor before I reached it.  He was a large, bearded black man who listened to blues classics in his tiny, needlessly cluttered office.

“Morning, Doug.” I said, nodding once.  He held the door open for me.

“Morning, Tim.” He said in his gravelly voice. “Get your fire gear on.”

At that point I was already inside, headed toward the front room to get the keys to the toilet truck.  I stopped amid the tool-laden tables of the workroom and turned to look at Doug.

Doug headed a five-man fire-management crew that worked out of the station.  They were responsible for preventing and fighting fires in the Sedona district.  But since fires could get quite large they trained all local USFS employees, even janitors, how to fight fire.  At the end of the two-day class which I had taken in June they explained to us that we would probably be conscripted into helping them should there be a large fire near Sedona that year.

I think most of my classmates, fellow employees, saw such a possibility as an unwelcome interruption in their work and life.  I, on the other hand, saw a forest fire as my ticket out of Hell.  It was the only thing that would take me far away from campground bathrooms and, with hazardous duty pay, I would earn even more money.

It was too good to be true, though.

“Right.” I drawled, smiling and turning away.

“I’m serious.” Doug said, still standing in the open doorway.  “Get your fire gear on.”

I stopped again.  My thoughts, though, traveled on to the front room and the corkboard on the wall where the truck keys hung on a blue tack.  To the right of that room were the lockers and inside one of them, labeled McGregor, was my fire pack.  I had packed it on the second and last day of fire-class, praying that someday I would have reason to use it.  Inside the pack were various tools of survival: canteen, nomex fireproof pants and shirt, an MRE, matches and so forth.  Sitting atop the pack was my helmet, a yellow, plastic thing with a tall, seemingly needless ridge that ran down the center.

“You’re serious?”  I whispered.

“Yeah, I’m serious.  And we don’t have all the time in the world.  Haven’t you seen?” Doug pointed outside.

I returned to the doorway and looked out.

The Sedona skyline can distract a man on any day.  All around mountains of red rock jut into a stark, blue sky.  But amid the barren cliff-faces and buttes was the mountain at which Doug was pointing.  From the uppermost plateau tufts of white smoke ascended into the sky.

“That’s Wilson Mountain in case you didn’t know.” Doug said.  I didn’t know the name, though I recognized the mountain; Thursdays through Mondays I cleaned toilets at the foot of it.  “It caught fire last night.  It was probably hit by lightning a few nights ago and has been smoldering since, just waiting for a good, strong breeze, like the one we had last night, to feed it and make it grow.”

Looking at the high plateau, I wondered just how high it was.  I hadn’t imagined heights when I fantasized about fighting fire.  I had imagined a frenzied gathering of gear, leaping into the fire engine and riding into destiny, toward somewhere flat, level and burning.

“It’s right over the canyon.”  Doug continued.  “Down below are a few thousand campers and tourists, some of whom may already be nervous and packing up.  So, as you can imagine, there’s some hurry.  All it takes is for some burning debris to tumble off the plateau down into the canyon and we’ve got a disaster on our hands.”

There hadn’t been much of a monsoon rain season this year so I understood.  Everything was dry.  The canyon would burn too fast to allow time for an evacuation.

“Hotshots are gonna be flyin’ in from all over northern Arizona by late morning, but we need to get up there as fast as possible.” Doug grabbed my shoulder with one meaty hand.  “So get your fire gear on.  You’re gonna earn some hazard pay, son.”

As daunting as the mountain seemed, I was filled with glee at the prospect of escape from my mops and my cruddy wire brushes.  Fearing that Doug might realize that there was no one else to clean the bathrooms, I ran for my fire pack, shouting ‘thanks’ over my shoulder.  

The Smoking Mountain, Part II
The Smoking Mountain, Part III
The Smoking Mountain, Part IV