The Smoking Mountain, Part III

Doug gave us the basic strategy on the way there.  I listened, simultaneously maintaining a fantasy about Ana; bedding down under a tree after a long struggle against the fire, taking her in my exhausted arms.

“The fire is on the upper plateau of Wilson Mountain at seven thousand feet.  Between there and Midgley Bridge is Wilson Bench.  It’s a lower plateau at six thousand feet or so.  Once we reach that there’s some level ground as the path crosses the bench.  So that should be refreshing.”  Doug smiled.  I sensed that he was worried about my and Ana’s stamina.  “Then there’s the final ascent.  Hopefully when we get there the fire will still just be on the upper plateau.  And we’ll attack it.

“What’s the horse for?” Mark inquired.

“I’m gonna saddle ‘im up when we get to Midgley and ride on ahead.  I’ll take her up to the bench, dismount and go up on foot.  I’ll start doing some planning and radio what I see back to the station.  Maybe call in some air strikes.”

“Really!” Ana said, obviously as thrilled as I was by the possibility.

“How exciting.” Mark said in a less-than-interested tone.

I said nothing, for the first time brought out of my sexual reverie.  Air strike?  By God, I was on a real life adventure and it looked like nothing could stop me from experiencing it!  My mind veered away from Ana’s body to my own.  Could it make it?  Could my legs carry me up that mountain, the one that loomed larger and larger in the wind-shield?  I was ashamed before the fact, certain that my legs would give out, that I would have to stop and let the others go on up.  Only twenty years old, I was prematurely haunted by a vision of Ana looking back as she forged on with the real men.  A part of me that called itself older and wiser ridiculed the vision and reminded me of the insignificance of this coming tromp in the woods compared to the Fall semester and finally taking courses in my major.  But my stomach churned nonetheless.

Midgley Bridge leaps over a deep, magnificent gorge into which despairing individuals occasionally throw themselves.  My brother the deputy has to coordinate teams to retrieve their discarded bodies from the innocent stream below.  He says it is bizarre, hiking down through such beautiful country to recover a corpse. 

At the North end of the bridge there is a paved pull-off for tourists and a few stone picnic tables beneath stone roofs.  A service road leads out of the picnic area and quickly becomes a footpath, winding upwards toward Wilson mountain.  After we arrived, Doug saddled Bailey as he rattled off a series of technical instructions to his firefighters.  Finally he mounted.

“The big redneck’s in charge.”  He said, pointing at Brian, who smiled and fingered his Confederate belt buckle.  “March as fast as possible.  Get there before the hotshots do.  Don’t embarrass us.  As for the new guys¼” he glanced at Mark, Ana and I, all three of standing self-consciously in a separate group.  “If it gets too tough, you can always turn back and help at the station.  This isn’t the Army and no one can make you fight fire.”

Then he was off.  

“Let’s go.” Brian grunted, taking the lead.  

I was not a hiker and after fifteen minutes I began to lag behind.  It seemed that my pack had gained weight and my shovel was made of lead.

I recalled how much I had wanted to carry a pulaski, the double-headed tool that did the primary work in this kind of fire-fighting.  One side of the tool was an axe-blade. Opposite, in place of a second axe-head, was a pick-like projection.  Pulaski bearers go before shovel bearers on the fire line.  My job would simply be cleaning up after the rest of the team.  Every one but Mark, Ana and I had pulaskis.  Now though, exhausted only a few minutes into our journey, I was glad that I was not deemed capable of wielding the pulaski.  The shovel had to be lighter, burdensome as it seemed.

Presently I began to utilize the shovel as a staff, vaulting myself over boulders, logs and other obstacles.

“Isn’t there supposed to be someone who cleans trails?” I said with a dangerous expense of breath and clambered over a fallen tree that blocked the path.

“Budget cuts!” Shouted Helen far ahead of me, wiping the barest trace of sweat from her downy upper lip with a beefy wrist.  “Now all we have is wilderness volunteers like Mark.”  The entire crew, except for me, laughed in gasps.  I didn’t have enough air left.  “And all he’s good for is locating vortexes and selling crystals!”

I made an agnostic’s vague, wordless prayer, hoping that they wouldn’t start talking about my job.

Some of the crew, especially Brian, began to comment on my slowness.  I was definitely holding them back, and speed was crucial.  Somewhere, high above us, flames were eating their way toward the slopes that led down into the Canyon.  Once there, burning debris could roll down into the thin, thirty-mile long chasm where the disaster would be unbelievable.  Mark, who was in his forties, was handling the exertion better than I.  Of course, his job gave him opportunity for practice.  Ana, though she lagged, did not make the desperate wheezing noises that I made.  Every now and then she would turn and smile, saying, “keep it up, kiddo” in a motherly tone that I found very depressing.

A rest was called before we reached the bench.  I suspected it was for my sake.  By that time I was panting audibly.  We sipped water (“not too much” Helen admonished, wagging a thick forefinger at me) and inhaled the pine scented air.  We had climbed out of the desert.  We exchanged few words.  Brian refused to even look at me.  Ana remarked that she had a blister on her heel and I recognized, silently, that I definitely had the mother-of-all blisters on my right foot, just below the Achilles’ tendon.  My boots were still fairly new, bought for one hundred dollars a few weeks earlier for just such an occasion, and hadn’t seen any more action than that involved in walking from the cab of the toilet truck to the nearest restroom.  I decided to say nothing, since complaining at that point wasn’t exactly going to win me any brownie points and because I was afraid it would be used as a pretext to send me back.

I marveled at how much better I felt with just a few minutes rest.  The air I breathed no longer felt like fire in my lungs.  My entire body felt like a well-oiled machine, warmed up and ready to go.

“You feelin’ okay?” Helen inquired. “You ready to fight fire?”

“Yeah.” I replied coolly, putting my helmet back on.  “Let’s go.”

Ten minutes later I had again fallen behind everyone.  Mark began to shout “The bench is just ahead.  We’re almost there!” every few minutes.

Finally, in agony, I lifted myself up onto a ledge that went on for some way.  I had reached the bench.  Level ground, covered in grass, stretched away into the distance.  There were a few copses and lone trees dotting the surface.  Nearby, beneath the branches of a juniper pine, the Sedona crew stood around Bailey, who was tied to the trunk.  Far beyond them, the ground reached the foot of the upper plateau.  The trail was visible, zig-zagging up the face of the steep slope toward the wooded top.  I fixed briefly on the smoke creeping through the crowns of those distant trees.  The fire was not visible or audible; there was only that flow of smoke into the sky.

As I approached the others explained to me that Doug had probably gone ahead on foot and was already at the fire.  Mark took me aside after a moment.

“Are you gonna make it?” he whispered.  “Because it’s okay if you can’t.” Glancing over I noticed that Brian was glaring at me, buckteeth resting on his almost non-existent lower lip.  Someone had thought it was a good idea for Mark to do the talking. 

“Ana’s gonna go back.” Mark continued. “The blister’s bothering her and she’s afraid it’ll get infected.  Anyway, someone’s gotta take the horse back down to the bridge.”

It was a dilemma.  I felt awful.  But Mark had offered not only an end to my suffering but a retreat accompanied by the object of my lust.

I stared at the mountain-top over Mark’s shoulder.  A column of smoke ascended slowly into the endless sky.  I tried to get rational about it, weigh my choices.  If I went, I went with Ana.  I also went back to toilets.  And being realistic, I thought I had little or no chance with her.  The truth be told, she had never given me an unnecessary glance or comment.  And I would be going back to cleaning toilets.  You couldn’t get away from that.

On the other hand there was the mountain and all its fiery glory.  Coming up the trail my mind had turned more and more toward that goal.  The part of me that had always wanted to be a soldier, to throw myself into danger, yearned to smell the smoke, hear the crackling of underbrush afire, watch the yellow flames creep destructively over everything in their path.  But I wondered if I actually could make it.  And if I did, would I be in any condition to fight fire?  And shouldn’t I just be happy with what I had done already?  It was more than what most janitors did.

“Mark, I can do it.” Said a voice that sounded a lot like my own.  “I’ll keep up.  I’m not turning back now.”  I almost choked on the last word.  My blister was burning like a fuse and I finally understood what people meant when they said that their feet felt like hamburger.

Brian swore and ran to the ledge.  “It’s the Mormon Lake crew.  Let’s go!”  Though it was quite a feat of verbal exercise for the normally monosyllabic Brian, I seemed to be the only stunned by his long-winded, magnum opus.  The others gathered their gear in a frenzy and followed him as he bounded along the trail with ridiculously renewed vitality.  I didn’t understand the need to beat a larger and more-well equipped crew to the fire, but I was in no position to criticize.  Certainly I was too far behind for them to hear me.  

“Bye, Tim.”  Ana said.  I turned and saw her lead the horse down over the ledge.  I let myself watch for a few moments.  At length, I turned and followed my crew.

I managed to keep up, more or less, as we crossed the bench.  By the time we began the last ascent the hotshots were only a few minutes behind.

Going up, breathing became much more difficult.  Part of it was due to exertion.  The other part was due to elevation.  We were quickly approaching seven thousand feet.  Occasionally I caught sight of the Sedona crew, which had gotten away from me, but I couldn’t catch up.

Turning a corner, I found them sitting on rocks and logs.  Brian glared at me furiously.  “You gonna make it or not?”  The others looked away, ashamed.  They were all thinking that I belonged in a bathroom three thousand feet below.

I sat down and sipped water from my canteen for a few moments.  Then the trampings of the hotshots could be heard below us, perhaps just a few turns down.  Brian leapt frantically to his feet.  The others did so more slowly.  I trudged after them.

I plodded on, head hanging, but the hotshots quickly overtook me.  I stood to one side as they filed by.  “How ya doin’, old timer?” someone said.  “Looks like a Klingon.” I heard some one mutter in reference to my ridged helmet, which contrasted with their smooth, red, swept-back, dirty hard hats.  At least they didn’t know that I was the district janitor.  I noticed that they weren’t even breathing hard.

When I rounded the next bend I found my crew, waiting for me.  I figured that there was either a rule forbidding them to leave a member behind or that they had felt guilty and collectively forced Brian to wait for me.  He was staring at me, fuming.

A lifetime seemed to pass as I marched along behind them.  The fire was close and the ground was leveling out.  I could hear the burning and smell the smoke.  Suddenly the ground leveled out completely and we emerged into a small clearing, the other side of which was ablaze.

I was amazed to see all the hotshots sitting on the ground, drinking water. One of them, presumably their leader, stood near the small one-foot high flames talking with Doug.

I collapsed at the side of one of the hotshots. 

 

The Smoking Mountain, Part I
The Smoking Mountain, Part II
The Smoking Mountain, Part IV