Young Men and Fire Read online

  NORMAN MACLEAN was born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1902 and grew up in Missoula, Montana. He worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service before beginning his academic career. A scholar of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, Maclean was William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1973. His acclaimed book A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1976. Norman Maclean died in 1990.

  Young Men & Fire

  NORMAN MACLEAN

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  Chicago and London

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 1972 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 1992

  Paperback edition 1993

  Printed in the United States of America

  08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 11 12 13 14 15 16

  ISBN: (cloth) 0-226-50061-6

  ISBN (paperback) 0-226-50062-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maclean, Norman, 1902-90

  Young men & fire / Norman Maclean.

  p. cm.

  1. Forest fires—Montana—Mann Gulch—Prevention and control 2. Smokejumpers—United States. 3. United States. Forest Service—Officials and employees. I. Title. II. Title: Young men and fire.

  SD421.32.M9M33 1992

  634.9’618’0978664—dc20

  92-11890

  CIP

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  eISBN: 9780226500621

  Contents

  Biographical Note

  Publisher’s Note

  Black Ghost

  Young Men and Fire

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Maps of Gates of the Mountains and western Montana

  Gallery

  As I get considerably beyond the biblical

  allotment of three score years and ten, I feel

  with increasing intensity that I can

  express my gratitude for still being around on

  the oxygen-side of the earth’s crust only by

  not standing pat on what I have hitherto

  known and loved. While the oxygen lasts, there

  are still new things to love, especially

  if compassion is a form of love.

  NORMAN MACLEAN

  Notes written as a possible forepiece to

  Young Men and Fire, December 4, 1985

  Publisher’s Note

  THOUGH HE HAD HOPED for many years to write about the Mann Gulch fire, Norman Maclean did not start work on this book until his seventy-fourth year, after publication of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. He began Young Men and Fire partly in the spirit of what he liked to call his “anti-shuffleboard” philosophy of old age, but partly, too, out of a deeper compulsion. In Maclean’s files after his death were found some notes toward a Preface, written in 1984. “The problem of self-identity,” Maclean wrote, “is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead.” Young Men and Fire was where, near the end, all the lives he had lived would merge: the lives of a woodsman, firefighter, scholar, teacher, and storyteller.

  When Maclean died in 1990 at the age of eighty-seven, Young Men and Fire was unfinished. The book had resisted completion because the facts of the catastrophe proved so protean and because Maclean’s stamina began finally to wane. But more important, Young Men and Fire had become a story in search of itself as a story, following where Maclean’s compassion led it. As long as the manuscript sustained itself and its author in this process of discovery, it had to remain in some sense unfinished.

  After Maclean’s death, it was left for the press to prepare Young Men and Fire for publication. Our editing has not altered the structure of the book, and we have kept substantive interpolations to a minimum. We have done the kind of stylistic editing that we believe Maclean himself would have done if he had had the time, and we have cut certain repetitions in the manuscript. Facts have been checked for consistency and accuracy and occasionally corrected, but they have not been updated beyond 1987, the year Maclean became too ill to work further on the manuscript. We have added the present chapter divisions, although the breaks within these chapters are Maclean’s, as is the division of the book into three parts. “Black Ghost,” the story that opens this book, was found in Maclean’s files after his death, his exact intentions for it unclear. We print it here as a fitting prelude.

  Norman Maclean talked much of the loneliness of writing, but he also relished what he called its social side, and he planned to acknowledge the help he had received in writing this story. His greatest debts are recorded in the story itself: to Laird Robinson, Bud Moore, Ed Heilman, Richard Rother-mel, Frank Albini, and other men of the United States Forest Service; to women of the Forest Service, among them Susan Yonts, Beverly Ayers, and Joyce Haley; and to the survivors of the Mann Gulch fire, Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee. Maclean would have thanked dozens more.

  In editing the manuscript, the Press has benefited from the advice, at various stages, of Wayne C. Booth, Jean Maclean Snyder, and John N. Maclean. Laird Robinson was Norman Maclean’s partner in his quest for the missing parts of the Mann Gulch story, and we thank him for helping the Press in the same spirit. We are grateful, too, for the assistance of Joel Snyder, Dorothy Pesch, William Kittredge, Wayne Williams, and Richard Rothermel. We especially thank Jean Maclean Snyder and John N. Maclean for entrusting Young Men and Fire to the University of Chicago Press and working with us to bring it to publication.

  Black Ghost

  Black Ghost

  IT WAS A FEW DAYS after the tenth of August, 1949, when I first saw the Mann Gulch fire and started to become, even then in part consciously, a small part of its story. I had just arrived from the East to spend several weeks in my cabin at Seeley Lake, Montana. The postmistress in the small town at the lower end of the lake told me about the fire and how thirteen Forest Service Smokejumpers had been burned to death on the fifth of August trying to get to the top of a ridge ahead of a blowup in tall, dead grass. In the small town at Seeley Lake and in the big country around it there are only summer tourists and loggers, and, since the loggers are the only permanent residents, they have all the mailboxes at the post office—the postmistress, of course, has come to know them all, and as a result knows a lot about forests and forest fires in a gossipy way. Since she and I are old friends, I have a box, too, and every day when I came for my mail she passed on to me the latest she had heard about the dead Smokejumpers, most of them college boys, until after about a week I realized I would have to see the Mann Gulch fire myself while some of it was still burning.

  I knew, of course, that a fire that big would be burning long after it had been brought under control. I had gone to work for the Forest Service during World War I when there was a shortage of men and I was only fifteen, four years younger than Thol, the youngest of those who had died in Mann Gulch, so by the time I was his age I had been on several big fires. I knew, for instance, that the Mann Gulch fire would be burning for a long time, because one November I had gone back with my father to hunt deer in country close to where I had been on a big fire that summer, and to my surprise I had seen stumps and fallen trees still burning, with smoke coming out of blackened holes in the snow.

  But even though I knew smoke would probably be curling out of Mann Gu
lch till November there came a day in early August when I could not listen to any more post office gossip about the fire. I even had a notion of why I had to go and see the fire right then. I once had seen a ghost, and the ghost again possessed me.

  The big fire that had still been burning late into the hunting season had been on Fish Creek, the Fish Creek that is about nine miles by trail, as I remember, from Lolo Hot Springs. Fish Creek was fine deer country, and the few homesteaders who had holed up there made a living by supplementing the emaciated produce from their rocky gardens with the cash they collected from deer hunters in the autumn by turning their cabins into overnight hunting lodges. Deer, then, were a necessary part of their economy and their diet. They had venison on the table twelve months a year, the game wardens never bothering them for shooting deer out of season, just as long as they didn’t go around bragging that they were getting away with beating the law.

  Those of us on the fire crew that had been sent from the ranger station at Lolo Hot Springs were pretty sure that the fire had been started by one of these homesteaders. The Forest Service had issued a permit to a big sheep outfit to graze a flock of a thousand or so on a main tributary of Fish Creek, and you probably know—hunters are sure they know—that sheep graze a range so close to the ground that nothing is left for a deer to eat when the sheep have finished. Hunters even say that a grasshopper can’t live on the grass sheep leave behind. The fire had been started near the mouth of the tributary, on the assumption, we assumed, that the fire would burn up the tributary, which was a box canyon, all cliffs, with no way of getting sheep out of it. From a deer hunter’s point of view, it was a good place for sheep to die. The fire, though, burned not only up the tributary but down it to where it entered Fish Creek and could do major damage to the country. We tried first to use Fish Creek as a “fire-line,” hoping to stop the fire at the water’s edge, but when it reached thick brush on one side of the creek it didn’t even wait to back up and take a run before it jumped into the brush on the other side. Then we were the ones who had to back up fast. At this point, Fish Creek is in such a narrow and twisted canyon that the main trail going down it is on the sidehill, so we backed up to the sidehill trail, which was to be our second line of defense.

  I was standing where the fire jumped the trail. At first it was no bigger than a small Indian campfire, looking more like something you could move up close to and warm your hands against than something that in a few minutes could leave your remains lying in prayer with nothing on but a belt. For a moment or two I could have stepped over it and fought it just as well from the upstream side, and when it got a little bigger I still could have walked around it. Instead, I fought it where I stood, for no other reason than that all of us are taught to be the boy who stood on the burning deck. It never occurred to me that I had alternatives. I did not even notice—not until I returned the next day—that if I had stepped across the fire I would have been on a side of it where the fire would soon reach a cedar thicket whose fallen needles had made a thick, moist duff in which fire could only creep and smolder.

  The fire coming up at me from the creek in the bunch and cheat grass stopped for only a moment when it reached the trail we were hoping to use as a fire-line. The grass on either side of the trail did not make such instant connections as the brush had on the sides of the creek. Here the fire rocked back and forth like a broadjumper before it started toward the takeoff. Then it jumped. One by one, other like fires reached the line, rocked back and forth, and they all made it.

  I broke and started up the hillside. Unlike the boys on the Mann Gulch fire, who did not start running until they were nearly at the top, I started running near the bottom. By the testimony of those who survived, they weren’t scared until the last hundred yards. My testimony is that I was scared until I got near the top, when all feelings—fright, thirst, desire to stop for a. moment to pray—became indistinguishable from exhaustion. Unlike the Mann Gulch fire, though, the fire behind was never quite a blowup; it was never two hundred feet of flame in the sky. It was in front of me, though, as well as behind me, with nowhere to go but up. Above, it was little spot fires started by a sky of burning branches. The spot fires turned me in my course by leaping into each other and forming an avalanche of flame that went both down and up the mountain. I kept looking for escape openings marked by holes in smoke that at times burned upside down. Behind, where I did not dare to look, the main fire was sound and heat, a ground noise like a freight train. Where there were weak spots in the grass, it sounded as if the freight train had slowed down to cross a bridge or perhaps to enter a tunnel. It could have been doing either, because in a moment it roared again and started to catch up. It came so close it sounded as if it were cracking bones, and mine were the only bones around. Then it would enter a tunnel and I would have hope again. Whether it rumbled or crackled I was always terrified. Always thirsty. Always exhausted.

  Halfway or more toward the top I heard a voice beside me when the roar of the main fire was reduced for a moment to the rattle of empty railroad cars. The voice sidehilled until it was on my contour and said, “How’re you doing, sonny?” The voice may have come down with a burning branch, or it may have belonged to a member of our pickup crew whom I had never seen before. The only thing I noticed about him at first was that he didn’t slip because he wore a good pair of climbing boots with caulks in them.

  In answer to his question of how sonny was doing, I answered, “I keep slipping back,” pointing back but not looking back. I also pointed at my shoes.

  I was in my second summer in the Forest Service, so I knew what good climbing shoes were and how hobnails in them weren’t enough to make them hold on hillsides, especially on slick, grassy hillsides, but I was young and still trying to escape such harsh realities as growing up and paying half a month’s wages for a good pair of shoes. Consequently, I had gone to an army surplus store and bought a pair of leftover shoes from World War I. They were cheap shoes and wouldn’t hold long caulks so I had rimmed them with hobnails, and hobnails soon wear as smooth as skates. The ghost in the caulks climbed straight uphill and never slipped, but I had to weave back and forth in little switchbacks and dig in with the edges of my soles.

  Being sorry for myself made me feel that I couldn’t go any farther; being terrified made me feel exhausted; waiting for the ghost in caulked shoes to help me made me feel exhausted; being so thirsty that I couldn’t form words to ask for help made me feel exhausted. As a fire up a hillside closes in, everything becomes a mode of exhaustion—fear, thirst, terror, a twitch in the flesh that still has a preference to live, all become simply exhaustion. So upon closer examination, burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times, not two times as has been said before—first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes, and if you are a Catholic about all that remains of you is your cross.

  The black ghost that could walk in a straight line came closer to me and took a look. I looked back but out of fright. The black ghost had a red face. In more leisurely times he could have been an alcoholic, but certainly much of the red now was reflection from the flames. “Could I be of any help?” the red face asked, becoming a voice again.

  I thought I was beyond help, but I swallowed the thirst in my throat to find a word and said, “Yes.” When I was able, I said, “Yes, thanks.”

  The black ghost came closer, the red in his face burning steadily. Then suddenly in his face there was a blowup, a reflection of something either behind him or in him, and he slapped me in the face.

  “My God,” I said, and reeled sideways across the hillside. All I knew while I staggered was that if I fell I might never get up. I burst into tears even while I was staggering, but came to rest standing. When I could recover my breath and hold the hot air in my lu
ngs, I cried out loud, especially when I realized that all that could save me now was my army surplus boots. Still in tears, I proceeded to climb almost straight uphill almost without slipping until I reached the contour where I had been outraged. Here I stopped and went looking for what had done it, but he was far up the hill, peering down at me from the mouth of a cave that now and then opened in a red cliff of flame.

  This is all I know about the violent apparition that was just ahead of the fire. It must have been a member of the fire crew that had been picked up in the bars of Butte. I had never seen him before and have never seen him since. Maybe he was a Butte wino demented by thirst. Maybe he was a Butte miner with tuberculosis whose lungs were collapsing wall to wall from the heat of the air they were trying to breathe. It is even possible something was working on him besides the fire as he tried to keep ahead of it, something terrible that had been done to him for which he had to get even before his consignment to flames. In either of these cases, at just the right moment I may have appeared out of smoke, young and paralyzed and unable to do anything back if he did what he wanted to do, so he did it.

  Above, the crevice in the red cliff opened now and then. From its entrance a figure retreated and ascended into the sky until he hung like a bat on the roof of a cave. He was always watching me, but I don’t know what he hoped to see. Finally, he was hanging upside down by his claws.

  I have no clear memory of going up the rest of the ridge, except that when I reached the top I had to put out the fire that smoldered in my shoelaces. I didn’t think of the crew or where I might find them. I didn’t think of the ghost. After I reached the top of the ridge, for a time I couldn’t think of anything behind me. I thought of things ahead, the nearest of which was a hunting lodge up the main fork of the Fish Creek where my father and I had stayed the last two hunting seasons. It was run by a woman, Mrs. Brown, who looked something like my mother but more like an Indian with brown crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes. In addition, she was a fine shot so that if one of her guests didn’t get a deer she would run out for an hour or two the last morning and shoot one for him. I thought, if I follow the ridge upstream and then drop into the creek bottom where her cabin is, Mrs. Brown will be able to do something for me, even if I am in pretty bad shape. I thought she might even shoot a deer for me, and then I thought, no, that’s wrong—I don’t need a deer, but go anyway. You need something.