Mary Lowry, the author of a new novel about wildland firefighting, has an interesting article in the New York Times, titled The Origins of My Pyromania. When we wrote about her book, Wildfire, we mentioned that she worked for two seasons on the Pike Hotshots in Colorado.
In the Times piece, she talks about playing with fire and matches as a child, and then getting paid while using a drip torch for some serious ignition when she was a firefighter. Here is a brief excerpt from the article.
…When I was 21, I found myself standing in a forest holding a drip torch in my hand. A drip torch is like a devilish silver watering can full of diesel and gasoline, with a burning wick below the spout. I tilted the drip torch, tentatively at first. A liquid trickle of fire poured out into a clump of bushes. I walked along, deliberately spilling fire, and the flames surged, reaching for low-hanging branches, then climbing into the trees.
This was the larger conflagration I had always longed for. I wasn’t a lone pyromaniac any longer, hiding my acts from the judgment of those around me. I was working on an elite “Hotshots” crew of 20 wildland firefighters. Now, for the first time, I was lighting a “backfire” that would burn in front of the main wildfire and thus deprive it of the fuel it needed to spread. I was literally fighting fire with fire…
Merriam-Webster defines pyromania as “an irresistible impulse to start fires”. I would not go so far as to say every firefighter is a pyromaniac or an arsonist, and I don’t know if Ms. Lowry fits that description, but when a convection column is boiling up from the ground, lofting burning leaves and small tree branches into the sky, and it glows inside like a volcano, and the indrafts are pulling in winds and smoke from all directions, and there is condensation on the top forming a cloud … it’s hard not to be fascinated with the awesome spectacle.
In 1971 a reporter from the Los Angeles Times went through the training to become qualified as a firefighter so he could follow the El Cariso Hotshots around on several fires, including a long road trip to the Mendocino National Forest northern California. When the lengthy article appeared in print, the Assistant Superintendent took some heat after being quoted as saying, “You know the difference between a firefighter and an arsonist? Only about a hair”.
And, sorry, but no, I don’t have an electronic copy of the 1971 article, which covers almost three full newspaper pages. If anyone does, or if there is a link to it on the Times site (I could not find it), let us know in a comment.
