Clare Boerigter has written an article that includes some of her experiences while working on a fire crew — it is worth your time and is titled The Fire Rises.
Below are two excerpts, about working on a fire they accessed by river raft.
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“…There are twenty-two structures, and we are here for them. The largest is a lodge where Cary Grant once slept, the smallest is an outhouse for hikers to use. We’ve extended hoses around the grounds, improved the sprinkler system and had a second Mark III pump rafted down to us. We keep five-gallon containers of fuel—jerries of gas and diesel for the chainsaws, drip torches and pumps—in the middle of the horseshoe court. And, instead of waiting for the fires to converge wildly on the lodge, we have brought them here in slow, measured strips. I have dragged drip torches through poison oak, the heat felt like sunburn, the smell in my face as fine, soft ash. I have shot rounds from flare pistols, watched them explode into flame as they land, the sound like sucking wind, like fire rising. This lighting that we do, putting fire on the ground, brings about a quickening—the stir of breath and blood—as great sugar pines and Douglas fir torch like matchsticks, as the air blackens and fills with embers…”
[…]
“…There are snakes on the beach where we have made camp. The first came to me out of sleep: a small, brown serpent with a curious eye. I could have touched him with a finger. He had, undoubtedly, scented me on the air with his tongue. I sat up, shook my hair back on my shoulders, thought about how easily he could have slid himself in with the strands.
The first rattlesnake I almost stepped on in the dark with my flip flops. The second rattlesnake came out of the firewood pile. The third rattlesnake I do not see but imagine every night as I lay near the rocks, my tarp on the ground and the sky as my ceiling…”
wow,
that is an impressive piece of writing.
some of the best fire related i have had the pleasure to read.
I agree, Rosie. She has a way of making the mundane interesting.