Fire season in Montana, and I’ve been re-reading Fred Haefele’s artful, impactful essay on wildland firefighting, anthologized in Extremophilia “Fire on the Mountain.” A brief excerpt…
“Our first morning on the line, Collin and I were cutting through doghair lodgepole, downhill from the fire. It seemed there were too many of us, that we were bunched up, the Hotshots working too close behind us. I had stopped to gas my saw when a burnt-through snag arced out of the fire and blindsided a Hotshot kid while he dug line. He did a little cartwheel then went down hard, fifty feet away from me. I heard the strike team leader say, “Is there a man down?” though I was certain that he’d seen it happen too. One by one, the other saws died, the voices seemed to fade, the whole hillside went quiet, and all you could hear was the hiss and pop of the fire. I stood, frozen to the spot. Finally the kid moaned and it seemed to break the spell. I trotted over, light-headed, full of dread…”