Things That ACTUALLY Help During Fire Season

Noisy Creek Fire, Washington State, 2017

It's officially fire season. If you want to know how you can ACTUALLY help out during a wildfire in your area, here are some ideas: 

If you want to do something to help out firefighters working on the lines, here are some tips to help keep the mayhem in fire camp at a minimum: 

- Firefighters are required as part of their job to come FULLY equipped for a two week assignment, with all of their personal gear, toiletries, socks, toothpaste etc. Everybody likes free stuff, but nobody in fire camp should be here unprepared.

- Most camps will turn away donations because they don't have the manpower to deal with distributing them and stuff will just get shuffled off to local food banks, shelters, etc. at the end of the incident. If you INSIST on donating stuff the most useful, most asked things are preventatives like Emergen-C, vitamins, or coffee (see below). 

- Firefighters are provided with over the counter medicines like Tylenol and DayQuil, Gold Bond Powder, foot care items, chapstick, sunscreen and insect repellent through the medical unit. 

- Homemade/baked goods can open Incident Management teams to health liabilities and will usually be turned away as well. They also violate the contract with food caterers in fire camp who provide everything necessary to meet the firefighter's 6000 calorie a day requirement, including snacks. This is for firefighter health and safety.

- Gatorade, water and ice are all provided. Don't buy this stuff for us.

- Contribute to local volunteer departments who have limited funding and face the toughest job during the first hours of initial attack. The volunteers often have to buy their own boots and supplies without any reimbursement, and they don't get paid like professional wildland firefighters who are on the clock, paid, for 14-16 hours a day.

- Fire camp coffee is brutal. If there is a fire camp near town, pay a few coffees forward at a local coffee stand for the firefighters that will be coming through. Or again, if you insist on bringing something to camp, instant coffee packets (like Starbucks Via) are like gold out here.

- Donate to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation (https://wffoundation.org/). They will be there for the firefighter when they, or their families, truly need it the most.

PLEASE SHARE!

P.S. - I know that everybody is an expert, so if you're wondering, I am speaking from 15 year of fire experience in both volunteer and paid positions as a Fireline EMT and a Public Information Officer. I have worked all over the U.S. (even Alaska) for every level of Incident Management Team, including running the medical unit for Type 3 firefighting organizations. 

Things About Beauty

“I want to know how I can have acne AND gray hair at the same time?” the new fireline paramedic echoed my own internal conversation. It was ironic, since I had noticed earlier that morning what a beautiful rosy complexion she had, and I was jealous. This was only hours before she caught me plucking gray hairs in my rear view mirror. Not that beauty is the most important thing out here on the fireline. Far from it. The most important thing is, of course, food. Then sleep. Then safety (Safety 3rd!). And maybe after all of those, beauty falls in rank.

I have never been much of a beauty expert, as evidenced in my make-up application skill level (or lack thereof) and generally unkempt hair. But according to three real aestheticians I know, and one self-proclaimed one, John Tesh, the Beauty Experts at Cosmopolitan Magazine and the back of my Lip Smackers package, there are a lot of really easy tips and tricks for staying beautiful even under the harshest of conditions. Like say, photographer’s lighting systems and long Metro Rides, or air that is filled with both smoke and dust particulates in clearly visible but immeasurable quantities for days at a time.

(For the record, until about six years ago I assumed an aesthetician was somebody who taught people how to have good taste [as in aesthetics], like a dietician teaches people to eat good[?] food.)

I read once, or maybe heard it on John Tesh (if you can’t tell, I a major fan), that we tend to have acne breakouts on the side of our face that we sleep on since our pillowcases harbor bacteria and dirt from… well, Iife, I guess. That makes sense since at this moment my own pillow is nestled between a Very Dirty Transverse Rescue System that has seen the back of too many fire pickups, my hardhat and a combi-tool (a shovel/pick combination that I carry on the line).

This probably explains the residual break out on my right cheek because I can’t really sleep on my left side with a torn labrum in my left hip and an undiagnosed pain in my left shoulder. Sleeping on my right side isn’t a whole lot better since I have a torn labrum in my right shoulder and an undiagnosed pain in my right hip, but it is some better. I read in Cosmo that sleeping on your back is the best for facial skin since gravity pulls it all backwards and toward your scalp, minimizing the development of wrinkles like the ones by my nose where my cheeks are squishing it all night long, mashed up against my dirty pillow.

Sleeping on my back poses a whole new set of issues though as that same gravitational pull seems to work on all of my body fat, which I suspect are culpable in the compression of my spinal cord in Just The Right Places so that my hands and feel fall asleep within about 45 seconds of lying supine (on my back, for you laypeople). I tried to mitigate this last night by propping my left leg up on the same dirty TRS that my pillow is snuggling with now and elevating my right foot on the hardhat. That resulted in about two hours of sleepless evaluation of tingly hands and the gravitational pull on my facial skin.

So back to the right side I went, and resigned myself to a dirty pillowcase and more zits. Sleep before beauty, I told myself. Which makes acceptance of the definite lack of beauty a little bit easier. It is more concerning to me of late since I have established certain goals which include improving my attention to physical appearance, since, “Havin’ no natural beauty” of my own like Sonora in Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken (favorite movie alert!), I probably need to - help myself. Not that, once again, beauty is the ultimate goal, but there is no denying that with beauty comes influence, and people are happier to work with and respond better to someone who is attractive. It’s just the way it is. People, monkeys, peacocks… we’re all wired to be more receptive to the Hot Ones, whether it’s tan legs, swollen purple butts or fantastic feathery shows . So in order to make the power plays I am looking forward to in the future, I need to up my hotness factor, and probably wash my pillowcase.

Things About Guidelines

You guys, I suck. As a general rule, I am kind of terrible at hearing/following/adhering to guidelines. Which is to say, I am not good at general rules. I happen to be working in a capacity at this time that is largely about guidelines and general rules. You can imagine how well that is going. I am learning a lot about rewriting and redoing and relistening and revisiting and pretty much re-everything in this role. Here is a working list of the guidelines I have broken on this fire assignment so far:

1) no open toed shoes in fire camp
2) remain at least 10 feet from open water without a personal flotation device
3) don't use the word "monitor"
4) don't use the word "watch"
5) don't use the words f*** s*** d*** or b*****
6) sleep within fire camp perimeter
7) don't take food out of the kitchen area
8) don't throw food scraps into the bushes
9) don't feed the animals
10) don't scare the public
11) practice good hygiene
12) be nice to people

We're not gonna talk about which rules I am breaking out here...

I would like to say how sorry I am for my transgressions and offer proliferating regret, but since I am working on self-love and self-acceptance, Ima just roll with it and accept the occasional hand slap and look of profound exasperation from my immediate supervisors.

Not following guidelines has garnished me a whole collection of rejections from several places where I submitted writing samples in the hopes of a payoff. Part of me wants to blame my homeschooled renegade background, but really, I am just more excited about what I have to say than I am about instructions. It could be that I am resisting the hardcore overdose of rules that I grew up under, but even then I was pretty intolerant of being corralled between the lines, as my parents will attest.

Maybe guideline follower is one of those things that I have never been and I should work on, but sometimes then I feel like I would just be like all of the other lemmings marching toward the cliff of conformity without ever asking why.

Guidelines are created by and for a litigious world, where individuals refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, i.e. wearing flip flops in fire camp. Everybody wants somebody else to pay the price for their poor choices. But if there are rules, then nobody else can be blamed, right? I don't see that working very well. Humans are messy animals that will find a rule that has not been made yet, break it, and cost others so much that it will demand the recourse of a new guideline the rest of us are stuck with. Too many rules are just a symptom of a much bigger problem, I think Ima keep bucking them, and working to solve it.

Marcus Squirrelius likes Skinny Pop.

Things Worth Fighting For

The white flakes of ash float down all around me in the crisp November air. If I didn’t know better and if the smoke wasn’t thick in the backdrop of the landscape, I could almost imagine it is snow as it settles without melting on the headstones that chase up and down the steep hill next to Lone Oak Church. Tomorrow is veterans day, and the solitary grave marker of a soldier is in front of me with a flag being tossed carelessly to and fro by an undecided wind. The colors are right, but this is not the flag that I look for at a veteran’s headstone.

Another peculiarity strikes me as I read the numbers etched into the white marble: March 18, 1910. Adam Chariker was 81 when he died. Not a young man. And not a veteran of the great wars in memory… but then my slow yankee mind begins to compile the facts. These stars and bars are not Old Glory. They are the demonized symbol of an internal struggle so great that we still bear the scars more than 150 years later.

 

It strikes me as poignant, this banner of Civil War, placed reverently at the grave of a soldier, a veteran of combat in the defense of his country. A warrior for a cause he believed in deeply enough to fight and kill other men - his own countrymen. We awaken now in the hangover of an historic election that has divided our nation in a way that perhaps it hasn’t been in these 150 years. And this little rebel flag brings tears to my eyes to remember the thousands and thousands of men and women who have fought and died on both sides of causes that were sacred to them.


Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. It shakes me to think that in all of my respect and reverence for those who have served it is easy to overlook the American Soldiers who fought one another, brother against brother, father against son, in the bloodiest battles that this land has been forced to drink up, believing uto their last breath in what they fought for. It’s easy to discount their service because depending on which side of the Mason/Dixon line you live on, it’s too uncomfortable to condone their fight. To call a confederate soldier a patriot is as unpopular as calling a law enforcement officer a hero. Racists, right?


The civil war was not about slavery any more than modern violent protests are about racism or mass shootings are about guns. There is a deeper underlying issue that may be just as unsuccessfully resolved by modern lawmakers as it was by the blue and the grey so long ago. The battle between north and south was about self government, external control, and the fine line between too much and not enough of both. As long as we are human we will fight this fight, and the only battleground where we will find victory is the landscape of our own minds and hearts.


I stand along the fireline here in North Carolina, shoulder to shoulder with veterans of more than one war. I stand next to conservatives and liberals, libertarians and pacifists. I work alongside Yankees who will endure grueling hours and physical labor to save the goat barn of the descendant of a confederate infantryman from burning up. This is the great America - the people who break a sweat every day to fight the very real enemies. The teachers who insist on a generation more well educated than their own. The “uneducated” voters who changed the oil in your car and grew the kale you bought at Costco. The scientists and lawyers who battle in trenches, bathed in a different gore, for our protection and our salvation from perverse humans and pervasive diseases. The doctors, backhoe operators, linemen and priests who refuse to proliferate conjecture of the condition of our nation from their couches, but with the work of their hands and minds and hearts they generate change.


It is not about making America Great Again, because that so-called “greatness” was borne on the backs of slaves, of minorities struggling first to survive, then to succeed. It’s about being the Great America that we have always intended, and continuing towards the ever elusive mark. We are perhaps now as great as we’ve ever been, as states pass laws calling assault of a police officer a “non-violent” felony and replace the rights of individuals with a higher minimum wage. The war against racism is far from over, as is the war against ignorance, greed, sloth and corruption. We owe our veterans at least our best efforts to maintain a nation worth their fight. A people worth their hope.


Our president is a representation of who we are as a people, the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. We have cast off restraint after years of bowing to the strong arm of money and power and we now stand, naked and exposed, like the emperor in his new clothes. The real fight for American Liberty and virtue is not in Afghanistan or Aleppo, it is here in our own homes and on our own streets, and we have just run into battle with weapons that we have no idea how to control. But we can learn, and we must. And we can love, and we must.

Things About (fire) Showers

First World Problems, y'all.

I have taken showers, or something that in some way resembled a shower, in places all over the world, literally. But nothing beats a fire shower, and here on the Kettle Complex, they've outdone themselves to make it a memorable experience.

In an exciting plot twist, the shower contractors here on the Kettle Complex operate a trailer with individual stalls, each with door opening to the outside world, kind of like a game show where you get to pick your shower experience. Will you take what's behind door number 5 - with a leaky shower head, a wad of hair in the drain and a questionable trail of incongruous slime down the west wall? Or will it be door number 3, with a dysfunctional lock on the handle that reveals a fully naked and VERY surprised firefighter inside? Maybe it's door number 9, which was cleaned recently but where you realize too late that it sits at the end of the hot water train, which apparently stopped for a breather back at door 7. It's luck of the draw in these phone booth sized boxes, just beckoning the frozen dirtbag in nomex to make the risk-laden decision.

Once you've committed, and, thanks to the shivering soul behind door 3, remember to lock your stall VERY WELL before you begin the monumental task of taking of several layers of nomex, fleece and long johns in a space about half the size of a juvenile coffin. Thoughtfully, the contractor has provided a fold down bench seat that is made of solid lead and which crashes to a horizontal position with the force and severity of a giullitine. I am not sure how the bench helps, as a seating position on it wedges your knees up against the opposite wall, making the removal of socks or pants laughable. But it's nice to sit for a minute and plan a strategy before you call the contractor to help you push the 85 lb seat back up against the wall.

Of course you forgot shower shoes on this fire, a classic rookie move that you will never admit to, but you are secretly counting on the shower people to have a giant vat of miscellaneous flip flops that you can fish out and slip on before anyone notices. It's a good thing you aren't picky about them matching, because two mates floating in the bleach water is just too much to ask. You try not to imagine which fungus-infested toes were last wrapped around the rubber as you slide your feet in - thanking god for the millionth time that you are a girl and these pink flip flops have most likely been on slightly cleaner and slightly fewer feet - just the handful of girls in camp and a couple of the smaller Mexican contractors, I am sure.

After a brief shudder, you're ready to get clean. Or at least to rinse the top layer of grime off and maybe consider reducing your armpit hair to a braidable length for convenience. Shaving is a problem in and of itself in the later weeks of fire, since you'll usually end up shaving off more goosebumps than hair, and leaving a stinging rash of regret up and down your legs. A lot of girls give up shaving all together during fire season, but after I started having dreams that I was cuddling with bigfoot, I opted to resume the regime.

Late season fires pose the difficult dilemma of whether to take a shower in the night, and go to bed with wet hair in sub-freezing temperatures, or a morning shower, looking forward to ice-crystal hair and being first naked, and then wet and naked, in the aforementioned temperatures shortly after dawn. In the particular day in question, I had opted for a morning shower, not willing to repeat the two week head cold that I blamed on my last late season night bathing. #longhairdocare

The cattle-call shower trailers where 8 girls change in the same space like a junior high PE class at least offers the communal warmth of everybody's steamy output, but in these individual stalls, the cutting edge venting technology in the roof that creates continuous airflow out of each booth creates the atmosphere of an igloo in the colder months.

But the water is hot - piping hot - and you climb in and start to think about how to let the rest of your crew know that you won't be back out on the line for two or three days, give or take. After a miraculous half day, the guilt for abandoning your post starts to set in and then the real strategizing begins. How to leave the sultry, sauna-like cubicle behind the curtain and emerge into the ice block domain of the dressing cubby. Thankfully, you don't have to leave the shower experience completely behind you, as the condensation from 250 degree water has accumulated in a thick layer across the ceiling, and what hasn't frozen solid is dripping in a fairly steady ice-cold rain all. over. your. naked. body. At this point you give up on any kind of an orderly process for reacquiring the layers you shed earlier in the morning. It's an all out panicked frenzy to get any kind of clothing on your body, STAT. Later you will realize that your shirt (and probably underwear) are on inside-out and backwards, but you just don't care.

You graciously, in a mildly hypothermic state, try to rinse the trail of incongruous slime from the shower wall and collect your wad of hair, unlike the uncouth cad in stall number 5, and make a hasty retreat down the rattling metal steps to the dirt below, where you promtly begin to undo all of your hard work getting clean. But not until you've returned the pink flip flops to the swirling vat of chlorine and thanked the shower contractor people, who ask you how it was, and mention casually that you have a giant booger smeared across your face. It's helpful, since they didn't think to install mirrors in the phone booths. It might have prevented too many inside-out shirts, I guess. By the time you get the booger handled and your numb feet back into your patiently waiting boots, which you are equally surprised and relieved to see have not accumulated any snow or black widows in your absence, your hair is a frozen mass of rigid dred locks, which is exactly why they make hats.

Happy shower day on the fireline, folks - oh, and you missed a spot shaving.

Things About Time Travel

Yesterday I drove over Sherman Pass to Republic for a cello concert. The concert was amazing - more about that to come. But the drive...

Ten years ago, I made that drive a million times a week. Sometimes twice in one day. The memories of that summer wash over me like a rough cold wave on the Oregon coast, taking my breath away. The songs, the sights, all flash through my mind. The Forest Service campground where I spent weeks excavating. The creek bed where I waded up to my waist on survey. The brilliant smile of a beautiful boy with a soot-blackened face. Camo pants, Dollar Bets, karaoke at the Hitching Post. Sweet Home Alabama, Tim McGraw and Watching The Wind Blow By, rope swings and watermelon. Falling asleep in an exhausted pile of over-sung, over-danced, over-worked and over-funned boys and girls still wearing nomex and boots.

The memories make my heart race and my stomach flutter like it hasn't in years. Funny how a drive can transport you back in history to a different time. Every curve of the road had a different memory, a conversation, a song - this is the spot where I lose cell service, and this is the other spot where it comes back and 37 text messages from a waiting boy flood my screen.

I remember a little blonde baby and a 4 1/2 year old who ate so much watermelon that she threw it up all over my car.  An 8 year old tomboy and a 7 year old fairy princess. Missing plenty of teeth but not one minute of life. I remember liberation from the tyranny of a terrible marriage. Years of pain washing off of me in the lakes of Ferry County. I remember stepping off of the blind precipice that is leaving A Religion behind, to find out if there is really A God instead. I can still feel the freefall into learning that absolute truth is defined in the burning trees and tumbling rocks of nature. I can still taste the tiniest trace of unconditional love on my lips. Love without judgement, only curiosity and the desire to Know Me. I can feel the wonder of being my own person, valued and sought out and enjoyed, finally escaping years of condemnation and failure and never, ever, ever Getting It Right. For a little while, I didn't have to. I just had to be. Honest, open, trusting, seeking, learning.

That drive was my road home. My pathway to freedom. To knowing my own soul and who I was Created To Be. That mountain pass was the crossover from incarceration to liberty. I learned to fly on that road, and not only when I was going 75 MPH, trusting in the false security of friendship with the county cops and the entire staff of the Colville National Forest. After an insular life of overprotection and sheltering, I finally found a safe place in the wild country over the hill. I fell out of the nest and into a whirlwind of freedom and grace and learning. My instructors were rough and clumsy. My classmates were unruly and uncouth. And I loved them all. Still do. I am thankful for that summer. For all of the steps leading up to it and away from it. For the memories and the baggage that it gave me. I am thankful for that time machine of a road.

Things About Old Men

I love old men. I just do. And old ladies too. But old men can tell stories like no other. For clarification, by old I mean over 70. They've lived life. No more games, fear of consequences. Just say it like it is, old men. If I could encapsulate every old man I have ever met in a colorful story book, I think that I would be pretty happy with myself.  Theirs are stories worth telling, and worth hearing.

This week I worked with a man named Jim. He's 74, and he's out here, running a skidgeon. Or a squidgeon, if you're Josh, and easily confused by words. For anyone who doesnt know, a skidgeon it a cross between a log skidder and an engine. It can dig and cut and drag and squirt and drench.  It's pretty cool. And when you run it, you get tossed about the cab like a bobble head, breathing dust and smoke like crazy, especially when you have a home-made number like Jim's skidgeon, with an open screen, welded cab. Most skidgeon operators are of a certain age, and deaf. It's that disregard for consequence I think. The nothing-left-to-lose and what's-a-few-bumps-and-aches-and-pains. I think it makes them feel young and useful and alive.

Jim told me a story about his family. He's been married to Betty for 54 years. They had two daughters. One is a roller operator for a road constructions crew and the other he said, got into "drugs and bullshit", and well, it finally killed her. The heavy equipment operator daughter lost all of her fingers and a good chunk of her left hand working at the mill, but she still has her thumb so she manages just fine driving.  The other daughter, Bobbi, got married to a local boy named Blue, who turned out to be no good. 

About 27 or so years ago, Blue took his refer truck out to Kansas, with Bobbi in tow, leaving their two week old baby back in Oregon with family.  They set out to make some money, but after bouncing from state to state fruitlessly, Blue finally saw what he wanted  somewhere in central Kansas. He set Bobbi up driving the refer truck and he hid in the sleeping compartment. He told her to hail another trucker pulling a load of cattle. She talked the other driver into pulling over for a joint, and when he the sucker climbed into the cab of the refer, Blue shot him twice and killed him dead. He bundled up the body in the back of the refer trailer, which he left on the side of e desolate road, then he hooked his cab up to that beef and hauled it back to Oregon and sold it. Bobbi watched in horror  as he cleaned up the blood that streamed down the side of the truck, and as he got a neighbor to dig a put to bury some of the steers that had died in their overlong and miserable transport. Blue told the neighbor to leave the pit for some other trash, and went back to Kansas to get his refer, complete with dead body. He wrapped that body up and threw it in the mass cattle grave and dumped it in, covering it before he had the neighbor come and bury the whole damn pile.

It took two years for Bobbi to tell Jim and Betty what her husband had done, after Blue had run off with a dingbat hairdresser. Jim went straight to a lawyer friend and they got Bobbi's statement all done up. Sure enough, the guy that Blue had killed had a warrant out for HIS arrest for stealing the cattle in the first place, so the only people looking for him were the Kansas police. Bobbie took them out to the property where the body was, where the sheriffs, looking for all of the world like neighborhood rednecks in their cowboy hats (cause that's how they do it out there in Mitchell, Oregon), lured Blue out of that trailer and arrested him right there in front of that dingy hairdresser.  They found the body, sure enough, and when they got Blue down to the police station and upstairs towards the interrogation room, the guy wrestled away from the cops in his handcuffs and jumped out of a second story window. As you can imagine, he didn't get very far, and after a week long trial in Topeka, he was sentenced to 25 years. After that, he sent love letters to his dingbat hairdresser girlfriend who had just inherited a good bunch of money and had moved to Kansas to be close to her jailbird boyfriend. After buttering her up with lots of mushy stuff, he told her to hire somebody to go out to Oregon, get Bobbi hooked on drugs, get her to recant her statement, and then overdose her. Blue told the dingbat to destroy the letters, which had all of these instructions in detail, but she kept them, because they were sweet. The hairdresser paid $3000 to one druggie to go out and take care of business, but, surprisingly, he disappeared with the cash.  Then she gave a convicted felon $1200 to carry out the deed, who took the money and copies of the letters to the police. Something about those letters made it so that Blue managed to stay in prison past his 25 year sentence, but Bobbi didn't make it that long. Her own bad habits got the better of her. Her daughter, Heather, stayed with Jim and Betty until her delinquent father tried to weasel his way into her good graces for help with a parole hearing. Lucky she was smart enough to know better, and she'd read the death sentence letters about her mother. Heather is an ultrasound tech now, with three kids, and another one on the way.

Jim has more stories to tell, about how Betty is as smart and talented as they come, but prefers to sit around on the computer. She had a run in with "female cancer" last year and she's doing ok now, but she'd gotten pretty heavy and one day, Jim took her by the shoulders, looked her in the eye, and said "you know that I love you dearly, but if you don't lose some weight, you'll be in a wheel chair inside of two years." Betty started walking, taking some pills, and lost 120 pounds. He says she could do petty much anything she wants, but she kind of likes to do nothing. After 54 years, if Josh can criticize me with that much affection in his eyes, I'd be ok with it.

Then there was Steve. Another heavy equipment operator of the appropriate age, who had suffered a Aaortic Anuerysm two years before I met him on the Cub Complex in northern California. He had missed the last fire season, he said, because he had been in a coma for about 6 months due to the massive loss of blood and shock to his system. He said it wouldn't have been so bad except the doctors didn't take him seriously on his first two ER visits. They gave him heartburn pills and sent him home. The third time, he said, he had to lapse into a coma right in front of them to get dome attention. Anyone who works in the medical field, and many other people, understand that an unattended, undiagnosed Aaortic aneurysm is ALWAYS fatal. The chance of surviving one that is caught right away is slim. Steve is nothing more than a CAT driving miracle.

One of my favorite old men of all time is Larry. I worked with Larry for the better part of two summers. He taught me how to ride ATVs, mostly by letting me crash, and groom trails, and dig holes, build signs and drive really fast on washboard roads. Larry was adamant about the legality of the "rule of ...", which was some addendum to state speeding laws that said if it was safer to go faster than the speed limit, it was ok. I looked it up, and sure enough, there was some little loophole that could be stretched just far enough to prevent Larry from ever getting a speeding ticket. I could never get over watching Larry run a Stihl 66 for 8 hours a day, with gnarled arthritic Hands and a habitual hunch in his back, which I can imagine once was broad and strong, back when he was a city firefighter for Bend, and the big brick fire station with the brass poles was't a series of hipster bars that couldn't stay in business. I can see him picking up cleverly on the pretty receptionist that passed the station, and marrying her up right quick with her two kids and all, because Joanne was all that and a bag of chips. I hear that Joanne had a bout with cancer last year, and it wasn't looking good. I need to call Larry.

Then there was the old navy vet with MRSA in his lungs that I rode with in the back of the ambulance to Spokane. He taught me how to say "lint of the belly button" in Italian, which had been his mother's favorite obscenity. I wish I could remember that silly phrase. I swore I'd never forget it. 

I honestly look forward to being married to an old man version of Josh someday - a Josh with absolutely nothing to prove to anyone and lots of nose and ear hairs. I look forward to rolling my eyes at his stories and backing him up when our great grandkids respond in disbelief.  I think Josh will be an old man of the best variety. One with all of the best and most amazing stories. Stories that we're living right now. 

 

Things About Fire

I was driving off of the line last night, right through a big burn that some hot shots had just fired off. It was beautiful. More beautiful than Christmas Lights on Snob Hill. More beautiful than Pirates of the Caribbean. More captivating and powerful and terrifying and beautiful than almost anything. All at once. As I drove, I thought to myself, you're the luckiest girl alive. Here you are, broken, weak, quite nearly useless, and you get to see this. To be here. Not only that, you're getting paid. Fire is awesome. You know you're doing the right thing when you can't get over how frakking much you love it.

This is fire. There is no camera or artist that will ever be able to capture the heat that radiates over the road, through the windows of the car, warming the side of your face to remind you, ever-so-gently, that it could melt you into a puddle of nothing. If it decided to. If it ganged up with the wind and felt like it. 

Fire is a destructive force. As with almost all naturally occurring elements, given free reign. It is one of the most amazing and valuable chemical reactions. It has the power to heal as much as destroy. But such power. Two days ago, the only road to where we were working looked like this: 

Today, after a few over zealous hotshots had their way, and we nearly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of heavy equipment, it looks like this:

The fire blew so forcefully and quickly through that the needles on the trees on the east side of the road didn't even have time to burn off. Just blow sideways and fry to a crisp fall orange. Unnatural for an evergreen. This part of the forest isn't healed. If any of the trees survived, they will struggle through decades of fighting with a new ecosystem to continue their growth. In some places, the burn is gentle and friendly, like a mother changing her baby's diaper. Just cleaning things up. It's not pleasant, unless you happen to be a fire junkie (most of us out here are), but it's necessary and good. Kind of like killing all of the spiders in the world.  

I can never get enough. The smell, even when my eyes and throat and lungs are burning - The smell makes me want to strap on a shelter and a hard hat and tromp into the woods just to see it move through the trees. Something so powerful and mysterious and uncontrollable. Watch the silly little people in their yellow and green chase it furiously with their ineffective tools until the fire grows weary of the game and chases them back to the relative safety of their precious lines. Lines that often don't hold, in spite of the countless hours and dollars pumped into them. Whether the lines hold is really more up to the wind, and the sun, and every entity in the woods that isn't wearing green and yellow. All it takes is a singed bunny with a smoking hieny to cross the lines and drag his glowing, emberous cottontail through the crispy green brush. It's happened. But we're here, we draw our lines and chase our smoke and sometimes we get lucky and have the wind and the sun and the rain on our side, when they get tired of the arrogant flame front and his bossiness. And then we win. It's a melancholy win through, killing the passionate beast and trudging through gray sludge as we cool down the messy remains. Every job has its downside. For this one, putting a fire out isn't nearly as fun as outwitting the prolonged chase of it, directing it to where you want it to go in a fashion that will serve the purposes of the forest. Putting the fire out just means moving to the next game of tag, and starting all over. From April Showers til well past the first snowfall of winter, we chase it. Like a virulent  strain of a deadly contagion, we must catch up with it and squelch it. Not much rest. Losing sight of everything else that is important in our lives. Knowing that we can put things off until later. That it's FIRE SEASON and we must go. 

Things That Burn

Trees. Bushes. Grass. Houses. Really crappy old camp trailers that double for houses and definitely shouldn't. Rocks. (they do!). Cars.

Wenatchee is full of smoke. I like the smell of smoke. I don't mind an exciting day on the fire line when the hotshot crews are lighting off big sections of forests and it's really amazing to watch, even when the smoke is swirling around and saturating everything in my rig, including sandwiches, medical gear, fig newtons... I don't mind all that. But when smoke has displaced more than 79% of the air we're breathing for several continuous days, it isn't much fun. I tip my hat to the Wenatcheeans who have maintained a (mostly) positive and grateful attitude in spite of the smoke hanging in the air, even inside of their Target Store. That's kind of a surreal sight. A haze of smoke over the cosmetics. I only know because I had to stop there to get Candy Corn M&Ms. Which, incidentally, are weird, but hard to stop tasting.

I'm really grateful for being able to be here, making money. I'm grateful that no one has taken it upon themselves to get seriously hurt, even though some thug in an engine just promised me he was headed out to try. Some people will do anything for attention. I'm thankful that I get to do something that, while from a socio-economic standpoint, is a ginormous, inefficient waste of resources, is also exciting and means I get to see really cool places like Peavine Canyon, where it's cool to live in a gutted rambler trailer as long as you put Christmas lights on it. Or Squilchuck Road, which I think is pretty much the coolest road name EVER. Or Beehive Reservoir, where I can't tell if the water is really translucent grey or that's just the reflection of the smoke. But it's pretty. And I haven't found any beehives. I'd like to stay here for the rest of the fire A) because I have cell coverage, unlike Peavine, and B) because there is a bathroom, of sorts. Not that I am too good to squat in plain view of the Entire World, as I was pretty much forced to do at least 1000 times in godforsaken McDermitt. I don't have much pride left in these areas, but the toilet paper sure is nice. As far as public peeing goes, I have had to adopt the perspective, in certain settings, that if somebody is looking, it serves them right when they see something I am pretty sure nobody wants to see.

Enough about peeing. Let's talk about reading. Fire time is one of the rare opportunities I get to really read. Usually I am good at burning through some literary junk food, Clive Cussler is a favorite. This summer, however, I decided to lean philosophical and brought along Atlas Shrugged. Three fires in and I am finally 3/4 of the way through it. Far enough in to say: it should be required reading, and has somewhat re-established my wavering views on conservative politics. So read it. Not so you can be a conservative, because it's my personal opinion that a lot of conservatives are kind of silly, but because it makes you THINK. And I think that thinking is something that nobody does enough of anymore, liberal or conservative. My goal is to get this book done on this fire, which will cut into my rambling time - but maybe I will have smarter things to say on the other side. In an attempt to not overload my brain, I am balancing Atlas Shrugged with crappy pop music (only between marathons of The Carpenter) and Candy Corn M&Ms. There's a certain irrational feeling that tells me I am somehow burning calories by reading the 1074 page novel, thereby justifying perpetual tasting. Also, I committed to read a book for a book club that I have loosely associated myself with, but feel I should finish AS before I start Tar Baby. So, you're next, Sue. If I can figure out a way to get my copy delivered to me here. My favorite would be if my super awesome mr mom hubby could come join me on this fire with my new book in hand and we could spend the next ten days making copious amounts of money and hanging out together. Because I miss him. And my crazy kids. But I think the fire would actually charge me if my kids showed up here. Except for Natalee, who would probably have the entire medical unit, supply cache, and inmate kitchen organized in the first hour after she arrived.

Speaking of inmate kitchen - a peculiarity of Washington DNR fires is the kitchens that are run entirely by convicts from State Prisons. Somehow it is socially counterintuitive to feel comfortable having a bunch of felons cooking your food, but they do a pretty good job. My biggest complaint is that these kitchens have always come equipped with tables that you have to STAND at to eat. They hit just above your waist, and truth be told, there nothing more unappetizing than watching 800 dirty firefighters dropping food from their mouths to the ground and table, as somehow the extra inches of travel via fork make perfect aim impossible. I suppose this methodology saves money on food for lost appetites, people too tired to stand and eat, and the rush it makes you feel in to get done and move on. I can't help but feel like its very similar to a soup line of the depression, filthy bums shuffling through, exhausted, defeated, and ultimately insulted by no offer of seating for a decent meal. While we're going about wasting boatloads of money on bottled water and Gatorade that does as much damage as good, maybe we could get some freaking chairs? I dunno. Just a thought.

Things That Make Money

this is what I do in the woods: suspend IV bags from sticks and hang out with silly boys

I am leaving for a forest fire up in Wenatchee. This will probably result in a two week silence from me, but if it works out, I will find ways to speak from fire camp. In the meantime, I will be making enough money to finance my woman-of-leisure lifestyle when I return.