Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne

      

       FIRE ON THE RIM

      ALSO BY STEPHEN PYNE

       Grove Karl Gilbert

       Dutton’s Point

       Introduction to Wildland Fire

      Cycle of Fire

       World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth

       Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire

       Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia

       The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica

       FIRE ON THE RIM

      A Firefighter’s Season at the Grand Canyon

      Stephen J. Pyne

      With a New Preface by the Author

      University of Washington Press

      Seattle and London

      Copyright © 1989 by Stephen J. Pyne

      “Preface to the 1995 Edition” copyright © 1995 by Stephen J. Pyne

      University of Washington Press paperback edition first published in 1995

      Printed in the United States of America

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Pyne, Stephen J., 1949-

      Fire on the rim : a firefighter’s season at the Grand Canyon / Stephen J. Pyne

      p. cm.

      ISBN 0-295-97483-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      1. Wildfires—Arizona—Grand Canyon National Park—Prevention and control. 2. Wildfire fighters—Arizona—Grand Canyon National Park. 3. Pyne, Stephen J., 1949- . I. Title.

      [SD421.P93 1995] 95-4726

      363.37’9—dc20 CIP

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

      To Sonja,

      who shared most of it.

      and the memory of Joseph R. Pyne,

      who made it possible.

      Contents

       Preface to the 1995 Edition: Reburn

       Preface to the Original Edition: Fire Call

       Part One: EOD

       Part Two: TOURS OF DUTY

       1/ The Area

       2/ Tipover

       3/ Powell Plateau

       4/ Saddle Mountain

       5/ The Dragon

       6/ The Basin

       7/ The Monument

       8/ Point Sublime

       9/ Walhalla

       Part Three: COB

       Afterword: Final Report

       Glossary

      PREFACE TO THE 1995 EDITION

      Reburn

      FIRE ON THE RIM was a book I wanted to write for a long time but didn’t know how and to some extent didn’t know why. There were really three problems, related of course, but also autonomous.

      The first was technical. How do you make a profoundly seasonal experience into a coherent narrative? Fire season has a beginning, middle, and end, and so do fire careers, but how to reconcile an annual cycle with a secular one baffled me for many years. The typical solution is to imitate a diary and highlight the bigger events of the chronology or to collapse the whole into a single, composite year. Neither, I decided, was good enough, but in pursuit of an alternative I chased a lot of waterdogs. Eventually I hammered out a format around the idea of a “great season,” framed by initiating and valedictory years, that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. That decision led to the use of the historical present, the creation of composite events, and inevitable distortions as to who did what when. Not least it committed me to a narrative persona more or less fixed at a particular, and timeless, stage in his career. Accordingly I even found it necessary to invent one character to convey certain of my experiences without forcing the narrator to claim them. Still, all this gave coherence to the prose.

      The second, more daunting problem was a coherence of purpose. Was this a collection of beer-fogged anecdotes, or did the experience, and through it, fire, acquire a larger significance? If so then the story needed the discipline of literature (with a small “1”). It needed, at its core, some moral drama.

      As I read it, the literature of fire falls into three genres, a kind of conceptual fire triangle. One exploits fire as a narrative driver. The chronicle of a fire carries the other plots along with it, and fire illuminates, literally and symbolically, that larger narrative. Probably the classic expression is George Stewart’s novel, Fire. That book captured most of the possibilities of fire as narrative, which is why, despite its technological anachronisms, the book continues to find an audience. The second genre hovers over the central existential drama of firefighting, the tragedy of the burned-over crew. Here is the trying fire, the fire of judgment, the fire that sorts out the living from the dead. It is the prospect of death by fire that, in practice, moves the experience of firefighting beyond the domain of outdoor recreation and that, in principle, elevates its literature beyond juvenile sports stories. But until Norman Maclean wrote Young Men and Fire the genre had few serious practitioners. Possibly Maclean has exhausted the literary prospects. It is difficult to imagine anyone revisting the subject without quoting his vision if not his words.

      That leaves the third genre, firefighting as a rite of passage, fire season as a coming-of-age story. This is, by far, the most common experience of wildland firefighting, linked as it is to the seasonal employment of young people. Fire season becomes a time in one’s life, the passage from adolescence to adulthood. What added rebars to the narrative concrete, however, is the fact that the year after I began at the North Rim the National Park Service changed