Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne

Service fire, a Cat, not people, would be swamping, they declare. We walk by the glimmer of our headlamps, searching for evidence of the old road or new routes. Then we sight the fire, a huge orange glow against the Canyon.

      Dana shouts a greeting, and Tim and I loudly congratulate ourselves on getting the pumper in to the fire. Never has anyone in the Park driven so far in to a fire. Never, the Angeleno confides, has he been to a Forest Service fire to which he has had to walk so long.

      The problem is not the springs but the fact that they cross fireroads, which means that they intersect matters of policy. The fireroads are opportunistic, and often arbitrary. The Forest Service recognizes the character of the Plateau and constructs its roads along ridgetops, but the Park puts them wherever it can, mostly through or across ravines. Many Park “fireroads” are nothing more than easy routes through the woods during the dry season; some simply traverse meadows; nowhere are there provisions for drainage. But all the roads emanate from the crest line, and since the early-season fires gather at the points, which dry sooner than the interior, access by road demands that the higher, wetter elevations be breached first. The Plateau’s geography of water will not be joined easily to the Rim’s geography of fire. Where they intersect, there are bogs.

      The fireroads are means that are no longer reconciled with ends. What may be opportune at one time, when the surface is dry, can become a bog at another. The fireroads cannot be repaired and they cannot be traversed with vehicles adequate to their state of disrepair and they must be crossed, as often as not, in defiance of the curious hydrology of the Plateau. Yet crossed they must be, by administrative decree. The Park will neither repair the roads nor close them. The reason the fireroads were constructed—access to fire—is no longer compelling to the Park, yet the Park does not want to give up access to the backcountry entirely. It wants the means, though it cannot decide to what ends they should be put.

      Joe and I propose to try a double-winch arrangement, and Wil recommends that if that fails, we use the white powerwagon as a fixed point from which to attach a snatch block. The two SWFFs nod indifferently. Whatever happens we will be late for dinner.

      MODEL 22

      The primary fireroads are open, and we plan to spend the day in the Area, reconditioning tools and vehicles. Joe, our self-appointed Head Trucker, ponders the Slip-on Question.

      The Park has acquired a set of Forest Service model 20 slip-on units, with two-hundred-gallon tanks and pumps positioned in a special cage to the rear of the truck. Unfortunately, the Park has not also acquired a set of Forest Service trucks to carry the slip-ons, and some adjustments to ours will be necessary, for the model 20s take up nearly the entire truck bed, add 420 pounds additional weight, and on decaying fireroads will cause the trucks to be torqued and battered in ways their designers could never have imagined. The new slip-ons are the beginning of the end for our old powerwagons. (The white powerwagon holds on grimly—Joe swears that he could drive it through Lava Rapids if the need arose—but its transmission failed when rookie Draper popped the clutch as the truck rolled backward down E-1A, and the rest of the vehicle tumbled into junk soon afterward.) The immediate conundrum is how to mount the model 20s to our old trucks, but the larger issue is how we get to fires at all—and whether the Park really wants us to get there.

      Joe surveys our fleet—two Dodge powerwagons and a Three-quarter-Ton Chevy pickup. Nothing is left of the water truck—a 1943 war-surplus Chevy tanker—except the unbaffled one-thousand-gallon tank which has to be lifted onto the big dump with a backhoe and lashed down with heavy chains. The old truck blew a rod as Dana was whining down Lindbergh Hill. Dana later showed the truck to the Park mechanic, pointing out where the truck had a “problem.” Staring at a hole the size of a softball in the engine block, Daddy Pat admitted through his half-chewed cigar that “that’s a pretty good sign somethin’s wrong.”

      Each pumper (or “ground tanker,” according to Forest Service nomenclature, or “engine,” to follow later National Interagency Incident Management System terminology) is a rolling fire cache. A pumper offers access, via fireroads; water, from a two-hundred-gallon tank, a pump, assorted hoses, and hydraulic fittings; handtools and accessories, from flagging tape to batteries to first aid; rations, drinking water, sleeping bags; chain saws, with extra chain oil, saw mix, chains, wedges, and sledge; and, of course, gear for vehicle repair and extrication. On the pumpers we hang our firepacks, and by means of pumpers we go for jobs out of the Area, at least two crewmen to a vehicle. Whatever else they are used for, the pumpers are fire vehicles first, and whatever jobs we may be assigned, fire has primacy. We take our firepacks everywhere; we gas and retool the pumpers nightly. And every week or so we inspect in detail those that are still functioning. The new slip-ons, and their advent at the opening of fire season, have complicated that chore.

      The Head Trucker puzzles over the model 20s, while the fire crew—those working on the vehicles and those in the cache—drift off singly and in pairs for cups of coffee. There are serious design problems embedded in the Slip-on Question: there is no place to attach our saw racks, tools, or firepacks; there is nowhere to hang a spare tire; there is no way to enter the protective cage over the engine to work a starter rope. Joe feels a momentary thrill when he discovers that the pump is designed for an electric starter, yet the euphoria fades as he realizes that to install a cord will require that we drill a hole through the bed of a General Services Administration vehicle. GSA will not allow any holes, and the Park mechanic will not assist us with the wiring without a hole. Hot coffee in hand, Tom asks the Head Trucker how he proposes to stabilize the slip-on unit without drilling holes for machine bolts. Joe sighs and walks to the Fire Pit. Time for a phone call to GSA.

      The General Services Administration is a bureaucracy that has moved beyond Kafka’s nightmares. Joe knows what the response will be, but the query is for show, not substance. GSA will tell him not how to do something, only that he is not allowed to do what he needs to do. The agency is sublimely indifferent to any nuance of North Rim life and geography. It will not supply a vehicle adequate to the loads and wear to which it will be subjected; will not allow the Park mechanic to make repairs (that means repairs cannot be made because we are eighty-five miles and a tow truck away from the nearest authorized garage); will not even recognize that, on primitive fireroads, tires wear by spalling and gouging, not by a uniform attrition of tread, millimeter by millimeter. Joe is not even sure he wants to argue for a new vehicle. Last season (“only that long ago?”) Harding flew to the South Rim and hitched a ride to the GSA motor pool at Holbrook and picked up a badly needed replacement truck. On the return trip he stopped for lunch at Jacob Lake, only to have the transmission freeze up. GSA towed the truck away, and we arranged to send Harding back for a second vehicle. This time he got no more than fifty miles out of Holbrook before he blew a rod; GSA had neglected to put oil in the engine block. Eventually we got from the Navajo Reservation a recycled pickup that died before the season ended. The phone rings, but Joe already knows what the reply will be. GSA will deny authorization for any modification in the vehicle. Joe calls the Park Service garage on the South Rim. Do not anger GSA, he is told; do not reinstate the old slip-ons; do not install the new slip-ons without securing them; do not call and complain anymore.

      The crew returns. Joe watches them pass by the door of the Pit. The solution to the Slip-on Question ultimately resides with the Park, not with GSA. The problem is that we need water to fight fire. Water requires slip-on units because there are no sources of surface water on the North Rim. The slip-ons require special vehicles. The vehicles demand at least a minimal road system to be effective. Fireroads—their presence and maintenance—require a clear policy on fire. The Park will not solve the Slip-on Question because it will not address the fireroad question. “What do we do?” Tom asks.

      “Drill the holes,” says the Head Trucker. No one else, he reasons, will ever want or get stuck with these vehicles, so we might as well treat them as permanent acquisitions. Attaching the two slip-ons should occupy the crew for the remainder of the day. Joe walks to the fire cache. The first order of business will be to hoist the slip-ons with a block and tackle attached to the roof joists.

      Ralph suggests that the new slip-on should be known as model 22.

      THE TANK

      The struggle to get to fires and to get water on fires is endless.

      The