Beautiful Burn

  "Aye, Chief," Tyler said, shooing me into the hall.

  "The black?" I whispered from the side of my mouth.

  "The area that's already been burned to a crisp," Tyler said, mimicking me.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief. "That was more difficult than I imagined."

  "He's a good guy. He gets shit done, makes sure we have all the equipment we need, even when the brass don't always think we need it."

  "Brass?"

  "Government higher-ups. It's a budgeting thing. Constant fight. Not why you're here. Let's go meet some of the guys."

  Tyler led me to the truck bay where the rest of his crew was hard at work. Two of them had the hood up on one of the trucks, two were sweeping and mopping the concrete floor, and a few more were in the corner with the equipment.

  "What are those?" I asked, pointing to the axe/hammer hybrids hanging from the wall.

  "Oh, those are pulaskis. Those," he said, pointing to a shovel-like tool, "are rhinos. We make those here."

  "You make those?"

  "Yeah, with the welder, a saw, a sander, and a few other tools. Whatever we can find, really. We have to get creative sometimes."

  I pulled out my camera, took a few shots of the tools, and then aimed at the crewmembers going about their day. Tyler approached the men tinkering under the hood of a vehicle that looked like an oversized ambulance.

  "This is a crew bus," Tyler said.

  "When it runs," one of the men said.

  "The sign outside says Interagency, and you have Interagency equipment here, but also engines, and this is the city fire department?" I asked, confused.

  Tyler shrugged. "Double duty. Just makes things easier, especially since a lot of us do both urban and wildland. It's closer to town, too, during off-season."

  I nodded, pulling out my notepad and pen.

  "This," Tyler said, pointing to a man taller than him, but not as thick, "is Smitty." The short but solid hotshot wore glasses, and was a sophisticated kind of beautiful, with olive skin and a grease smear on his cheek.

  They both wiped their hands on their pants and greeted me.

  "Lyle Smith," Smitty said, shaking my hand.

  Tyler pointed to the other one. "This is Taco."

  "Taco?" I asked. His red hair and freckled skin gave me no hint of a reason for the nickname.

  "Clinton Tucker. My son is two. When he says our last name, it sounds like taco. Unfortunately, it stuck, but it's not the worst nickname around here."

  "Does everyone have one? A nickname?" I asked.

  Tyler shrugged. "Pretty much."

  "What's yours?"

  Smitty chuckled. "He has one, but no one is brave enough to say it to his face."

  "You'll have to let me in on that," I said with a smirk.

  "No," Tyler said. "He won't."

  I jotted down their names. "Is it hard for you, Taco? Being away from your son for days or weeks at a time?"

  "I guess. We don't really know another way. It's what I do," Taco said, wiping his hands with a rag. "During fire season, it's months at a time."

  "How long have you been a hotshot?"

  "This is my fourth season in Colorado."

  I nodded and let them get back to their jobs, then stood in the corner to snap a few candids of them working.

  "Over there is Watts ... Randon Watson," Tyler said, pausing while Watts waved with one hand, holding a mop in the other. "And that is our squad boss, Jubal Hill. Don't let the silver hair throw you. He's an animal."

  "Jubal?" I asked. "What's his real name?"

  Jubal dropped the broom and walked over, his light hair setting off his bronze skin and baby-blue eyes. He held out his hand. "Jubal Lee Hill. Nice to meet you."

  "Jubilee," I repeated.

  He looked down and laughed once. "It's just Jubal. No nickname needed."

  "Nice to meet you," I said. When he walked away, I documented him like I was paparazzi. He needed to be in a calendar, or working for Vogue in New York and wearing designer glasses and a suit, not pushing a broom in a garage.

  "It's okay," Tyler said. "Every female who comes through here has a crush on Jubal."

  "He doesn't act like it," I said.

  "That's because he doesn't know it."

  "Right."

  "Seriously. He's loved the same woman his entire life. Since, like, the first grade or something. They got married right after high school, and ... you should see them. They're gross."

  "Gross?"

  "Like newlyweds. They've been married thirty years."

  "That's gross?"

  "No," Tyler said. "We just like to give 'em hell. I bet my parents would still be like that, too. It's kind of cool to see. The rest of them are out."

  "How many are on your crew? And what do you mean by out? Hurt? Vacation? Out sick?"

  Tyler chuckled. "Crews are typically twenty men and women."

  "Women?"

  "Not very many, but the toughest hotshots I know are women."

  I smiled, letting my camera hang from the strap around my neck. "So where are the rest?"

  Tyler led me to a group photo in a frame. "Like I said, in off-season, when we're not fighting fires, we're sometimes assigned other jobs like search and rescue or disaster response assistance. We'll also work to meet resource goals on our home units. Some guys have other part-time jobs or just take unemployment and ski or travel or spend time with family." He pointed to the faces I didn't recognize. "Fish, the assistant superintendent. Sage, Bucky, and Slick are squad bosses like Jubal. Sugar. Cat. Scooter. Baggins. Jew. Sancho. Runt. Puddin'. Pup."

  I arched an eyebrow.

  "I'll get you a list of full names later."

  "Real names, please. What are resource goals?"

  "Thinning, prescribed fire implementation, habitat improvement, trail construction projects ... stuff like that. Sometimes we go to the schools and do ... you know ... Smokey Bear stuff."

  "Who has to dress up?" I asked.

  Tyler made a face. "That'd be me."

  I snickered. "Thanks for that," I said, scribbling on my notepad. "I'd like to get a picture of you in the suit at some point." He frowned, and I nudged him. "You're a peach for showing me around and an angel for taking me to see the superintendent."

  "A peach?"

  "So, how many hours do you work on average?"

  Tyler crossed his arms. "We're doing this now?"

  I looked up at him from my notepad. "Yeah?"

  "It depends on if it's fire season or downtime. If we're fighting a fire, we just sleep, eat, and work. We can work up to eighteen-hour days, but working thirty-two hours a stretch isn't uncommon. Up to fourteen-day stretches."

  "Holy shit," I said under my breath.

  "Used to be twenty-one. Then we get our required days off--a forty-eight hour R & R--and then we're back out. We travel all over ... wherever they need us. Even Alaska, Canada, and Mexico."

  "How long have you been doing this?"

  "I'm a peach? Really?" he said, amused.

  "Shut up and answer."

  "I can't shut up and answer..." He trailed off, recoiling from my glare. "We're on our third season. We were ground crew before that."

  "We?" I said, looking up at him again.

  "Taylor and me."

  "Are you a package deal?"

  "Basically," he answered matter-of-factly, and I imagined him doing the same in interviews as well.

  I scribbled a few sentences, and then touched the pen to my lip. "I don't see a lot of older guys on your crew. Why is that?"

  "You won't see many at all. Wildfire fighting is brutal. If you do it more than five or six seasons, you start seeing some lingering physical issues. The superintendent goes on site, but he's basically restricted to a desk because of his back, knee, and shoulder surgeries."

  "Jesus," I murmured.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. You've mentioned something about the community. What else do you guys do?"

  "You mean community ou
treach? During downtime we have AM and PM physical training built in to the schedule, patrolling, drills, chainsaw work, fence building, signage..."

  I jotted down his answers while he spoke, hoping Jojo could somehow produce a story from my random scribbles.

  "Do you get time off?" I asked.

  "Not during fire season. I took today off to get some shit done."

  "Do you need to..." I said, gesturing to the door.

  "What? No, no, I'm good."

  "You don't want to leave me alone with these guys, do you?"

  "No, not really."

  "What will you do when you leave until you come back? What does a hotshot do on his day off?"

  Tyler's brows pulled in, and he stared at me, confused. "What do you mean?"

  "You're leaving, right? You don't live here, do you?"

  "No, I'm not leaving."

  "So you do live here?"

  "No, I have an apartment with my brother here in Estes Park. We typically only stay at the station when we're on shift, but yeah ... you're here, so I'm here. I cleared you with the superintendent, so you're my responsibility."

  I wrinkled my nose at the thought.

  "If the guys get called out, your plan is to ride along, right?"

  "Well ... yeah."

  "Then I'm staying. They'll be busy. They won't have time to babysit you."

  "I went to kindergarten. I can follow directions."

  "I'm not arguing with you. This is how it's going to be."

  "What about when you're on shift?"

  "Same thing."

  "Oh, so they won't have time to babysit me, but you will?"

  "Jojo wanted you to follow us around, right? This is how it's done when we have journalists shadow. Someone has to make sure you don't get hurt."

  "You can't be serious. I'm assigned to you, and you're assigned to me? I was just beginning to feel cool."

  "I'm not leaving you alone. It's dangerous, Ellie."

  "You're just precious."

  Tyler frowned. "I'm rethinking this."

  I suddenly felt heavy, and then panicked as bitter bile rose in my throat.

  "I was just kidding. Are you all right? You look a little green," Tyler said.

  "I'm nauseous all of a sudden."

  "Bathroom's down the hall, second door on the right."

  My stomach lurched, and I gagged, covering my mouth. I didn't wait for it to happen again, sprinting to the bathroom just in time. Just as I bent over the toilet, I thought about my camera being dunked in toilet water and covered in vomit, but it was hovering over my right ear, held by the hotshot I loved to hate.

  "Why am I so stupid?" I moaned, my voice echoing off the porcelain.

  Tyler was holding my camera with one hand, my hair in the other.

  "Is she okay?" one of the guys asked from the hall.

  "She's fine, Smitty. She's caught that stomach bug going around," Tyler said.

  "What a bad ass," Smitty said. "I was in bed for two days with that shit."

  I hurled again. Both men made the same sound, equally surprised and disgusted.

  "I'm super excited to have an audience for this on my first day," I said.

  "Sorry," Smitty said. "Feel better, Ellie."

  "Not humiliating at all," I said, puking again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  "Whoa," I said, taking a step back. I'd been on several house fires and car fires, and even a few grass fires my first week, but Tyler was right. Wildland fires were different.

  Tyler kept eyes on everything around him while guiding me to a safer area. I was bundled in a base layer, thermal, fleece pullover, with oversized flame-retardant jacket and pants for a top layer, making it more than difficult for him to keep a grip on my arm. He was in a fire-resistant shirt and tan cargo pants, with maybe thermals underneath, wearing goggles, a gear bag, and a hardhat.

  A line of Alpine hotshots--most of whom I'd just met two days before at the fire camp, but who Tyler loved, including his brother--in bright yellow jackets and blue hard hats were digging a line at the bottom of the hill. A symphony of their pulaskis and rhinos clanging against roots and branches bit through the constant drone of radio communication.

  Tyler had brought me as close as he could, trying to help his crew while keeping an eye on me. We'd camped for two nights, and excluding any embers jumping the fire line, he predicted we would be packing up by nightfall. No one was more surprised than me that I wasn't looking forward to it.

  There were no engines with hoses or pumper trucks full of water. The hotshots fought fires with drip torches, shovels, and chain saws, digging trenches to pull everything out of the ground that could fuel the fire.

  I wasn't scared of heights, but a strange combination of fear and exhilaration came over me as I looked down at the valley below. The wind was blowing chunks of my hair into my face, and I realized it was also blowing the fire toward the Alpine crew. Time slowed down as I stared at Tyler. We were stuck in a moment I'd never been in before, not skiing a summit, not on a wave runner off the beaches of Thailand, not hiking Machu Picchu. We were on top of the world, the only force between the fire and the houses I could see from the mountain we were standing on. Holding my camera, freezing, and a mile from flames that could burn me alive, I'd finally found what I didn't know I was looking for.

  "Back up, sweetheart," Tyler said, reaching across my chest like my mother used to do when she'd slow down the car too fast.

  I was nearly hanging over his arm, leaning forward, hungry to be closer, snapping shot after shot, devouring the adrenaline as fast as my body could produce it. It was better than any high I'd ever had.

  The flames made a low roaring sound as they crawled over the dry brush and leafless trees like a line of soldiers pushing forward without fear. The walk to the fire site was a difficult trek. We'd driven almost two hours to the fire camp, and then hiked for nearly an hour through ice and snow, climbing steep inclines and through the aspens. My feet and face were numb before I even smelled smoke, but I'd forgotten about the cold hours ago, looking through the lens of my camera.

  Taco ran up the hill, out of breath and drenched in sweat and dirt, stopping in front of Jubal to report. "Fuel break completed on the eastern edge."

  Smitty was behind him, panting and holding a drip torch in one hand, his pulaski in the other. Watts was holding a chain saw, his shoulders sagging. They looked equally exhausted and content, every one of them in their element and ready for their next order.

  Jubal slapped him on the shoulder. "Good work."

  Tyler was supposed to have the day off, but that didn't stop him from helping his team dig a two-foot-thick fire line. I watched him cut at the ground with the pulaski like it was nothing, directing the men around him as if a wildfire wasn't burning the world less than a mile away.

  Clicking through previous pictures, I noticed they were Tyler-heavy, but that didn't stop me from zooming the lens and snapping another close-up of his sweaty, sooty profile against the setting sun. He was sort of beautiful--from every angle--and that made it hard for me to leave him out of a shot. The green pines stood waiting to be saved, and with the cool gray color of the smoldering smoke and the warm oranges of the fire on the horizon, tragedy made a beautiful backdrop.

  "Helo's coming in!" Jubal yelled, holding the radio to his ear. "Wind turned!"

  I looked to Tyler, confused. "There's no wind."

  "Up here there's not. A fire makes its own weather. Farther out, we might not have wind at all, but where the fire's burning, it's sucking oxygen and can create thirty or forty mile per hour winds."

  More hotshots whom I hadn't yet met had been called in. With chain saws in hand, a small group called sawyers was limbing trees to cut gaps in the canopy above, keeping the fire from hopping from one tree to another. Each sawyer had a partner called a swamper who gathered the cut limbs and bushes and threw them on the other side of the fire line.

  The rest of the crew--the diggers--would work in a line, hacking away at t
he forest floor, creating a three-foot trench--a fire break down the middle of the saw line. The Alpine crew had been split into two groups of ten--sawyers, swampers, and diggers, and then some on lookout, one checking the weather, and the others down the way igniting a back burn. Even separated, they worked together seamlessly, half the time not saying a word. Jubal was communicating with the superintendent, and then barking those orders at the hotshots while elbow-deep in the dirt himself. They all worked for hours to create what they called fuel breaks, cutting and burning away any vegetation, covering miles bent over digging, sawing, all in an effort to starve the flames to death.

  A distant thud thud thud drew closer, and soon a helicopter was zooming overhead. Just beyond a pillar of smoke, the helo released its load, and a purplish-red powder rained down.

  "That's red slurry--a fire retardant," Tyler explained.

  "It stops the fire?"

  "Slows it down. Buys us more time to dig."

  I swallowed, and Tyler touched my cheek with his gloved hand. "We're okay."

  I nodded quickly, terrified and excited at the same time.

  The hotshots barely took a second to notice the dump of slurry, and then continued hacking at the ground. I watched in awe, exhausted from just the hike to the fire site and the cold.

  Tyler breathed out a laugh, and I turned to see him staring at me the way I looked at the fire. He didn't look away; instead, one side of his mouth curled up. Even through the sweat and ash, his dimple appeared. In that moment, Tyler Maddox and his fires filled a hole in my soul I hadn't known existed.

  They worked past dark, the fire reduced to a galaxy of glowing orange embers along the hillside.

  "All right," Chief said to Jubal over the radio. "Time to call in the ground crew."

  "What does that mean?" I asked Tyler.

  He smiled. "The ground crew will mop up after us. They'll pull together piles in the black and burn them out until the fire is cold. We're done unless embers jump the fire line."

  The hotshots were already packing it in, making the long haul back to the vehicles. I walked with my camera in hand, making it easier to document the return hike of exhausted, ash-covered men trudging through the forest without a single person to thank them for saving countless miles of trees and homes. The public would never know the reality of what had happened here, or how hard the hotshots had worked to make sure no one would. The only evidence was the scorched earth we'd left behind.

  A small white flake touched the end of my nose, and I looked up, seeing thousands more falling to the earth. The snow seemed to give the crew a second wind, and they began chatting about the day and what they might do with the rest of their weekend.