Smoke Season

CHAPTER 6

Twenty minutes later, Mel and the rest of the Carbon Rural team had regrouped down-mountain. There they staged, once again fueled up, yellowed up, and ready with nothing to do but wait.

“All dressed up with nowhere to go,” José noted, settling onto the running board of his truck.

“Like Deklan when he was so sure Hailey Myers was going to ask him to Homecoming,” Ryan threw out, earning himself a smattering of laughs from the younger volunteers and a smack on the arm from Deklan. The rest of the crew found a seat on stumps or in vehicles to await the arrival of the additional muscle they’d requested.

The neighboring agencies made their appearance within minutes. First Eagle Valley, then the sheriff’s department. Oregon Department of Transportation’s larger rigs couldn’t climb higher than the base of Flatiron, but even so, the sound of their additional trucks staging on the Forest Service roads below provided a sense of comfort. Some pulled tractors and bulldozers on flatbeds behind them, and the occasional screech of metal on metal as trailers were unhitched reassured the crew that the collective firefighting community was now behind them.

Everyone wore their Buffs over their mouths and noses now, and most of the men and women looked fidgety as they awaited orders from their respective superiors, packing and repacking their gear. Mel understood: everyone was anxious to either get started fighting this thing or get the hell out of here, one or the other. Her own muscles twitched as she shifted from boot to boot, her very cells seeming to hop around like electrons illustrated in a science movie shown in class. It was a feeling Mel listened to, a gut instinct if you will, a sixth sense. It was time for action.

“What do you think, Chief?” she asked the Eagle Valley officer standing closest. She reported only to her own superior officers, but she valued his opinion. “She look like she’s gonna take a run to you?”

Because it sure did to her.

Before he could answer, Doug White chimed in.

“I don’t think things could get too hairy.” He threw an indulgent look toward the officer as if to say, Leave it to a woman to overreact.

“If the breeze picks up,” Mel pressed, “we could see this fire make a play for the west, northwest.” Even without wind to fuel it, the flickering swath of flame before them hadn’t settled down since dawn.

The potential trajectory was obvious, at least to her, but White only offered a grunt that sounded a lot like a scoff. Mel refused to rise to the bait. If she planned to make fire captain before she turned forty-five, with the raise that would go along with it, she needed to exude confidence. When the Eagle Valley officer nodded, giving her words weight, Mel gave herself a mental pat on the back. Finally, they could see her point. But no: it was just that Chief Hernandez had arrived on scene, stepping up behind her.

“I’m thinking this blaze could run west, boss,” White contributed immediately, as Mel’s face heated with instant and righteous rage.

She couldn’t help it, even knowing fighting her profession’s built-in patriarchy would do her about as much good as Deklan trying to get out of cleanup duty. She knew the drill: no matter how hard she worked at every PT, no matter how well she scored on every training course, and no matter how many Coronas she drank with the guys off shift when she’d rather just be at home, she’d never be part of the boys’ club. She suspected it had already cost her a fast-tracked promotion or two. If she failed to bite her tongue, it could cost her job. And Mel couldn’t afford to lose even a day’s pay.

Hernandez eyed the pine needles blanketing the dry dirt, the dense sage clinging to the slope of the west bank, carpeting Flatiron all the way to the peak, and nodded. “We’ll stay on alert.”

“Should we work to meet the dozers in the meantime?” Mel asked, because that uneasy feeling returned to her gut. “Start cutting containment between here and there?” Wind, ground fuel ... either factor could change everything in an instant, sending their crew scattering, making retreat the only option again. She couldn’t stomach the idea of putting her people at risk because the likes of Assistant Chief Doug White couldn’t read a forest fire.

Hernandez gave her suggestion some thought but ultimately dismissed it. “We’ll wait and see, as I said.”

White did a poor job of trying to hide a condescending smile, and with a sigh, Mel settled uneasily back in to do as told. Prevailing fire-science wisdom did dictate that whenever possible, nature needed to run her course. Still, she wished the fire-science PhDs in Salem could stand in her crew’s boots on the front line a few times.

As she breathed shallowly through the filter of her Buff, her mind flitted to Annie, down in town. Was she struggling for air, too, in the cramped apartment over the Eddy? Her asthma was always worse when the air quality dipped. What if her oximeter numbers made her ineligible for surgery?

Mel made a mental note to ask their pediatric team. It was the never knowing that was the hardest part of parenting Annie. The first time her daughter had experienced what the specialists called a “tet spell,” she’d turned blue within seconds. When your baby couldn’t breathe and you had to reach for the supply of morphine —of all things—that you always had to have on hand, you realized really quick: this was parenting at a whole new, terrifying level.

While other parents worried their kids might not get invited to the latest birthday party, or have trouble learning to read, or miss a field trip due to a head cold, Mel got to worry her daughter’s blood would be suddenly denied oxygen. And a spell could hit anytime, anywhere, out of the clear blue sky, gray sky, and all skies in between.

Even when they had a good day, or a good week, Sam and Mel were left to wonder: How long would it last? Holding one’s breath while your baby lost hers, waiting for the next downturn—which always came—was exhausting as hell.

“Bishop?”

She jumped, startled. Ryan had sidled up next to her, a frown on his soot-dusted face. “How long are we gonna be standing around?”

Mel looked for Hernandez, but he’d already left the scene, then sidelong at White, but he was staring at his phone, so she decided it was up to her to toe the company line. “As long as it takes for this fire to decide what she’s gonna be.” She sighed, wishing she could give him a different answer.

Ryan was a hard worker, eager to follow whatever order came down. She tried to keep the frustration out of her own voice. It wasn’t Ryan’s fault that White had undercut her, or that watching the Flatiron Fire felt a lot like watching Annie reach every infant milestone with bated breath. Would she roll over on time? Would she sit up? Would her breath be suddenly snatched from her lungs? Mel and Sam had scrutinized her for any and every slight change.

True had been nothing short of a lifesaver, Mel remembered as Ryan wandered away, digging a granola bar from his pack. Even if True didn’t feel that same, awful constant tug between family and career that Mel felt every waking moment of her life, some of Mel’s favorite family memories included her—scratch that, were because of her.

True offered a sense of relief that soothed the Bishop household like a balm. Just the presence of another adult hanging out on the deck at Highline, firing up the barbeque on a long weekend, kicking back with Astor, teaching her how to make hemp bracelets strung with scraps of river-polished rock, took the edge off in a way a glass or two of sauv blanc never could. Mel craved those evenings and lazy days when just a bit of the weight of being Astor and Annie’s mom lifted from her shoulders, the heft of it temporarily shifted to True, who bounced Annie on her suntanned thighs and made her giggle.

It was this wish to dilute parenthood that cut deep and ragged, when she let herself dwell on it. How could Mel and Sam look to True to share all this responsibility with them, like Annie was a burden instead of the blessing and miracle everyone always reminded them she was? What no one pointed out: taking care of a child with a life-threatening, lifelong heart defect day in and day out wore a person out . Some days—no, most days—Mel felt fifty instead of thirty-eight, and some of those days, and not even the hardest ones, a little voice in her head whispered, It’s not fair. On the hardest ones, the ones when they had to call 911, when even the morphine and beta-blockers couldn’t touch the tet spells, Mel wondered ... if God only gave people what they could handle, how had a deity who was supposed to be so damned perfect made such a serious fucking mistake?

Mel sighed and stood, the heat of her breath moistening her Buff. The flames licking at the ground cover before her still seemed docile enough, so why was she still feeling on edge? Was White right? Was she worried about nothing, or was the fire going to take a run?

She scanned the camp of crew members for Lewis again, spotting him refilling a collection of five-gallon Gatorade water dispensers. She walked over to make her case a second time.

“The crew’s getting restless,” she noted, then corrected herself, deciding to own it. “ I’m getting restless. Something about this fire doesn’t sit right with me.”

Lewis hefted the last empty water dispenser toward the tap. “Then let’s go with your gut. The wind direction has been nagging at you ever since we staged here.”

Was this Lewis’s way of acknowledging he knew it was her observation of the fire’s behavior that had been snatched up and recycled by White? If so, it cost him nothing. No man working his way up the fire-station ladder had to worry as much as she did about stepping a toe out of line. But still, the surprise must have shown on her face. One of the first things you learned working for Uncle Sam was that you didn’t shake rank, and Lewis was a by-the-book kind of guy.

“Just tell White it was your idea,” she muttered.

Lew laughed but obeyed, and a minute later, Mel heard that self-important voice cut across the assemblage.

“New orders!”

Deklan and Ryan lifted their heads with interest, while others wandered toward White to hear the latest, including officers from additional stations. As first on scene, Carbon Rural retained seniority, at least for now. “While we wait to see what nature has in store for us,” White bellowed, “we can be proactive. Starting with cutting some firebreaks, to meet the sheriff’s department’s bulldozer line between the base of Flatiron and town.”

He nodded to Lew, who had the grace not to look Mel in the eye. She focused on Janet instead, who gave her a wink before waving her over and spreading out their Forest Service map on the hood of a water-tank truck.

“See here?” Janet said. “We can use FS 7312 as a starting point, curving the firebreak with the grain of the mountain.”

Mel traced the route on the map with one finger, following the almost delicate topographical contours of the elevation lines. “If we get all our ground crews on it, we can have Flatiron encircled by midafternoon, evening at the latest.”

Ryan tugged at his Buff, already dusted with the ash that fell from the sky to accumulate on their helmets and hats. “Ha, like a moat,” he noted, leaning over Janet’s shoulder, his voice muffled under the thin cotton.

Mel clapped a hand onto his shoulder, brushing off a layer of soot. “ Exactly like a moat.”

Each ranking officer dispersed to convey the new order to their respective teams, Mel following suit. Digging containment lines was grueling work, but at least now she could finally grant her crew their wish for something more to do than spend the night in the woods in their sleeping bags. She saw Deklan first and, noting that all his gear looked in order for a change, told him, “Go get first pick of the Pulaskis, kid.”

It was gratifying to see his eyes light up. Over by the stack of gear off-loaded by another rookie, he tested the sharpness of the axe and adze heads of each Pulaski with a hesitant fingertip, weighing each heavy fire-line-breaking tool in his hand, deciding which one to wield. Soon enough, the sweat of manual labor would replace the pinch of pink excitement in his cheeks, but in this moment, his boyish optimism had her imagining Sam at that age, headed off to boot camp with only false bravado for company, and her heart constricted.