The End of the Season

Hey all, sorry about no posts for a while. Fire season 2011 is hanging on till the bitter end. On October 1st we had a fire near Unionville, just south of Helena. I was the incident commander, and I was not expecting to fight fire on October 1st. Okay, we think, now we're done right? Incorrect. We met October 3rd fighting a fire east of Montana City called the Haystack Fire. We wound up spending the night on this one. Normally, this would have been fun. The thirty mile-an-hour winds made it a little difficult to sleep. 

Lately we have been tidying up around the station: taking gear off engines, draining water from the tanks, winterizing, completing paperwork for our seasonals, etc.

I feel sort of ambivalent this time of year. On the one hand, this has been a pretty busy season for us. We had local fires in March, went to Colorado in April, conducted training throughout May and June, went to Georgia and Florida in June/July, and had a more fires around here into October. I am tired of fire for a little while.

On the other hand, the summer is a very fun time. All our seasonal firefighters are working and in general we have more fun than people should be allowed to have. So, while the pace slows up in the fall and winter, it gets a little lonely staring at my counterpart Andy all day. Plus, we lose people every year to new jobs, full time work and such. You miss these people a lot. We share a lot of laughs, and we have bonds formed by mutual participation in shitty work. An example: My buddy Chris and I spent a few days of our roll to Colorado digging out stumps that had burned deep into the ground. The fire just keeps smoldering away at the root systems and every root has to be followed, excavated, and extinguished. Every wildland firefighter has done this, and it sucks.

                     Here is Chris in one of our excavations.

Yep, having a ton of fun.

At the end of this shift we hiked up to the top of the hill and regrouped before hiking out to the rigs. While we sat around munching on the last bits of our lunch, which that day had bagels and cream cheese, someone had the great idea to see how much cream cheese a person could eat. Apparently, I was the "person". So, as firefighters are wont to do, we haggled for a while and settled on an agreement. I would fill my mouth with as many packages of cream cheese as I could, and would then have 60 seconds to swallow it without hurling cream cheese all over the mountain. I agreed to a price of $45 for my fee and began taking on cream cheese. Once my mouth was full they made me put in about two more packets worth, and the clock began ticking. And Steve began gagging. Have you ever tried to swallow cream cheese? Don't. Well, I managed to overcome millenia of deeply ingrained biological reflexes and I won the bet. $45 later, and that much closer to an early heart attack, we hiked back to the trucks. You see, its these kinds of impulsive things that make digging stumps fun. If we didn't do this we would go crazy.

Here are a few pics I took in 2007. They are from the McKnight Fire near Dillon, MT. They have no relevance to the current article, but they are cool pictures. Plus, its my blog.

 

Traveling to the Fire in Georgia, Dodging Tornados in Iowa.

On June 19 of this year (Father’s Day) we received an order for five engines to drive to Georgia to fight fire in the Okefenokee Swamp. The dads among us kissed our wives and kids goodbye, and we all headed to the southeast. There were 17 people, 5 engines, and 1 support truck. We made it from Helena to Rapid City the first night. Our plan was to spend the next night in Kansas City. First, we had to make it through Iowa; the Hawkeye State, the state in which I was born and raised. You can imagine my excitement at the prospect of showing off my home state to our crew of Montanans. Things were going great; corn, rolling hills, rivers, corn. Then we hit the little town of Shelby. Its ok, I didn’t know there was a Shelby either. Our radios began to go crazy with emergency broadcast service tornado warnings and other sorts of doom and gloom. It made sense; the sky was becoming darker by the minute. We stopped for gas and noticed what I like to call a “roach motel”. There was also a Dairy Queen and a local restaurant nearby.

The leader of our group ran over to make arrangements with the motel. They had something like six rooms available, so that was going to make for an interesting night of bonding for some of us. We drove over to the motel just as the front was approaching. Those of you who have experienced severe thunderstorms in the Midwest know that they are spectacular. There were flashes of lightning, the wind was ripping, and you could see the edge of the storm very distinctly, roiling about 500 feet above us. Some of us were doing fine, snapping pictures and shooting video. Others were making quick mental calculations as to how they could fit three people in one bathtub and survive on the second story of an old motel.

While some individuals were getting footage, the old lady running the joint says, “What are you guys doing out there?” One of our crew, who shall remain nameless, said, “Well, what are we supposed to do?” “Well I wouldn’t be standing out in the yard like a dumb ass.” An old lady called a strapping, professional Montana firefighter a dumb ass. As we were snickering at this exchange, her statement was somehow translated to: “Take shelter NOW! The tornado is here. You are going to die!” So we did what anyone would do. We ran. Fast.

Ever seen a group of dumb-assed firefighters trying to look cool and nonchalant while running from a tornado? Well, I have. You could even say I lived it. Not my proudest day on the job. As we neared shelter we began to realize that she did in fact say “dumb ass”, and not, “run for your lives”.

We went back to looking cool and nonchalant.

Next time we will continue the journey south toward Georgia, and talk about the importance of having safe-words.