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.