Fighting the dragons of summer
Cheshire man's book gets to the souls of the heroes who fight our wildland fires
THE WILDFIRE SMOKE you may have seen and smelled in Oregon lately is no illusion. As I write, no state has as many large wildfires burning—14—as our state. Nearly 100 fires in all are burning across Oregon, whose portion of the Pacific Crest Trail is closed in four spots. The Durkee Fire, burning near the Oregon-Idaho border west of Boise, Idaho, is, at 420 square miles, the largest wildfire in the country.
Every summer, we hear of such fires. At times, as with the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that roared west down the McKenzie River Valley, the enemy ravishes our own neighborhoods. But most of us have little idea what those who fight such blazes go through. And, at the moment, there are more than 20,000 of those firefighters across the country, at war with the wildland flames.
Which is why I recently sat down with Mike Thoele, author of Fire Line: Summer Battles of the West, at Max Porter’s coffee shop in Junction City. Though his book, published in 1995 by Fulcrum Publishing in Golden, Colo., has been out nearly 30 years, it’s a classic by a former Register-Guard reporter/editor who’s probably interviewed more front-line wildfire fighters than just about anyone alive.
“Wildfire fighters are the American version of the French Foreign Legion,” says Thoele, 83. “Out of sight, out of mind. TV news almost never captures the firefighter in direct confrontation with the fire. They might get a quick quote as they’re deployed or catch them during mop up, but what these people face is largely unknown by most.”
In an attempt to rectify that, Thoele—pronounced TAY-lee—drove 35,000 miles around the West in the summer of 1993 to talk to such firefighters, supervisors and others. He interviewed more than 30 people alone for his opening chapter about a harrowing incident involving the Wyoming Hotshots.
Two of his and wife Sandy’s children became hotshots: Tiffan, who also was among the first dozen women smokejumpers in the country, and Caleb.
However, what makes Thoele’s read so compelling isn’t just his exhaustive research, it’s his engaging writing. Of the calm before the storm that forced the Wyoming Hotshots into their aluminum pup tents as a last resort he wrote:
The dragon seemed complacent today. He crept downhill on their right, close enough that his glow beat back the twilight and his breath cooked the sweat from their faces as they worked the toe of the slope. But his march was slow and his teeth were short, no more than two feet tall as they gnawed through dry grass and the duff of blanket needles beneath the towering ponderosas. Still, it was odd, aggressive behavior for a fire this late in the day.
I ask Mike if there was a movie that does justice to the rigors of wildfire fighting, telling him that, when it came to understanding war, the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan had transformed my understanding of what un-edited combat really means.