Young Men and Fire (13 page)

J
ANSSON HAD SEEN MEN WEEP
and had wept himself, but as soon as he saw that the problem was medical and the medical men were there, he was on the move again. He picked two of the rescue crew to accompany him across the ridge and into Mann Gulch to explore ahead for the doctors and be ready to point out where the living and the dead lay hidden. He must have picked out the two he trusted most—one was Don Roos, assistant ranger from the Lincoln District, and the
other the seventeen-year-old boy he had met only a few hours before who by now was on his way to prove his own secret belief that he was the best man on the crew.

It was 1:20 A.M. when the three crossed the ridge and started down the other side, where they soon ran into what Jansson describes as a “twelve-foot rim rock breaking off on the Mann Gulch side.” Jansson says they had trouble finding a gap in it; others before them had, too.

It would not be exact to say that the three in descending at night into the remnants of Mann Gulch were descending into the valley of the shadow of death, because there was practically nothing left standing to cast a shadow. Since dead trees occasionally exploded and then subsided weakly into dying flames, perhaps it would be more exact to say they were descending into the valley of the candles of death. Rumsey speaks of the night as a “pincushion of fire.”

At about 1:50 they heard a cry below and to the right. As they continued to descend, “the updrafts brought a very suspicious smell,” but Jansson says that, because the wind was tricky, it was difficult to determine “whether there was a series of bodies ahead or whether we were just smelling Sylvia.”

It took them another ten minutes to find Sylvia, probably because Sylvia had been slipping in and out of consciousness during that time.

When Jansson, Roos, and Sallee reached him, Sylvia was standing on a rock slanting heavily downhill. Hunched over and wobbling to keep his balance, he couldn’t stop talking. “Please don’t come around and look at my face; it’s awful.” Then he said, “Say, it didn’t take you fellows long to get here.” He thought it was 5:00 in the morning. Jansson pulled out his watch and said, “It’s 2:00 A.M. on the nose.” Then in his report, Jansson speaks to us. “Since his hands were burned to charred clubs, I peeled an orange and fed it to him section by section.”

Sylvia said, “Say, fellows, I don’t think I’ll be able to walk out of here.” Jansson told him his walking days were over for the time being and he was “going to get a free ride out.” He
tried to make this a joke, although it is hard to make jokes at night on a hillside that smells of burned flesh.

Sylvia was worried about his shoes, which Dodge had taken off and placed behind a rock, so Jansson combed the slope with a flashlight until he found them. The knowledge that his shoes had been discovered comforted Sylvia, probably because he could not retain knowledge and had slipped back to thinking he would have to walk to the river.

About 2:20 the doctors and most of the rescue crew arrived and treated Sylvia as they had Hellman. Dr. Hawkins agreed with Jansson that it would be dangerous to attempt to move Sylvia and Hellman before daybreak, although the crew was ready to start stumbling in darkness through rocks and reefs to the river.

Sylvia complained of the cold, as Hellman had, but Hellman was wrapped in the only blanket the crew had brought back on its return trip from Hilger Landing. Since most of the men were not wearing jackets, “some of them stripped off their shirts and undershirts to wrap around Joe to keep him warm.” As he was still cold, half-naked they huddled close to him.

When he got warm, he got happy again. Several years ago Dr. Hawkins, who treated both Hellman and Sylvia on the ridge and then in the hospital, told me that, if I were burned and wanted to be as happy as Joe Sylvia had been, I should get terribly burned. “Then,” he said, “your sensory apparatus dumps into your bloodstream.” He added, “Usually it takes until the next day to clog your kidneys. In the meantime, it is possible to have spells when you think you are happy.”

Since only two could cuddle close to Sylvia at a time, others of the rescue crew spread out across the hillside looking for eleven missing men by flashlight and candlelight. It was like high mass until dawn—lights walked about all night in darkness.

Sylvia encouraged those who remained with him by telling them that before they had arrived he had heard voices of men
calling from above. They were the voices of men working and he had shouted back at them. Perhaps, then, it would be more exact to call Mann Gulch on this night the valley of candles and voices of dead men working.

D
AYLIGHT CAME A LITTLE AFTER
four o’clock, and Jansson walked only a few yards before running into Harrison’s body. He identified it by the Catholic medallion around its neck and the snake-bite kit which he had given Harrison when Harrison became recreation guard at Meriwether. His body lay face down pointing uphill and looking as if, instead of being a Catholic, he were a Moslem fallen in prayer. Jansson describes the earth as it looked at daybreak.

The ground appearance was that a terrific draft of superheated air of tremendous velocity had swept up the hill exploding all inflammable material, causing a wall of flame (which I had observed from below at 5:30 P.M. the previous evening) six hundred feet high to roll over the ridge and down the other side and continue over ridges and down gulches until the fuels were so light that the wall could not maintain heat enough to continue. This wall covered three thousand acres in ten minutes or less. Anything caught in the direct path of the heat blast perished.

Three thousand acres is close to four and three-quarters square miles.

At about 4:40 A.M. they started to carry Sylvia down Mann Gulch to the river. The crew that left with him was only six men and the doctors, so Sallee had to take his turn carrying the litter. It was also up to him to help identify the bodies—they tagged three while carrying Sylvia down the hillside. Jansson, who was noted for being a hard man on himself and his men, was sorry for Sallee. What a great compliment for a seventeen-year-old.

While they continued downhill, Jansson continued to be puzzled about why Harrison’s body had been found so close to
Sylvia. He had heard from both Sallee and Rumsey that Harrison had given out from exhaustion, so Jansson had expected to find his body much lower on the hillside and farther back than any of the others. That he got up and climbed to where he did is as much a monument to his courage as the cross they put there afterwards.

Jansson is the only one to have left an account at all inclusive of the discovery, identification, and removal of the bodies. Near each body he left a note under a pile of rocks identifying the body and summarizing the evidence on which the identification had been made. He may have intended to expand these notes into a more complete account, but he never did. If he had tried to say more, it would have been too much, for him and for us.

Lower down the hillside than they thought any of the crew would be found, they came upon Stanley J. Reba’s body; but when they examined it, they found he had broken a leg and then no doubt had rolled down the slope into the fire. He had literally burned to death. Most of the others, in all likelihood, had died of suffocation and were burned afterwards.

Sylvia was carried to the mouth of Mann Gulch by Jansson and his crew of six, arriving there only a short time before Hellman reached the river by way of Rescue Gulch, carried by Rumsey and other members of the rescue crew. Neither Sylvia nor Hellman was suffering, because, as Dr. Hawkins adds, “their burns were so deep and hard their nerve ends were destroyed.”

Each man was soon picked up by a speedboat, and each man’s spirits rose. Sylvia arrived at the hospital in Helena about 10:00 A.M. and Hellman about half an hour later. Dr. Hawkins told me that 10:00 was about time for the kidneys to fail. He immediately ordered an examination, and the report was as expected, “no urine found.” There soon came an end to euphoria; both Sylvia and Hellman were dead by noon.

By 1:00, Jansson, who had been in charge of moving Sylvia to the hospital in Helena, was back in Mann Gulch to renew the search with a fresh crew, including Dodge, and a helicopter
to fly the bodies to Helena. According to his plans, he should have been there at least three hours earlier, but the “eggbeater,” which had been ordered from Missoula, picked him up at 12:30 instead of 9:00. It’s hard for the woods and machines to run on the same schedule, and almost never is it the woods that are late.

Jansson had been the first one to be taken in on the helicopter shuttle, and he immediately started uphill tagging bodies. He started where they had found the three at daybreak and then, as he says, worked up the ridge “by contours.” He says that he did not have much time to gather up the personal effects scattered around the bodies: “The terrific blast of heat burned all clothing off, releasing non-inflammable effects, which, if not pinned down by the body, were carried as high as one hundred feet farther up the hill.” He found watches or the remains of wallets only by rolling a body over.

Late in the afternoon he looked downhill and saw a “charred stump of a man.” He already had found the ninth body, “so I didn’t count him and didn’t go close enough to determine if it was really a remains.” He was through for the day, a long day that had begun early the day before. Not until the next morning, the morning of the seventh, were all the remains found.

Only when all the Smokejumpers in his crew had been accounted for did Dodge fly back to Missoula. It is not hard to visualize him, eyes bloody and clothes dirty, as Sallee found him near the top of the ridge after the fire had passed over him, but it takes a moment of thinking to see him as his wife saw him when he stepped down from the plane in Missoula, fastidious as ever except for the tobacco stains at the corners of his mouth. He had five more years to construct a life out of the ashes of this fire.

Jansson had longer to live than Dodge, but those who knew him say he also had great problems rescuing himself. Asked by the Board of Review at what point he had given up being in charge of the rescue, he replied he just couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember because he never gave up the
charge. For instance, the year of the fire he twice returned to Mann Gulch to check his original observations of the blowup. Afterwards he wrote “Jansson’s Ground Check Statement.” Having twice walked and rerun his route with a stopwatch in hand, he concluded that his present report “is within two minutes of the time I have shown in previous statements.”

In the end, he had to rescue himself from Mann Gulch by asking to be transferred to another ranger district. It had got so that he could not sleep at night, remembering the smell of it, and his dog would no longer come in but cried all night outside, knowing that something had gone wrong with him.

P
ERHAPS JANSSONS GREATEST RESCUE
in Mann Gulch occurred later in the year of the fire. Harry Gisborne, the man above all others who made the study of fire a science, was determined to examine Mann Gulch firsthand before winter came and destroyed crucial evidence. His fear of winter was probably accompanied by a fear that he had not long to live, and he had some theories about fire whirls he wanted to test against facts. In particular, he wanted to test a theory he had formed about the cause of the Mann Gulch blowup. So despite a severe heart ailment he was determined to make the trip, and, without letting his close friends or doctor know, he persuaded Jansson, his disciple, to accompany him. Almost literally he was to die for his theory about the cause of the Mann Gulch fire.

The intensity of Gisborne’s interest in the cause of the blowup at Mann Gulch and in blowups in general is still another sign of his being an advance-guard scientist. Even as late as the Mann Gulch fire there was no general agreement about the causes of these explosions of wildfires. A blowup is a phenomenon that occurs rarely and often as unpredictably as it occurred that afternoon in Mann Gulch; to add to its secretiveness, it takes place far from the known habitat of meteorologists and trained weather observers. Throughout history, blowups have been seen almost entirely by survivors of big forest fires, who would not have survived if they had stopped to observe them.

Even though Jansson’s testimony before the Board had
described the Mann Gulch fire as “a blowup,” the official
Report of Board of Review
never uses the noun “blowup” or any such adjective as “explosive.” Discussion of the behavior of the fire is limited primarily to its appearance as a routine fire prior to the crew’s being dropped, perhaps because the Forest Service wanted to downplay the explosive nature of the Mann Gulch fire to protect itself against public charges that its ignorance of fire behavior was responsible for the tragedy. It was not until the 1950s, however, that Clive M. Countryman and Howard E. Graham published articles analyzing fire whirls in wildfires that received general acceptance. And it was only after Laird Robinson and I had taken several trips into Mann Gulch in the late 1970s that we saw clearly how these theories explained the explosive complexity of the Mann Gulch fire.

At the time of the fire or soon after, several of the leading Forest Service scientists stationed in Missoula, such as Jack S. Barrows and Charles E. Hardy, advanced a very different theory as to the cause of the blowup, a theory which still has some standing and from its nature would be very difficult to disprove. This theory is based on the assumption appearing most often when the human mind seeks to explain extraordinary effects—that extraordinary effects must be produced by extraordinary causes. According to this then-prevailing theory, the particular extraordinary cause of the blowup of the Mann Gulch fire was a thunderhead.

Stated simply, this theory presupposes that a thunderhead came along and sat down on the fire—its cool air being heavier than the light, hot air rising from the ground—but the thunderhead never got all the way to the ground in the form of rain. In effect, its sudden weight as it sat down on the top of the fire splattered the fire all around in the form of spot fires, and the gusts of wind that hurry along with dry thunder helped to fan the spot fires and the main fire until in a few minutes it was all fire.

The strongest argument in favor of this theory is that there were highly variable air conditions on this day, which was setting a record for high temperature, and highly variable
air conditions and explosions of fire come out of the same bag. The plane ride from Missoula to Mann Gulch had been rough enough to make one Smokejumper get sick and turn in his jumping suit for good. Even Rumsey and Sallee were beginning to feel ill and wanted to be among the first to jump. Furthermore, the pilot reported cumulus cloud formations in the distance at the time the plane was circling the fire, and each of those cumulus puffs signified a heavy updraft of hot air. When columns of hot air reach around twenty-five thousand feet and encounter rain and ice crystals, they are cooled and change to thunderheads. Being now heavier than the hot air around them, they start down but can stop without raining—not, however, without causing a scurry or blast of big winds.

The main trouble with this theory is that none of the survivors mentions a thunderstorm passing by, nor does Jansson, who was in the vortex of the blowup and a casualty of it. Moreover, it is the kind of all-purpose theory you can’t disprove that somebody offers whenever a fire blows.

Of course, there is no way in this cockeyed world of ruling out the extraordinary-cause-for-the-extraordinary-effect. You come by boat to Mann Gulch by way of the cliffs of the Missouri River where extraordinary ocean beds stood up and fought each other, but it seems as if the more that becomes known about big cockeyed things, including the actions of men and women as well as cliffs, the more they seem to reduce to one little cockeyed thing fitting closely to another of the same kind, and so on until it all adds up to one big cockeyed thing. It’s never confusion, though, because ultimately it all fits—it’s just cockeyed and fits and is fire. And of course that is extraordinary.

The extraordinary monster needing explanation is at least in its prenatal form a simple little mechanism. A blowup is a dust kitten that has become a raging monster, but its basic mechanism is that of a swirl of dust that seemingly comes from nowhere and may pick up a loose newspaper and give it a toss. When we think of it as a monster, though, it is natural to think
that something out of the sky had to start it spinning, and it is probable that some blowup somewhere was started by a thunderhead making a big wind spinning in circles, and it is proper, in searching for the cause of blowups, to consider the thunderhead theory. But the other basic theory of the origin of blowups, and the one we shall be dealing with, can be called the “obstacle theory.” It is the theory of Countryman and Graham and the theory that has met general acceptance. And, not surprisingly, it is Gisborne’s underlying theory, although he had not developed it sufficiently to explain the Mann Gulch fire correctly. It was not until Laird and I returned to Mann Gulch on hot mornings and continued to puzzle over what we saw there that we began to notice each time the same combination of little things that would fit together to start a fire whirl if, as was the actual case, a fire were present near the mouth of the gulch on its southern side and near the top of the ridge. Among woodsmen there is a preference for causes that are there waiting for you when you return, but admittedly sometimes they drop from the sky.

The obstacle theory in its essential elements is not hard to understand. A wind strikes an obstacle, say a rocky promontory on a ridge, shears off it, and so starts to spin and soon goes into full circles behind the promontory. Any fire caught in these circles will throw off sparks and even burning branches which, if the conditions are right, will start spot fires, and these, when the conditions continue to be favorable, will swell into fire swirls, and when you get caught between them and the main fire you will be as lucky as Jansson if you regain consciousness in time to vomit. All this is easy to visualize if you like to walk by moving waters and note what happens in a stream when it strikes a half-submerged rock or small logjam. The stream shears off it, and the good fishing is where the eddies form on the rear flanks of the obstacle and behind it. No trouble at all for stream fishermen to visualize.

Soon the question of how a strike of lightning in a dead snag high up near the top of a ridge close to the mouth of Mann Gulch became a fire monster consuming Mann Gulch
and thirteen elite firefighters turns into the question, Where are the winds of yesteryear? And that poetic question soon turns up the equally poetic answer, Gone with the winds. And that poetic question and answer when translated into direct prose means that you can’t explain the cause of a big fire of long ago if you can’t reconstruct the winds that caused it, and also that nothing is more true than that each individual wind passes and is gone for good. But the practical woodsman, who seldom is a poet, starts with the assumption that at least some of the winds of yesteryear are not gone, if only one knows how to see a wind that is gone. The practical woodsman thinks that he can see a lot of things in the woods that will tell him a lot about what can’t be seen there. For instance, you may already have guessed how much Laird and I explain what we see in the woods by relying on what we have seen when fishing. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that an important part of our theory of what caused the Mann Gulch blowup was an observation we made from a boat on the Missouri River several miles before getting to the mouth of Mann Gulch.

We were on our first trip together to Mann Gulch, in 1977, and I had been left behind not happily at the mouth of the gulch, where there isn’t much to do or see on a hot August afternoon. Laird clearly and if anything overpolitely had left me behind. He had a theory to check that would take him sidehilling to the head of Mann Gulch, and the unspoken word was that if I went along I would slow him down. He left on a supposedly cheery note to the effect that, while he was killing himself on the hot, bare hillside, I could loaf around the mouth of the gulch, which the river left cool, with plenty of time to find a missing part of the puzzle of what caused the blowup. And, so help me, I more or less did.

Nearly thirty years after a fire has burned over a piece of shale in the Gates of the Mountains, there doesn’t seem to be much to see since almost no trees are left standing; black fallen trees thirty years after don’t seem to offer many opportunities to make contributions to knowledge. I thought to myself, “Maybe you are trying to see something big and important too
soon. Maybe it would be surer to come if you tried to work up to it.” So I backed off, with only one slightly odd thing to observe about the mouth of the gulch—that there are a few green and standing trees there, just a short stretch of them, a hundred yards or so of them between the rise and the edge of the old fire, and I thought to myself, “That must have been a hell of a big wind to blow all this fire upgulch after it jumped the canyon. You would have thought a little of the fire would have sneaked a short way backward and toward the river.”

I started walking up the canyon, slowly, very slowly. Above the mouth of the gulch there seemed to be nothing to observe but black fallen trees, and after thirty years of lying on the ground they look pretty much alike. After I reconciled myself to the fact that all I was going to see was black fallen trees, I finally said to myself, “About all that is left for me to see is the way the dead trees fell,” and to my astonishment I just then saw something—or at least something that might be something.

Remember, now, that when I was looking at the way trees had fallen I was really looking for winds that had gone, and almost immediately I saw that the black, dead bodies of the fallen trees on the southern side of the gulch where the fire had started were strangely parallel to each other but at right angles to the top of the ridge. My immediate reaction was Everyman’s reaction. I turned and looked to the top of the ridge on the opposite, or northern, side of the gulch where there were also dead fallen trees—lots of them—and in a pattern, too, but in a puzzling one. They were lying parallel to each other, but, unlike the trees on the southern side, they lay parallel to the top of the ridge. However puzzling the patterns, the patterns had to stand as the remains of winds.

They probably had to stand for prevailing winds and for winds that might still be there. Certainly they had to have been there for some years after the trees burned, long enough for the trees to have rotted in the roots and been blown over. One vast storm might have done it but not likely—the trees couldn’t have rotted uniformly and agreed to topple at the
same time. They had to have been worked on fairly regularly over the years. As prevailing winds, they might still be there at their more or less appointed time, although the pattern of winds might since have changed. But it was fairly sure that once and for some years a big wind had blown over the top of the southern ridge and then down it (at right angles to the top of the ridge) and that on the northern side a big wind with some regularity had blown parallel to the ridge near its top.

This was the best I could do until Laird got back from his mission to the head of the gulch, but at first he wasn’t much interested in my report. His own report left him fairly depleted. He told me that we needed a new theory to explain why most of the crew, after leaving the escape fire, kept sidehilling up the gulch instead of going for the ridge. We had imagined a long stretch of impregnable reef blocking their escape. “In fact,” Laird said, “there were several big openings in the reef that they passed by but could easily have crossed through.”

We both felt depleted by this negative report. To spend a day in Mann Gulch, we had had to drag a motorboat on a trailer 130 miles over the Continental Divide just to get to the Missouri River. From there to where we were now in the late afternoon had taken the rest of the day, and it was about time to fold up and start back up the river to get to Missoula not too long after midnight. About all we would be able to show for a long day in Mann Gulch was that one of our theories about the tragedy was proven wrong by the hardest of evidence—the ground. So my report about the mess of burned, fallen trees on opposite sides of the gulch wasn’t going to take away our disappointment over the results of our long day. But it was about all we had to show for it, and I made my report brief. Still, neither of us entirely forgot it. We talked about it at several of our customary lunches in Missoula, and it was not long before the parallel messes began to emerge as something that might be important.

It was only a trip or two later that we started to think of the Missouri River as having a possible connection with the
blowup of the Mann Gulch fire. Up to this time, the Missouri River had been scenically interesting to us, but mostly it had meant motor trouble for our boat. We usually spent as much time on the river trying to figure out what the missing parts of our motor were as we did trying to figure out the missing parts of the story of the fire. On this day we had gone nearly a mile before the motor stopped, so we were still roughly five miles from the mouth of Mann Gulch. While Laird was kicking the motor, trying to get it to start a second time, I was trying to size up this piece of the river we were floating on to figure out how I would fish it. But no matter how much I was thinking about something else, even fishing, I was always ready to think about prevailing winds, especially when I got anywhere near Mann Gulch. I had noted a medium-sized wave in the quiet water near shore, and I thought to myself, “That’s funny.”