Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean
For several miles we have been following a downriver wind wondering if it could by chance have any connection with Mann Gulch. The mountain ahead becomes more interesting when it turns into a promontory between Meriwether Canyon and Mann Gulch than when it was a mirage under which a river disappeared. As a promontory, it supplies the connection between the prevailing downriver wind on the Missouri and the blowup of the Mann Gulch fire.
When the prevailing downriver wind (call it Wind Number One) first struck the promontory near the mouth of Meriwether Canyon, it split as if it had struck a big rock in a river and part of it (Wind Number Two) went straight ahead over the promontory and then straight down it in eddies on the Mann Gulch side. Some eddies became fire whirls throwing spot fires, and soon some of these spot fires jumped Mann Gulch to the opposite, grassy, slope. It was no great jump, the gulch being narrow and its grasses on the north side cured and already heated by radiation. Wind Number One, the main downriver wind, continued around the promontory until it met the mouth of Mann Gulch and sent Wind Number Three surging upgulch. Wind Number Three struck Wind Number Two at right angles, creating a giant fire whirl and starting the fateful race up Mann Gulch. As the fire swirled upgulch, a convection effect added strength to Wind Number Three: cool air from the river rushed up the narrow funnel at the mouth of Mann Gulch to replace the hot air rising from the fire.
By now it should be clear that an important part of the story of the Mann Gulch blowup is a Story of Three Winds. These three winds not only help to explain the basic structure of the blowup; they also explain other details. For instance, the powerful upgulch wind (Wind Number Three) struck, the burned fallen trees on the north side of the gulch; they lie parallel to each other and also parallel to the top of the ridge. The burned fallen trees opposite, on the south side of the gulch, are the work of Wind Number Two. This is the wind that crossed the promontory and headed almost straight down to the bottom of Mann Gulch. It would explain why the burned fallen trees are parallel to each other but perpendicular to the top of the ridge. There is probably an upgulch wind in Mann Gulch much of the summertime. What we have called Wind Number Three only added power to it, but power it needed to have. It was the wind that ran its race against the Smokejumpers and won.
It must be remembered, though, that these three winds are all part of one, first observed as a wave on the Missouri going the wrong way. Although Wind Number One did not act directly on the fire, it furnished the power for the other two that did. It was, so to speak, the supply ship, the other two the destroyers. As a Story of Three Winds, it solves still other puzzles the fire left behind. When Jansson was with Gisborne on the day of Gisborne’s death in Mann Gulch, Gisborne saw that the track of the blowup headed straight toward the part of the ridgetop where Hellman had been burned.
Occasionally in life, there come times that mark the end of puzzles. As was said earlier in this chapter, it is all cockeyed and it all fits.
ALTHOUGH BLOWUPS WERE NOT ANALYZED to the satisfaction of fire behavior scientists until the 1950s, it would be almost an a priori certainty that Harry Gisborne had long been interested in them. He had both a general theory about what caused them and a corollary theory as to what specifically caused the Mann Gulch blowup. He was to discover in Mann Gulch on the last day of his life that both his theories were wrong. To his credit, though, he was the first one to point out his error and was happily preparing to wake up the next day to correct his theories and probably soon would have, since his theories were basically on the right track.
He was a made-to-order picture of an early scientist, somewhat poetic and sometimes wrong, but often right and nearly always on the right track and nearly always dramatic. He tended to look for the extraordinary cause to explain the extraordinary effect, and, being himself an extraordinary effect, he had gathered about him a cult of young rangers, Jansson among them, to check in the field the theories he had developed at the Priest River Experiment Station, of which he had been director since 1922 and which he had made into the center of Forest Service research in the Northwest.
It is an extraordinary thing to say about a great woodsman, but he must also have been a charming man. He even developed the charming theory that certain conditions could be observed in November from which accurate predictions could be made about the fire season in the coming summer. He almost lost his cult of hero-worshiping rangers when he tried to get them to spend their Novembers looking for signs of next summer’s fires. They told him they still loved him even though he must be going crazy.
But they stuck with him to check his theory that fire whirls always whirl clockwise, a theory that also turned out to be wrong—some whirl counter- and some clockwise. But the underlying assumption of the theory is right. Most fire whirls are caused by winds shearing off obstacles, that is, glancing off a side of them and so giving fires a spin and starting them to whirl.
His corollary theory about the cause of the Mann Gulch fire whirl and blowup makes this basic assumption. In a memorandum dated the August 30 following the fire, he urges his friend C. S. Crocker, chief of the Division of Fire Control, to instruct his fire dispatchers and spotters hereafter not to jump men on a fire if it “is so located that air will be sucked into it around a promontory to the left of the fire.” When you see any such fire, he says, “look out for a blowup caused by a big clockwise whirl.”
The two big blowups he had observed previously worked this way, he affirms, and so had all blowups observed by others he had questioned. And this is no doubt true; he just had too few cases on which to build a general theory.
For his theory to explain the blowup in Mann Gulch, there had to be a promontory in front of (upgulch from) the advancing fire and to its left as you face it, and in addition there had to be a wind blowing downgulch. The downgulch wind would shear off the promontory and strike the main fire behind it on its left side, starting a fire whirl with a clockwise motion, which would throw burning cones and branches outside the circumference of the main fire, where some of them would start spot fires in unburned fuel.
This is fancy and intriguing, like a lot of early science, but Gisborne was a fine enough scientist to know after a good look at Mann Gulch that it wouldn’t work there, for two very good reasons. First, the only promontory was behind the advancing fire, not in front of it. Second, all the survivors speak of an upgulch wind, not a downgulch wind, the other necessary ingredient of Gisborne’s theory. In Mann Gulch the firewhirl had begun in a way Gisborne had never seen—with an upgulch wind shearing off an obstacle behind the fire. If anything, Gisborne seemed exhilarated by the prospect of having to get another theory to replace the old one.
It was November 9 when they climbed up Rescue Gulch, Gisborne half-convincing Jansson that if he rested every hundred yards he could make it. Jansson says that the half-hour trip took two hours, and he leaves a strange and moving report (for insurance purposes) about the whole day entitled “Statement to Accompany Form CA2 in the Case of the Death of Harry T. Gisborne.” The report was accompanied by a map (no longer to be found) with thirty-seven numbers on it signifying points where the two had stopped to talk. Still surviving, however, are four pages of notes indicating the main topics of conversation at each “rest stop” and often a direct quotation from the conversation there. They had not gone halfway through the fire area—only to stop 15—when the notation reads: “All his theories on the fire blasted.”
At stop 28, Gisborne said to Jansson: “I don’t believe your fire whirled. You only thought so because of what you have been told, by me in part.”
Gisborne must have been a fairly complex traveling companion. Much as he had been compelled to Mann Gulch by his theory about the cause of the fire whirl in the Mann Gulch fire, here he was, before the afternoon was over, half kidding and half scolding Jansson for believing that there had been a blowup in Mann Gulch, even though Jansson had almost died in it. He was even kidding Jansson for being led into this supposed error by being too subservient to Gisborne’s own t
To Gisborne, science started and ended in observation, and theory should always be endangered by it. Toward the end of the afternoon all he had observed showed that the fire had burned without fire whirls and that therefore both he and Jansson were wrong. Jansson was barely hanging on to his own experience of the fire whirl when they reached stop 32. Suddenly Jansson said, “That’s my whirl.” Gisborne immediately saw that a fire whirl had gone on a line for the top of the ridge near where Hellman had been burned, and probably was the reason Hellman had been burned there and Diettert was burned a little farther on. “Yep,” he said, and was all fire whirl himself again. He wanted to take pictures of it and then and there in late afternoon to follow its course and map it. Jansson was afraid that they already had made too long a day of it, and he knew that it would be all they could do to get back to their truck before dark. He assured Gisborne he would have someone return to the gulch to map the whirl, and Gisborne, when he saw how perturbed Jansson was, apologized. He said to Jansson: “I’m glad I got a chance to get up here. Tomorrow we can get all our dope together and work on Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it will lead to a theory.” This was at rest stop 35. By now the rest stops were becoming stations of the cross.
They were following a game trail along the cliffs high above the Missouri River at the lower end of the Gates of the Mountains, and were only a quarter or a half mile from their truck when they reached stop 37. Gisborne sat down on a rock and said: “Here’s a nice place to sit and watch the river. I made it good. My legs might ache a little, though, tomorrow.”
In his report Jansson says: “I think Gisborne’s rising at point 37 on the map was due to the attack hitting him.” He goes on to explain in parentheses that “thrombosis cases usually want to stand or sit up because of difficulty in breathing.” Gisborne died within a minute, and Jansson piled rocks around him so he would not roll off the game trail into the Missouri River a hundred feet below.
When Jansson knew Gisborne was dead, he stretched him out straight on the game trail, built the rocks around him higher, closed his eyes, and then put his glasses back on him so, just in case he woke up, he could see where he was.
Then Jansson ran for help. The stars came out. Nothing moved on the game trail. The great Missouri passing below repeated the same succession of chords it probably will play for a million years to come. The only other motion was the moon floating across the lenses of Gisborne’s glasses, which at last were unobservant.
This is the death of a scientist, a scientist who did much to establish a science. On the day of his death he had the pleasure of discovering that his theory about the Mann Gulch blowup was wrong. It would be revealing if tomorrow had come and he had got all his dope together and had worked out a new Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it would have led to another theory, probably the right one.
In any case, because of him we have been able to form what is likely the correct theory. Gisborne’s portrait hangs on the staircase of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, which immediately adjoins the Smokejumper base. He looks you square in the eye but is half amused as if he had caught you too attached to one of your theories, or one of his.
This was also the end of Jansson’s rescue work in Mann Gulch. He was to be transferred from the Canyon Ferry Ranger Station because he could not sleep in it or get his dog to come inside.
For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us—excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over, get our new dope together, and find a Hypothesis Number One all over again. And being basically on the right track when we were wrong.
Later, in thinking I was following him, I came to find out much of what I had found missing in Mann Gulch.
Part Two
8
WE ENTER NOW A DIFFERENT TIME ZONE, even a different world of time. Suddenly comes the world of slow-time that accompanies grief and moral bewilderment trying to understand the extinction of those whose love and everlasting presence were never questioned. All there was to time were the fifty-six speeding minutes before the fire picked watches off dead bodies, blew them up a hillside ahead of the bodies, and froze the watch hands together. Ahead now is a world of no explosions, no blowups, and, without a storyteller, not many explanations. Immediately ahead we know there is bound to be a flare-up of public indignation and the wavering candlelight of private grief. What then? It could be a slow fade-out of slow-time until all that’s left of the memory of Mann Gulch are cracking concrete crosses on an almost inaccessible hill and a memorial tablet with the names to go with the crosses beside a picnic ground at the mouth of the next gulch upriver.
After the autumn rains changed ashes into mud slides, the story seems to have been buried in incompleteness, pieces of it altogether missing. As a mystery story, it left unexplained what dramatic and devastating forces coincided to make the best of young men into bodies, how the bodies got to their crosses and what it was like on the way, and why this catastrophe has been allowed to pass without a search for the carefully measured grains of consolation needed to transform catastrophe into tragedy. It would be natural here, looking for at least chronological continuity to the story, to follow the outcries of the public and at the same time to try to share some part of the private sufferings of those who loved those who died. But always it would have to be conceived as possible, if an ending were sought in this direction, that there might be a non-ending. It is even conceivable that most of those closely connected with the catastrophe soon tried to see that it got lost; when the coming controversies and legal proceedings were added to all the rest of it, clearly the whole thing got so big it frightened people. They wanted it to go away and not come back.
Even so, there may somewhere be an ending to this story, although it might take a storyteller’s faith to proceed on a quest to find it and on the way to retain the belief that it might both be true and fit together dramatically. A story that honors the dead realistically partly atones for their sufferings, and so instead of leaving us in moral bewilderment, adds dimensions to our acuteness in watching the universe’s four elements at work—sky, earth, fire, and young men.
True, though, it must be. Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller’s belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life. The short semihumorous comedies we live, our long certain tragedies, and our springtime lyrics and limericks make up most of what we are. They become almost all of what we remember of ourselves. Although it would be too fancy to take these moments of our lives that seemingly have shape and design as proof we are inhabited by an impulse to art, yet deep within us is a counterimpulse to the id or whatever name is presently attached to the disorderly, the violent, the catastrophic both in and outside us. As a feeling, this counterimpulse to the id is a kind of craving for sanity, for things belonging to each other, and results in a comfortable feeling when the universe is seen to take a garment from the rack that seems to fit. Of course, both impulses need to be present to explain our lives and our art, and probably go a long way to explain why tragedy, inflamed with the disorderly, is generally regarded as the most composed art form.
It should be clear now after nearly forty years that the truculent universe prefers to retain the Mann Gulch fire as one of its secrets—left to itself, it fades away, an unsolved, violent incident grieved over by the fewer and fewer still living who are old enough to grieve over fatalities of 1949. If there is a story in Mann Gulch, it will take something of a storyteller at this date to find it, and it is not easy to imagine what impulses would lead him to search for it. He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.
When I was a you
It is in the world of slow-time that truth and art are found as one.
THE HILL ON WHICH THEY DIED is a lot like Custer Hill. In the dry grass on both hills are white scattered markers where the bodies were found, a special cluster of them just short of the top, where red terror closed in from behind and above and from the sides. The bodies were of those who were young and thought to be invincible by others and themselves. They were the fastest the nation had in getting to where there was danger, they got there by moving in the magic realm between heaven and earth, and when they got there they almost made a game of it. None were surer they couldn’t lose than the Seventh Cavalry and the Smoke-jumpers.