Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean
The seemingly anonymous middle distance between Reba’s cross and the reef is where nearly all the tragedy occurred—anonymous since no one who lived saw what finally happened there, anonymous also since even those who died there didn’t see much of what was happening to them because at the very end there was only heat too hot to breathe and not enough oxygen to keep the brain alive. A photographic mistake, however, obscures one cause of the fatality of this middle distance—the steepness of the slope between the foreground and the reef. It is about a 76 percent slope, meaning that for every 10 feet you walk forward, you also gain 7.6 feet in elevation, climbing at about a 45-degree angle. But in the photograph, instead of the middle distance rearing up like half a cliff, it looks more like the gentle, grassy slope of Custer Hill. If the photographer had had the right equipment with him, he could still have featured Reba’s cross in the foreground without flattening the scene of suffering behind it. The more the photograph erroneously reduces the grade of that slope, the more it erroneously reduces the actual speed and intensity of the fire that went up it, even the length of its flame; the more it erroneously flattens the scene, the more it eliminates the emotional realization of young men that it will be impossible for them to climb the slope as fast as fire.
Since the four of us at one time or another had worked on mapping crews, we knew that to trace the movement of men or fire precisely we had to start as we would in mapping the course of a stream—at a point already located with certainty on the ground and map. To begin, we would try to find a nearby “location point” established by an outfit which always seemed to know where it was in the woods, the United States Geological Survey. The location point usually would be a lead plug driven into the ground at the top of a prominent peak and stamped with USGS and the elevation. Then, after we had compass-and-paced the drainage system from there, we would continue our line until we could connect with another established location point. Unless we began and ended with known points, we might have accurately traced all the bends in a stream, but how the hell did we know where the stream was?
We agreed without argument that we needed to locate two key points on the hillside to map the final movements of those who died there. For sentimental and theological reasons alone, the first point had to be the opening in the reef through which Rumsey and Sallee crossed out of Mann Gulch. Late in the afternoon of August 5, 1949, it was the opening to salvation; now it was the point, like magnetic north, that had beckoned the two survivors back to Mann Gulch—their primary reason to return to the scene of the fire was to pass through the crevice again.
Second, and most important of all, was to locate accurately the spot where Dodge had set his fire. A missing part of the story, threatening to remain forever missing, was the tragic ending itself, whatever it was that happened after Dodge’s men passed this spot. No one lived who saw this missing part, and a storyteller who wanted to find it would have to know that the missing part of his story pivoted about a single point. There couldn’t even be the cartography of a story without an accurate location of the spot where the escape fire started.
It may seem not worth mentioning again now, but the rest of this sentence is placed here with some care—Dodge said that from his fire to where he found Sylvia still alive was about 150 to 200 feet east (upgulch) and about 100 feet below him.
Also, I had a high priority of my own, the cross of Henry Thol, Jr. It was the cross farthest upgulch and closest to the top of the ridge—his cross would define an important outer boundary of the tragedy. In addition to its being useful to the cartography of tragedy, there was this personal reason: I find in trying to record the tragedy of a good many characters who were young and much alike that a few remained distant from me and anonymous and were always dead—only some came close to me and asked me to visit their crosses when I returned to Mann Gulch and to try to be of some comfort to them. Thol’s cross was one I always visited, and when I did I would try to imagine a little of what it must have been like to be highest on the hill and not quite high enough. I also wished I could have been of some comfort to his father, but he was so enraged in his grief I probably couldn’t have been, even if I had had the chance. Yet, even if Thol had to die, his father should have found room to be proud of where his son is, the nearest to the top.
When all this is added up, it comes close to a day’s work in Mann Gulch, given the amount of energy it takes just to move around in Mann Gulch after getting there. But in addition, Laird and I had a piece of unfinished business we hoped to wind up on this trip, although we hadn’t mentioned it to Rumsey and Sallee for fear of suggesting what we wanted them to say. We still had only a guess for an answer to the question that had first sent us on our quest to find the two survivors and persuade them to come back to Mann Gulch with us: Why didn’t the rest of the crew, only a few moments behind you, follow you straight to the top of the ridge and safety?
Despite a long after-dinner session, it wasn’t possible to think of everything, but we felt we had a fairly good plan. We couldn’t tell what part of it we would be starting with, since we planned to approach Mann Gulch by way of Rescue Gulch and so would have to guess just where we would come out on top of the ridge. There was no question, though, that there was just one place of all places that Rumsey and Sallee wanted to see first when they reached the top and looked down—the opening in the reef through which they had crawled out of Mann Gulch. We all hoped that when we came to the top we would be close to it.
NEAR THE TOP OF THE RIDGE, we ran into a deep game trail sidehilling toward what would probably be an open, wide saddle—we followed it because the footing was good, not because we were looking for an open, wide saddle. Even before we reached it, Sallee said, “It’s the same God damn pass the Forest Service investigator tried to make me believe was where Rumsey and I crawled out of Mann Gulch.”
Over a quarter of a century later, Sallee was still angry because some company detective had tried to make him believe that he didn’t know where he was at the big moment in his life.
French Canadians don’t take kindly to being told they don’t know where they are in the woods. Sallee said, “He wouldn’t even stop for a few minutes to let me go up the ridge and show him the right crossing.”
The investigator’s pass was certainly a low and wide one—the top of the reef had decomposed and completely disappeared for thirty or forty yards. “It’s a good-looking pass,” I told him. “A couple of threshing outfits could cross here abreast.”
“That’s one of the big troubles with it,” Sallee said. “Rumsey and I had to squeeze through a crevice in the reef one at a time.”
I knew without looking at the documents in my packsack (which Sallee still carried) that it had been a close squeeze at the top for the survivors. Both of them early had testified that they first saw the top of the ridge as they approached Dodge lighting his fire; Rumsey stated that when they left Dodge they followed the upgulch side of Dodge’s fire until they spotted on their right a pile of rocks at the crest and headed for it; they have always agreed that Sallee was the first to edge through the crevice and Diettert did not follow. I asked Sallee, “Why didn’t you go straight uphill from Dodge’s fire to this wide pass instead of angling upgulch under a reef that might not have another opening for a long way?”
He answered, “Because by then there was a fire in this pass.”
So there at long last was the answer to one of the questions that the survivors alone could give. In their testimony they had sometimes insisted that, after leaving Dodge at his fire, they had gone straight for the top and at other times seemed less sure. Their answer is that they would like to have gone straight for the top, and did for a way, but a fire on the top of the ridge had closed a wide saddle above them and forced them to angle to their right to the next opening upgulch in the rocks above them. The sight of fire or smoke at the top of the ridge may also explain why Diettert turned aside at the crevice and why most of the crew kept angling upgulch. But Sallee’s answer raises a ne
We didn’t sit down to rest from the climb. We just kept following Sallee upgulch on the ridge looking for the crevice. For one thing, it was too cool in the winds up there to sit in one’s perspiration, although it was the first of July and the middle of the morning. The world of high altitudes is hard to believe from below. It is never what flat-country people call normal. That first summer I tried to reach Mann Gulch, a cloudburst turned our perspiration to ice and ended my brother-in-law’s friendly visits to Mann Gulch with a case of pneumonia. Most of the times I have been there, though, it has been so hot in the day that rattlesnakes stay in the shade of their holes, although even then the cool is never far away. The heat of the mountains is not the heat of the plains, which stay hot all night. Remember, on the day of the fire it had been a record ninety-seven degrees in Helena in the shade and it had to have been a lot hotter than that in the burning gulch, but the night of the fire it had been so cool near where we were then standing that the rescue crew had given Hellman their one blanket and had huddled close to Sylvia to keep him warm. As we climbed up from the river, we soon left summer behind and were walking through the world of spring flowers, beautiful blues and yellows, lupines and vetches, and balsam roots looking with wide brown eyes at ghosts and intruders. But it became even cooler toward the end of the day, so we never sat down, tired as we were, until we got back to the boat and water level.
It took Sallee and Rumsey only a few minutes to announce their crevice. Within twenty or twenty-five yards upgulch from the open pass, the reef appears again and for fifty yards or so is solid cliff—and then there is a crevice. The two survivors took turns crawling through it, trying it on for size, as it were, and seeming to find that the passing years had shrunken it and made it a tighter fit.
I suppose they were amusing because of the difficulty they were having fitting through the crevice. But it was not possible to watch them without mixed feelings. For me, it was hard to look at the crevice and not think of Diettert turning away from it. It must have been even harder for Laird. He came over to where I was standing and finally said, “I wouldn’t have gone through there either. You couldn’t tell from here, especially in the smoke, whether you would only be walking into a firetrap on the other side.”
“In the smoke,” I said, “nothing could have looked sure.”
“I would have gone with Diettert,” he said.
There was no more to that conversation. Where could it go?
When it came Rumsey’s turn to crawl through the crevice, I followed him. Then we went looking for the juniper bush he had fallen into, so tired he had almost let matters rest there.
“That’s it, that’s it!” he said. “I was exhausted; I almost stayed there.” But when we got closer, he began to shake his head until words finally came out of it. “I just can’t believe it. I just can’t believe I have been wrong all these years. It isn’t a juniper bush. It’s a dwarf, distorted alpine pine.”
After a while, he repeated, “I just can’t believe it. You just can’t believe anything that happens in a forest fire.”
He didn’t realize at the moment what a great amount of truth he had uttered, especially about the juniper bush.
A DAY IS AN INADEQUATE PIECE OF TIME in which to get . anything done in rough country, so we had split the job of locating the two remaining points of the triangle—where Dodge had lit his escape fire and where Thol had fallen. Naturally Rumsey and Sallee, who had seen Dodge light his fire, wanted the job of finding where they had cut loose for the top, and Laird went with them, having himself made the escape fire something of a specialty. At the time, I was glad to have the assignment of visiting Thol’s cross and, on the way, of passing Diettert’s. There are moments of the fire that I have tried to live through again and again with Thol and Diettert—especially the moment when they came nearest to escaping but realized they were not going to make it.
To Thol’s father, the retired ranger, his boy was always a boy. When someone on the Board of Review testified that the crew consisted of highly experienced firefighters, his grief and anger again swirled up out of his son’s ashes. “My boy spent two years in the Condon [Ranger] District as fire guard. I knew him—I knew him well—this I say of my own boy—he was a long way from an experienced firefighter. He could barely handle tools. He could handle tools well, but as being productive in handling tools, well he was not—and most of those boys—pretty much the same.”
This outcry is even more confused than its sentence structure. The young members of the crew couldn’t have been old-time experts with tools, but they had to be pretty good with the few basic tools of firefighting, and the son of a ranger had to be damn good. Anyway, what did fire tools have to do with the fate of the crew in Mann Gulch? They died in fire but had no chance to fight it. All the crew did with their tools was throw them away on orders from their foreman. The history of the Mann Gulch fire is the report of a race with fire to death. In this race, the cross nearly as close to the top of the hill as Thol’s is Navon’s, and Navon was twenty-eight; he had been a paratrooper for five years and a lieutenant at Bastogne. What do you expect of your nineteen-year-old son who had only eight jumps on a fire to his credit but was even a little closer to the top than Navon?
The crosses are simple and impressive and were made by the Smokejumpers in Missoula. As the photograph of Reba’s cross shows, they are concrete with the name on a horizontal bronze plate. That’s all there is, and that leaves everything very lonely up there, where no one goes walking or visiting. Besides rattlesnakes, there are mountain sheep and mountain goats, which also appear lonely, and, as the photograph shows, the fire left few living trees standing, so there is not even the friendship of shade.
Actually I had come to Thol’s cross to do two jobs: besides locating Thol’s cross accurately, I was to inspect the condition of his cross and that of several others nearby. Laird and I had promised Edward Heilman, director of aviation and fire management, that while in Mann Gulch we would inspect all the crosses and let him know if any needed repairing or replacing. To be sure that promise was kept, the four of us on the hill on July 1, 1978, had divided the crosses among us.
Thol’s cross is straight underneath an open saddle on the ridge where the surface of the reef had decomposed, so the reef did not act as a barrier to prevent him from reaching the top of the ridge. It is impossible to say exactly how close Thol’s cross is to the top because without instruments it is impossible to locate the crest on the wide, smooth surface of the ridge. We had recently found a 1952 Forest Service contour map of “Part of Mann Gulch Fire Area” (see pages 8-9 of the photo gallery) where the distance from Thol’s cross to the top of the ridge is probably less than 100 yards. By the same map it is 140 yards from his cross to Diettert’s. The distance from his cross to the place where Dodge started his fire will vary according to where you think Dodge lit his gofer match. If you accept the two places as correctly located on the 1952 contour map, the distance is 390 yards.
It is not certain that Thol’s cross marks precisely where Thol fell. I found his Forest Service flashlight with the batteries still in it seven or eight yards above his cross, and many of the crosses must be downhill from where the bodies fell. On that 76 percent slope of crumbled cliff and dry, slick grass it is difficult just to crawl without slipping; those running and stumbling, exhausted and terrified, may have rolled downhill after they fell. Remember that Jansson had another theory, even more terrifying. Noting that nearly all remaining nonflammable objects (such as watches and wallets) were found uphill from the bodies (unless found under a fallen body), he theorized that the power of the fire was so great it carried these objects with it. Both theories are probably correct.
ON MY WAY BACK FROM THOL’S CROS
Then I noticed that, when the gestures and the accompaniment returned downhill, they did not always return to the same place. That was the tip-off—maybe there was an argument going on between Sallee and Rumsey about where Dodge had lit his fire. It certainly wasn’t what it was like at the crevice, through which they had crawled back and forth with difficulty but in complete agreement.
And, sure enough, they were arguing about where they had left their foreman behind. But as the words paralleling their gestures became recognizable, it became clear they shared basic agreements. Most important was their certainty that they had located the opening in the reef through which they had edged their way to safety. In the coming conversation note how the crevice is the North Star that guides all arguments and tells the directions of all movements and measures their distances.