Young Men and Fire (19 page)

Walking behind, Laird and I could see the two in the same picture frame and, high above in the same picture, the cross of Hellman. We should like to have had a photograph of the two climbing toward the cross, but the cross was too far away to have shown—only in our memories are all three in the same frame, two returning and one forever there. We kept wondering what they were talking about, although we made a point of staying far enough behind so we could not hear.

Then they stopped and waited for us to catch up. Sallee said, “Hellman’s cross is not in the right place.” Rumsey said, “I agree.” The cross was still a half mile above, and the grass everywhere was a foot or more high. I said, “We’re lucky we can see the cross from here,” but I didn’t argue. It was Rumsey who had started down Rescue Gulch at midnight to get water from the Missouri for Hellman, and it was Sallee whom he had met halfway up leading Jansson, the doctors, and the rescue crew. The two together had had no trouble finding Hellman in that land which in the dark had lost its identity. Twenty-nine
years later they were going to give themselves a test to determine whether, unlike most mortals, they could find their way in this world and the world that died behind them.

Sallee said, “The cross is too close to the rock slide where the fire went around us.” He said to Rumsey, “Remember, we yelled after the fire went by, and Hellman answered about thirty yards away.”

Rumsey said, “I don’t think his cross is even on the right side of that draw.”

Sallee said, “I’m positive,” a word combination he likes. “On our way back this afternoon, let’s go by the rock slide and check.”

Later that afternoon, when we came back and were looking down toward the cross but were still quite a way from it, Rumsey said, “I think we are right. It should be farther from the rock slide, on the other side of the draw and lower down. His answer came from below.”

Sallee said, “I know positively it is wrong. There was a big, flat rock lower down on the other side of the draw, and we put him on it to keep his burns out of the ashes.”

“That’s it,” they said when we got close to the flat rock. “His cross should be here.”

Sallee said to Rumsey, “We could be doubly positive if we could find the tin can Dodge left you when he and I started for the river and help. Remember,” he said, “he left you a can of Irish white potatoes and his canteen. He had thrown everything else away.”

Rumsey looked behind him and said, as a Methodist, “By gosh, there’s a rusty old can.”

I started to reach for it, but Rumsey stopped me. “Don’t touch it. Let me think for a minute.” Then he said, “Of course, I didn’t have a can opener with me—only my jackknife. Besides, Hellman didn’t want the potatoes, just the juice, even though it was salty and would make him more thirsty, so I jabbed my knife twice into opposite sides of the top of the can, one of them to let in air for the juice to come out the other one.” Then Sallee reached down and handed Rumsey the
rusty can, and it had two knife jabs on opposite sides of its top. They had passed their own test.

So Hellman’s cross is not properly placed, as two ghosts who are woodsmen could tell a half mile away. It should be over thirty yards to the west of the rock slide, across a draw, lower down the hill, and next to a big, flat rock.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE IN HELENA
, while Laird was down on the Missouri somewhere trying to find a very special kind of friend who owned a special kind of boat with a motor that worked, Rumsey, Sallee, and I sat several hours around the dining table before carrying out the dishes. We were sure that tomorrow there would be four men in Mann Gulch who collectively knew more about its tragedy than would ever be assembled there again. Two were the only living survivors, both of them still outdoorsmen; another was one of the Smokejumpers’ finest modern foremen, who had become information officer at the Smokejumper base in Missoula, answering all questions the public could think of asking about getting to a fire and back again; and I had been on some big fires too, and, if that was before the other three were born and made me a little slow of foot, I compensated by having collected the best existing file of documents on Mann Gulch, including statements Rumsey and Sallee had made soon after the fire, which I intended to carry in a packsack with me into Mann Gulch the next day when we convened as a complete court upon ourselves—plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, attorneys, judge, and jurors. In such distinguished company, including the packsack, it would be hard for any one of us to remain far wrong. At least, not for long.

Since it takes a lot of daytime just to get in and out of Mann Gulch, we were selecting our targets in advance so we wouldn’t end up tomorrow as scattered over Mann Gulch as the cargo had been after it was dropped from the plane. Inevitably, our
sights all lined up on the same target, the scene of the catastrophe and the crosses.

You would have picked the place of the crosses yourself; nearly anyone would, so ancient and binding are the connections between drama, religion, and the top of a hill. The Christian scene of suffering, where hill meets sky, has been painted so many thousands of times that something within it must direct it to paint itself.

On pages 10-11 of the photo gallery in this book is a photograph in which much of what was left of the catastrophe of Mann Gulch appears in quiet composition but is short of being classic in the composition of catastrophe. I found it in a Forest Service file and so for a moment felt that nature had composed it, only later realizing that it is the work of a partly informed photographer with a good enough eye to combine the standard principles of photographic design with much of the ground on which the historical and dramatic catastrophe happened. But it is short of a perfect combination of art and history because an error in photographic art seriously divests it of the intensity of the real thing, and, what is more, it omits a slice of adjoining ground which would not have been hard to include and on which two of the most important events in the tragic story occurred. Still, it was the best of the historical photographs of the scene of suffering I had found, so it was the photograph Laird and I had to work with as we started our quest for the missing parts, and you too should start with it.

Despite its faults, this composition of the scene effectively observes the traditional three-part division of foreground, middle distance, and something at the top to frame it, each of these topographical and aesthetic formations making visible a separate dramatic and historical part of the tragedy, with each given its proper size.

The foreground is the darkened land of death extending completely across the bottom of the picture—dead trees, burned, fallen, and rotten, a broken stub of one of the fallen trees standing close to and as high as the cross to expose its death. A thistle, the only thing living, fronts the white cross of
Stanley J. Reba, which is the lowest on the hill of all the crosses and which possesses all the rest of the photograph and says what the rest is all about. Topographically, historically, and dramatically the end of this tragedy properly rests upon this dark foreground.

The upper frame of the tragedy is also composed of topography, history, and drama. The reef of rocks at the top was probable salvation if it could be reached. Near the top is the highest standing tree on the slope (marked X on the photograph). It comes out of the middle distance, but its top connects visually with the reef and even the sky, suggestively just to the left of an opening in the reef that might be the crevice with a juniper bush on the other side. Likewise, the dead tree might be the tree Dodge stood beside when he lit his escape fire. Above the frame is one faint semi-arid cloud, perhaps a reminder that Smokejumpers sooner or later return to the sky from where they are dropped, certainly a sign that rain will not come for days.

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.

N
EAR 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.