Chasing Smoke
August 1969. A lightning storm sets 28 fires across the reservation in ten minutes, and with the seasoned crews fighting blazes in Idaho, an 18-year-old radio dispatcher is handed a Jeep, four untrained volunteers, and a job: stop a grass fire before it crests the hill and races down into the valley, through the homes and ranches of everyone he knows.
He has no radio, no experience, and no idea what’s waiting on the other side of the ridge. He makes one decision, then another. And then the wind changes.
Told in the voice of a man who has carried one afternoon for more than fifty years, Chasing Smoke is a gripping, beautifully paced story about courage, guilt, youth, and the moments that decide who we become.
Part I: Introduction
“You asked if I was ever in any danger.”
“’S’cuse me?” Greg looked at the drink in front of the old man. There was a little room now so he popped two plastic straws into the glass. A drop of the contents, dark as old honey, fell on the scarred bar top. Greg whisked it away with his rag.
“A minute ago, you asked if I was ever in any danger.” He gestured toward front of the bar and they both turned to look through the windows at the dusky grayish-brown light filtering through the valley. “When I said I used to fight wildfires when I was a kid.”
Greg stared at him blankly. He’d just been making drink order conversation, asking how the guy was faring with all the smoke in the air. He’d been up on a ladder, turning on the old, pre-indoor smoking ban air filter when the guy walked in and settled at the back corner of the bar. He acted like a regular but Greg had never seen him in the six months he’d been behind this particular bar.
Part 2: An Unforgettable Experience
You have to understand, it was different in those days: pretty informal, especially here on the res. When the fires started, they didn’t ask how old you were. They looked at how big you were, how fit, and could you likely handle a shovel. There was also almost no training. You got most of that on the job, learning from the more experienced guys.
Of course, they didn’t just pick you out of the cradle. They started you slow, on small fires. Some stump somewhere, smoldering from a lightning strike, and gradually moved you on to bigger stuff. By the time I’m telling you about, my boss had enough confidence in me to let me run the radio watch, coordinating incoming calls with the appropriate responses.
So that afternoon, when this nasty little bunch of lightning came through and gave us 28 fires in ten minutes across the res, one of them right above town, a grass fire growing like the Vietnam War. He put me on dispatch, grabbed a bunch of local guys - like I said, all our regular guys were gone on fires in other places - and headed up the hill.
Part 3: A Life Forever Changed
The fire jumped our line three times. Three times we had the start of a good line and it pushed us back. Every time the wind picked up a little more. The fourth time I stopped doing what I was supposed to and started digging line like everybody else. Which was a mistake.
You see, the job of a crew boss - and that was the job I was doing at that moment, even if I wasn’t trained for it - is not to fight the fire. It’s to make sure the crew is safe while they fight the fire. I knew that. I’d heard it over and over. But up there, on that hill, in that smoke and heat, I forgot it.
And almost killed us all.