We arrived in Oregon to cold August temps in the mountains, on a resource order to the Potter Fire, we’d been told. We’d shipped down from the Cow Canyon and Vantage fires in eastern Washington where we’d been posted for the last 11 days to finish out our roll, here. As we circled up the next morning I remember how the briefing began,
So, there’s been a change of plans. We’ll be working the Swamp Fire, Division November, and a pause. I didn’t need to hear the next words because I already knew what that meant, because I’d been following the news.
We’d be replacing the division where a hotshot fatality had occurred, just two days prior on the Willamette National Forest. Collin Hagan, 27, of the Craig Interagency Hotshot crew had been struck and killed by a falling tree, while working the Big Swamp Fire.
Our captain told us he wouldn't put us anywhere that our safety would be compromised. The briefing ended the same way it always did. Questions, comments, concerns? The crew was silent.
The next days went by in kind of a daze. We cut a p-line that morning, and I was off step, off-rhythm in my cutting as our two saw teams cut the lead. We were among bigger timber than we’d been in all season. Thick brush beneath old snags. I felt like I was stumbling. I apologized to my partner for being slow, and in his kind way he just shrugged and thanked me for being safe. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. It all seemed too fast. I watched the other team move in what seemed to me like a wild cutting frenzy. I felt repelled.
The next day our saw teams went on a snagging mission. I watched tensely as one of my saw team members fumbled with his cut on a big tree he was not experienced enough to read and was relieved when our assistant captain intervened to coach him through a double cut. I felled two candlestick snags calmly, dropped them right where I wanted them to go, and observed my clean stump, my dialed Humboldts, and my numbness, as my crew members gave a nod and we continued on. I remember feeling out of place despite how well I did my job.
The next few days we tied in with the other two shot crews that had also come in to replace Division November. I recognized a buggy and reached out to a friend on one of the shot crews, finding some time at fire camp after dinner one night to chat. We caught up awkwardly, mentioning the fatality, neither of us quite having the words. I remember as we parted we told each other to be safe out there, before we headed back to our respective camps. I remember feeling the weight of that. In fire, you have to more frequently and intensely confront the fact that you never know when you’ll see someone again.
On the second to last day I started my saw to find that I had filled the gas tank with oil the night before, something I’ve never done in my seven years of running a chainsaw. I dumped it out immediately, cursing myself for the mistake. I felt overwhelmed. It occurred to me that I was incredibly tired. I was being hard on myself for it.
How could I not be, with all of the movement continuing around me? It occurred to me that I was suppressing more than just fire.
Duty, Integrity, Respect. I reflect. The three tenets of wildland fire suppression. I had done my due diligence, showed up for my crew and the tasks assigned. But what about the other two? Where is the integrity, in burying grief? Where is the respect in the thinking that you could replace one human life, with another?
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I left the Forest Service after we returned home from that assignment. It’s taken me a month to announce it because I haven’t had the words. I still don’t.
The shock I felt at receiving that last assignment is only now just registering. It felt like a lack of recognition for a human life. The march wore on, we reformed the line, we continued the war, and it was this, more than any of it, that finally stole my spirit. I think this is where trauma takes root. In the suppression of our own humanity.
I kicked the dust, I kept hiking, doing, working, among the trees that had struck and killed a brother. Ash coated my boots. I couldn’t shake something my squaddie had said earlier in the season. Humans are like trees. We are constantly surrounded by our own death. All I could think, was at least trees do not suppress it. So, finally, I acknowledge that I no longer can.
The nature of working a fire suppression job, is to keep on. We kept our heads down, we kept moving. I knew I’d done it for a whole summer, was phyiscally capable of doing it. But something went numb in me, when we got our marching orders that day, on that lightning strike fire in the middle of nowhere. Sent to a line where a young man, my age, was killed just days prior. He was short-hauled out from the scene of the accident. In the coming days, a helicopter landing zone was put in, retroactively. I remembering noticing the irony of this, while everything kept moving.
I question now whether the agency had my back, after a summer spent working a 6-1s schedule, living out of my truck in one of the hottest parts of eastern Washington, making just over minimum wage and eating shit food on fire assignments and now, this. I was literally at war, in service to a federal agency committed to protecting its own face. In my experience, that agency was not concerned about how it maintained its public perception, so long as it did. The inner workings of this big machine sickened me. It treated me and my coworkers like replaceable parts.
I had great leadership on my crew. I had great crew members. Humans that I saw as my team and family. But my ability to be a teammate buckled when I witnessed how the agency moved following the death of a member. How could I continue to support a mission when the mission did not support us?
Why do we fight lightning start fires in the middle of nowhere? Why do we attempt to stamp out every last fire? Why do we see fire suppression as heroic? Why do suppress our pain when our brothers fall? Who are we actually in service to? Why do we push down grief, anger, hurt? Why do we continue to fight a losing battle?
I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t work for an agency that devalues human life. My disposability was reflected back to me in the thousands of meal trays with uneaten pastries and meat wads that filled the trash bins at the fire camps that no one could stomach because they weighed us down and gave us indigestion. The food we were provided was not fit to nourish someone working 16 hour shifts on the line. We were not valued in life or death. My assistant captain with a gluten intolerance was not provided a meal option on a daily basis that honored his intolerance, and lived on a couple bars a day that he’d packed as backups. He was not alone, among the thousands who do this job. Where is the humanity in this? And also, to what end will we wage a war on nature, without recognizing it is also a war on ourselves?
The way we hack at the soil of the forest floor to prevent fire, must be as damaging to the forest as the way we force ourselves to continue hacking away for a chance at an existence in a culture that does not value human life. How much longer will we choose to inflict that damage, and support that paradigm?
August subscriptions will be donated to Fusee Fire, who are seeking to change the paradigm from fighting fire to working with fire and restoring it to the landscape, which is so needed. Check out their link and work here:
September subscriptions will be donated to the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters Foundation, who are advocating for the rights and wellbeing of those on the line.
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This is really well done. Thanks for writing it—there are so many people that need to read this. This culture of putting your head down and continuing to work despite everything—including death and grief and the senselessness of engaging on a lightning strike in the middle of nowhere immediately after a fatality— is completely unsustainable. Glad you recognized that, though I understand how tough it is to leave that world regardless of the circumstances.