Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REED
A plume of smoke billows into the sky, thick and gray. A stretch of yellow caution tape surrounds a metal grate. A fire ten times the size of my first burns the ground. My father’s voice, distant and choppy, is all I hear.
Reed, what have you done! Why can’t you be more like your brothers?
The memory serpents around my windpipe, but the feeling only lasts a second. Several miles off the main road in a remote area it’s clear. We’ve made it to the White Horse Campground.
Two engine crews with long hose lines draped over their shoulders control the scene. They’ve established an anchor point near the road and are drenching pine trees with arcs of water. The engine crew captain and incident commander trail up and down the south side as Jack pulls our vehicle up next to them.
“Good to see you again, Hart. This is Captain Sparrow.”
The incident commander introduces Hart to his counterpart—a guy with a beard halfway down his chest. A pirate joke lingers on the tip of my tongue, but we all remain quiet in the back seat as we listen to the report .
“We’ve got fire at the timber. Moving uphill. Rapid rate of spread. Ten-miles-per-hour winds from the southeast. We need your crew to plug into the right flank and work north toward Salmon River.” He turns his head to the side, his voice catching on the wind. I hear nothing but “Good luck out there.”
Jack nods to them as he pulls the buggy off the road and onto a hiking trail. We don’t make it very far before the surrounding brush is too dense. If we take our standard issued tires through this terrain, we’ll get stuck.
It’s not until we’re diving out of the back of our vehicle that I notice the ambulance is gone. Ben and Hailey must have stayed behind with the engine crews. Jack circles his arms to gather us and shouts his debrief over the crackle and pop of bright orange flames.
“Listen up. We’re dealing with extreme fire behavior. We’re talking flame lengths up to fifty feet in the sage and lodgepole pines. We’re keeping the crew together. Four saws up front cutting a fifty-foot swath. Everybody else with hand tools scraping behind them. We need to make it as far as we can today. Marshall, you’ll be posting lookout on that hill spinning weather. I need an update every hour on the hour.” Jack tosses him a radio. “Use Tac 3.”
“You got it, Supt.” Marshall catches the device with one hand, clips it to his collar, and slings his line pack over his back. He takes off on his own for the summit.
“What are your questions?” Jack asks the rest of us.
I raise my hand. “I’ve got a question.”
He plants his hands on his hips, his mustache set in a firm line. “Something tells me I’m going to regret hearing it.”
“How often do you think we can expect an update from Captain Jack Sparrow back there?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “You’ve been waiting the last five minutes to say that haven’t you?”
I grin. “Yes. Yes, I have.”
“ This is Copter 110, issuing water drop .” The declaration comes through Jack’s radio, and like a dam breaking, water gushes from the sky and drenches the flames a hundred feet from us. The helicopter arcs to the left, the blustering wind spraying a net of heavy mist over our entire bodies. The initial condensation dampens our clothing and drips down the lenses of our protective eyewear. Most of the crew drops to the ground in a plank for the rest of the deluge. I take it standing up, arms spread wide.
“What a time to be alive, boys!” I yell, shaking my body like a wet dog. I may look as though I just walked through a car wash fully clothed, but I feel like I just free-fell from a fifty-foot cliff.
Now this is what I came here for.
When night falls, the wind carries smoke away from the campground where we’ve settled with the engine crews. The deep-blue sky glitters with stars—a respite from the heat of a fourteen-hour workday. Clearing one mile of brush is what we have to show for it.
McCafferty was right. A day of hiking in 90 degrees is nothing like laboring beside open flames.
We dug and scraped for hours. My forearms and hands seize so badly from the fine motor strain they’re struggling to support my dinner fork. But that’s not stopping me from cramming in two thousand calories of beef and bean burritos as my stomach gnaws on my spine.
Jack squeezes Marshall and Murphy’s shoulders as he says to the crew, “Good work out there today. Let’s get some rest. We’re in this for the long haul. ”
When he steps to the side, I see Hailey waiting in the shadows beneath a tree. She’s chewing on a nail as she tracks her father’s footsteps. There’s a sadness in her eyes as she watches him. It makes me want to ask her questions. Personal questions that I’m afraid I’ll have to reciprocate. But I give in to the pull anyway and approach her.
“Long day, huh?” She stuffs her hands in her pockets as I stop in front of her.
“They’re about to get even longer I’m afraid.” I sweep my eyes past the charred vegetation where the woods glow a brilliant orange.
“I heard,” she says. “They’re setting up a fire camp here tomorrow. This place is about to become a city.”
We both scan the beginnings of that new city forming, with water tender crews and hand crews setting up tents. The idea that this fire could morph into a new animal every day excites me, no two days on the job looking alike. It’s exactly what I was hoping for.
“That means you’re staying too?” I ask.
She nods, and I smirk.
“What?”
“Oh, there’s only one part of this new camp I’m disappointed about,” I say.
“What’s that?”
I take a step closer to her. “What happened this morning not happening again.”
Even in the dark, I watch the color in her face deepen, like a layer of red crayon shading in the apples of her cheeks. Her eyes flare as she bites her lip.
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about that,” she whispers.
I lean in slightly, her back connecting with the tree trunk behind her. I inch as close to her lips as possible. Just a breath apart. Her chest rises and falls in rapid succession as I whisper against her jaw, “We’re not. Casual, remember?”
Her exhale ghosts across my face. “Right.” She swallows once. Blinks twice. Then she sweeps out to the side and jogs away.
I release a held breath. “You can do it,” I whisper out loud to the tree. “Casual as a cucumber.”