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Life on the Line

Reporter's Notebook

By Dillon Tabish

I used to relish fire season.

For four summers in my late teens and early 20s, I fought fires for the State of Montana. Many of those days were spent huffing up and down mountains in broiling, smoky weather, carrying a Pulaski and the prospects of spending long hours into the night on the fire line.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a perfect job for a kid like me, a kid like Norman Maclean, who said of his initial journey into wildland firefighting at 17, “I was young and I thought I was tough and I knew it was beautiful and I was a little bit crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.”

I partially blame Maclean for my own involvement. Like most boys growing up in western Montana, I read “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories” and experienced an epiphany. Except I can’t fish. It wasn’t the famous angling epic that captured my attention, though. Maclean’s lesser known tale, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” followed him as a young man during the summer of 1919 when he worked for the fledgling U.S. Forest Service fighting fires in a remote section of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Maclean would also write “Young Men and Fire,” an award-winning nonfiction book about the tragic Mann Gulch fire of 1949, which claimed the lives of 13 men in the Helena National Forest.

Montanans have been engaged in wildland firefighting from the earliest days of our territorial saga. Many of the legendary blazes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the notorious Big Burn of 1910, ravaged our landscape and forged our early identity.

As I read Maclean’s stories and learned of my home state’s deep history, the adventure of battling fire in the wild mountains where I grew up became powerfully and mysteriously attractive.

As it happened, when I was 19, I landed a job up the road from my hometown of Missoula. And as fate would have it, our fire crew was based on the shores of the Blackfoot River, Maclean’s old fishing haunt.

Those four summers were beyond anything I could have imagined. Our crew of young men and women, many of whom grew to be close friends from our time in the mountains, swarmed blazes big and small, sometimes two or three times in one day. We learned — many times the hard way — the importance of work ethic when it mattered most; grace under pressure, Hemingway said. The first time a fire blew up in front of me — a flashy explosion in Arizona — it forced a group of us to drop our tools and run our escape route. Real danger is a valuable teacher.

I remember the first time the group of inmate firefighters from Montana State Prison, known as the “Con Crew,” arrived to help us catch a grueling fire climbing a mountainside in the remote landscape near Ovando. There was initial anxiety among some of us, but it quickly vanished as the crew of inmates roared up the mountain, digging line with tireless pride. After we successfully contained the fire past midnight, we exchanged high-fives with the crew and kicked back for a few minutes, laughing and sharing stories like a group of friends. I remember seeing something in the eyes of those men, a sense of appreciation maybe. “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows,” Emerson said.

As I’m writing this, smoke is climbing in the horizon, the first real signal of fire season’s arrival. I no longer enjoy these hazy days. But I appreciate our ongoing battle and how it forges our character of resilience.