Dirt Work by Christine Byl Page A

clump of anything soft works in a pinch—ferns, moss, fireweed leaves rolled tight. Do not use tempting cow parsnip, especially if the sun’s out. Its oils are photo-reactive and contact with skin brings an itchy rash that’s bad enough on hands.
    Forest fires shape the North Fork, as commanding a force as glaciers in eras past. Decades of misguided suppression tactics and climate change’s heavy hand have resulted in tinderbox groves throughout the West, and the North Fork’s dog-hair lodgepole and spruce forests are easy fodder for conflagration. Late-summer heat, a dry year, a lightning strike, and the skies grow apocalyptic with ash and plume, a dirty glow visible from miles away. Some fires burn out fast and others are nipped in the bud, spotted by the fire lookout, extinguished by initial-attack teams or the glamorous smoke-jumpers who leap from the sky like superheroes. But every few years, Glacier sees a big one, often in the North Fork.
    Trail crews are backup Type II firefighters; when the need for people power trumps expertise, we get called in. Sometimes we do day work, washing hoses and cleaning saws, or, if lucky, fly in a helo to a remote cabin for structure protection. Other times, the stint is longer, a detail in fire camp, a little boomtown with canvas tents and trailers, IT systems for payroll, and two catered meals a day, more meat than even a cowboy can stomach. No steaks if you’re spiked at a backcountry site or unexpectedly out overnight—then it’s MREs with microscopic bottles of Tabasco sauce and space-age meatloaf salty enough to sap out of you whatever moisture hasn’t already gone by way of smoke or sweat. Our yellow shirts and green pants, made of fire-resistant Nomex, chafe the skin, and by the end of a two-week tour, they smell like a laboratory that went up in flames.
    The world of fire evokes ambivalence in me. Fighting fire can be fun, a welcome late-season break from the monotony of trailwork, a chance to envision ourselves heroes. There’s adrenaline and camaraderie, doing good work and bacon every morning, and, of course, overtime pay plus occasional hazard premiums. (Fire seasonals in the West like to sniff smoky air and say, “Smells like money!”) But there’s also the militarized mentality, the “hurry up and wait,” macho smoke-jocks strutting like hopped-up Marines, and the almost-too-hot-to-bear weather that nurtures fire, underwear soaked with sweat. Eventually the sneaky pleasure at getting paid premium wages to play Hacky Sack while “standing by” gives way to demoralizing sluggishness. Weeks of inefficiency and the rumbling machinations of bureaucracy grind all but the staunchest work ethic to a pulp.
    Nationwide fire policy has improved dramatically in the past thirty years, with an increasing emphasis on fire ecology and the role it plays in forest health. Some of my best friends work in fire, mapping fuels, plotting burn patterns, and prescribing where to manage a burn and when to let the flames do their work. On the ground, though, a crisis-response outlook still eclipses the long view, and the tone of fire camp lingo is all battle and charge. Epic blazes predicated on prior mismanagement don’t do much to help the ordinary citizen see the benefits of fire (for example, certain plants need fire to propagate the way other plants need water), and the media fuel the problem with their drama-hungry emphasis on homes lost! acres devastated! In mainstream rhetoric, there’s little critique of a continuing trend—multimillion-dollar home construction in fire’s version of a flood plain, which increases the human-fire interface and the likelihood of displacement. No one, it seems, can look a guy who’s lost his house in the eye and ask him, Why the hell’d you build it there? So fire remains nature’s whipping boy; a century of bad press is hard to undo in a decade or two, and for many,