The State of Idaho had not hired us to have water fights with its fire trucks. So on that surprisingly hot June day, we didn’t pay much attention to the other crew when they parked their truck on the dirt road in front of our lunch spot while we relaxed in the shade.  Nor did we give their efforts to start their water pump engine any heed.  However, when they sprayed us cold water, that did get our attention.  I leaped up and ran for cover while the five others in my crew jumped onto our truck and started the pump.  The two crews soaked each other, hurled insults, and laughed until long after lunch break was over.

When we returned to work, our crew leader mentioned we would have to head into town early to fill the water tanks. Since piling brush wasn’t what anyone called a good time, the prospect of knocking off early didn’t exactly trouble us.

During the previous winter, a crew had thinned the twenty year-old stand of Douglas fir, grand fir, tamarack, and white pine by cutting down the small trees, the misshapen trees, and the trees crowding out those growing fast and straight.  Now, our job on this fire fighting crew was to remove the slash left behind.

It was tedious, hot work: bend, pick up, throw; bend, pick up, throw; bend, pick up, throw.

Those who had worked on the fire crew previous summers got to cut the slash with chainsaws.  While they had the honor and privilege of running a saw, their job was no less boring and difficult.  They spent their days humped over a noisy, vibrating machine, and their breaks came when they needed to refill the saw with gas and chain oil or when brush caught in the chain to throw it from the bar.  In the mid-1970s, sawyers didn’t wear safety chaps. They were too hot, and besides a woods worker wasn’t supposed to look like a cowboy.   Neither did the saws have the automatic breaks and guards that saws have today.  So, the sawyers had to watch what they were doing and keep their hands, thighs, and boots away from the chain. It was hungry even when dull.

The rest of us threw the cut slash into piles that would dry until fall.  Then, we who had spent the summer protecting the forest from fire would walk through the forest with propane burners or cans of diesel and set the piles on fire.  This, unlike our present work, was immensely entertaining.  Sometimes the brush piles didn’t want to ignite, but when they took off, their blue and orange and yellow flames leaped and danced through the pile of dry branches and sent embers high into the gray autumn sky.  The incense of burning fir and pine filled the air and permeated our clothes. The end of the work season was drawing near.  Hunting season, Thanksgiving, and fall layoff approached.  Even if it was raining, it was a good time to be in the woods.  You could always dry off with the warmth of a just-set fire.

On this hot June day, we were not thinking much about fire—it was too early in the season for that. Somehow, however, a fire flared up in some of the dry slash we had piled.  Maybe a chainsaw overheated and no one noticed.  Maybe a sawyer spilled gasoline and a spark from his saw ignited the gas that flared up in the dry, dead, cut limbs.  Maybe it was a cigarette.   Given the way things went back then, maybe some kid was trying to light a joint on that hot, windy afternoon. Maybe someone set the fire on purpose thinking to make some overtime or hazardous duty pay.  Maybe he wasn’t thinking.  Anyhow, a fire began to burn in the stand of timber we were supposed to be improving.

We ran to the fire truck, rolled out the hose, and started the pump engine.  The spray of water arced onto the flames and quickly knocked them down.  Then the water stopped—the tank had gone empty.  The other crew couldn’t get their pump started—they had run out of gas.  By the time they got their pump running, the fire had a good start and was already blowing up into the crowns of the firs and pines and making a run despite our efforts to stop the blaze.   It raced up the ridge, leaping from tree to tree, whipped by the stiff afternoon breeze. 

For a moment, we slowed the fire’s spread with a stream of water from the other crew’s hose.  Then their tank went empty. The fire crackled back to life.  We stood in disbelief.  Fires weren’t supposed to take off like this in early summer.  At first the crew chief was too embarrassed to radio for help, but now he had no choice.

Someone mentioned the water fight and the crew chief said to forget that.  We had to get the fire out. 

Guys with chainsaws headed up the ridge and started felling trees in an attempt to make a firebreak.  The rest of us worked on the edge of the fire with our shovels trying to smother the flames with dirt.  The wind freshened and the flames created their own draft.  Desperately, we worked against the flames.  Cinders burned through our shirts.  Smoke stung our eyes and choked our lungs.  The heat singed the hair from our arms.  My heart beat as if it were ready to burst.

The blaze spread quickly and we were in danger of being surrounded by fire. In our zeal to stop it, we were working too close.  It was too hot.  We had to get out of there.  So we regrouped, headed further up the ridge to cut a fire line, and hoped the Orofino office would get us the help we needed soon.

With our hand tools and chainsaws, we couldn’t work fast enough.  No matter how quickly we cut and dug, the fire gained on us.  The sweltering heat, the choking smoke, the crackling flames pressed ever closer. The fire began to overrun our hand-dug line. We were losing the battle, and it looked like we were going to lose the whole stand of trees—a stand that the state had spent huge amounts of money on thinning and preening for timber harvest.

Just as we were about ready to give up and get out of the fire’s way, a D6 (good sized Caterpillar bulldozer) came roaring up the hill.  Its silvery blade knocked over small and medium sized trees. Then the cat backed up and scraped the duff to expose damp, brown soil.  Working this way, the cat skinner gouged out a fire line far wider than we ever could cut with our hand tools. 

We got out of his way, waved, and went back to re-enforce the fire line the bulldozer built.  The cat skinner smiled, waved briefly, and kept rumbling up the ridge building the firebreak. We cut roots that might burn, felled trees near the line down the hill into the fire, and put out smokes that windblown embers and fired brands started across the line. 

Tanker trucks arrived along with other crews.  We rolled out hose, dragged it up the hill, and started the pumps.  The water doused the flames.  Then we aimed at the hotspots. The cold water wet our hot gloves, shirts and pants.  The cool spray gave relief from the heat of the flames, the heat of hard work, and the heat of the day.  The water hissed in the smoldering fire and steam mixed with smoke.

By dinnertime, we had the fire out.  Some men stayed to tend the fire by dousing hot spots and flare ups through the night.  The rest of us, as we rode back to town, calculated the couple hours of overtime pay plus hazard pay

I said, “fī yer.”  Barb, my then wife, who was from the Orofino area, ribbed me about my Minnesota accent.  She said the word had one syllable: “fīr.”  Even though I worked in the woods as sawyer, even though I could buck six or seven truck loads of timber to send to the mill in a day, even though I drank a six pack of beer on the way home from the woods each night and smoked a pack of Camels each day, I was still an outsider. 

With Barb’s uncle Lester, the man operating that bulldozer that saved the day years earlier after the water fight in the woods, I dipped into my mother-in-law’s whiskey, while he told stories about playing baseball, raising barns, fighting fire, and labor strife in the area’s mills. Still I was an outsider.

I said the property we owned on a bench above the Clearwater River not far from Orofino was dangerously built up with an accumulation of dead grass. We needed to burn some of it off.  Lester didn’t say much.  Barb said I was nuts.  I was a city boy who didn’t know brass from gold about fire.

I, like most foresters and extension agents, considered controlled fire to be a great cleanser.  To eliminate slash left behind by logging operations, which harbors insects and disease that attack trees, foresters employed fire.  Plus, fire offers a good way to return some nutrients and minerals to forest soil after it has been logged. Extension agents and state foresters urged landowners to keep dead grass and other burnable material from building up in ungrazed pastures and woodlots or along roadsides. The best way to do that, they said, was to set controlled burns.

I had some experience with this: I had helped touch off controlled burns with the Forest Service.  Plus, I had burned many a field with another of Barb’s uncles who owned a 1500-acre wheat ranch near Nezperce on the Camas Prairie. He hired me to help run the place.   He lived in town; Barb and I lived in the family ranch house seven miles southwest of town.  A magnificent place built near the turn of the last century, the six bedroom house stood on a hill that offered a view that extended from White Bird Pass in the south, to the Selway Crags in the east and to Moscow Mountain in the north.  During the summers, I worked raising wheat, barley, canola and Kentucky bluegrass seed.  Each August, after we harvested grass seed, we regularly burned the mile-square fields.  Or sometimes, when a harvested field of wheat was filled with so much stubble we couldn’t easily plow, we burned the stubble off. 

This field burning was a time-honored practice and nearly as common as plowing.  In the 1970s it was part of the farming landscape even though we knew it left fields bare and, thus, in danger of eroding more than when stubble is left in the field.  We also knew burning eliminates the organic matter healthy, productive soils need.  Still, some farmers reasoned—whether rightly or wrongly, but mostly wrongly--that field burning killed insects and diseases along with offering an expedient way to clear a field.  More importantly for farmers, bluegrass needs fire to produce large quantities of seed. Nowadays, much to the dismay of bluegrass farmers, field burning is forbidden in many states and somewhat controlled in Idaho.  Air pollution from field burning has killed people and causes whole areas to suffer under a pall of smoke.  In the 1970s, however, we didn’t worry much about those sorts of things.

Burning a dry field of stubble is one exciting process.  After circling the edge of the field with a disk to expose bare soil and create a firebreak, we would wait for a still day or a day with a little wind.  When conditions were just right, I attached a section of harrow to the tractor and drove through the field to fill the harrow’s teeth with dry stubble.  Then Barb’s uncle lit the stubble in the harrow, and I drove the tractor along the windward side of the field pulling the burning stubble.

Flames spread with amazing fury.  The holocaust rushed across the mile wide section in a flash— in ten minutes the square mile field was burned.  The smoke rose to form a mushroom-shaped cloud as if from a nuclear bomb.  The roar filled our ears, and we could only hope that our firebreak would hold.  The thought of someone being caught in this conflagration was beyond imagination.

The fire left the field smoldering, blackened, and bare.  After the fire cooled down, rough-legged and red-tailed hawks appreciated our work.  They gorged themselves on so many mice and voles they could barely fly. 

Based on this experience, which I considered extensive, I assured Barb that burning a little dead grass alongside a road would be easy.  So one glorious spring day, the first clear day after weeks of storms and rain, we decided to head up to our land for a visit and to do a little clean-up work.  Barb got some food and beer together.  I threw the fencing tools and a couple shovels, a rake, and a pitchfork in the pickup.  Why, she asked, was I bringing a jug of diesel. To burn off some of the old, accumulated grass, I told her.  She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

Our twenty acres faced south and afforded a view down the Clearwater River canyon.  Half the acreage was flat and cleared years previously for farm ground.  The other half rose steeply up a hillside covered with good-sized ponderosa pine mixed with Douglas fir.  We mended fence and cleaned up some old junk. As we ate lunch in the warm sun, birds sang in the pines and firs, and off in the brush grouse were mating and booming.  A couple of hawks soared in a thermal above the river canyon and disappeared into the clear blue sky.

Barb was 23; I was 30 when we met.  She was from Peck, Idaho; I was from St. Paul, which seemed like a big city. She wanted kids; I didn’t. I liked hanging out at home; she liked the bar scene in Orofino.  We were, despite our differences, in love.  Barb was wild about me.  I don’t know how many times I tried to douse the embers of love. I ignored her, went out with other women, and tried to forget about her to make her forget about me, but she wouldn’t give up.  When I rented an old homestead on the breaks above Big Creek, she moved in. We had a yo-yo relationship: when she drifted off, I pulled her back in; when I drifted off, she reeled me back in.

She was a wild one. Long before tattoos became popular, she had a long, single-stem rose tattooed down her back. She stayed in town partying late, got drunk, argued with the cops. She collected black animals: a black lab, black cats, and black chickens.  For a while she even had an injured raven with a broken wing that we found on a logging road not far from home.  That raven, which smelled like burned wood, ruled the menagerie with its black eyes and beak.   My nick-name was “Animal” because with my long hair and beard the loggers I worked with thought said I looked like the crazy Muppet.  Friday nights, we’d close the bar, go to a friend’s house and party dawn. Then we’d drive home, never once questioning the wisdom of driving when we were so drunk we barely could walk.  Still, compared to her, I was a wet blanket, and some friends called me “the old fuddy duddy.”

One Friday evening, I came home after a week of work in the woods.  Barb came running out to greet me.  She wore a pink dress with little pink elephants on it – her party dress.  After a big hug and a kiss, she said she couldn’t stay in that house any more.  Why not, I asked, crest-fallen.  Because packrats had invaded the house, she screamed as she told me about one running over her as she lay in bed trying to fall asleep.   

Since she had her party dress on, we went to town, got drunk, partied till 3AM, drove home (our guardian angel kept us on the steep, narrow, winding road up the canyon to our house that night), and in the morning, despite a roaring hangover, I ripped up floor boards until I found the rat nest, then set traps and put out poison bait.  We got rid of the packrats and Barb stayed.  Her folks were not exactly happy with this.  Still, she persisted.  I persisted. We persisted.  The spark flared. We went to Coeur d’Alene to get married and stood nervously in a judge’s chambers as he intoned the marriage vows.  When he paused, I blurted out “I do.”  The judge said, “Okay, but not yet, son.”  He finished my part of the vows, nodded to me, and I repeated “I do.”  Barb said her vows, I gave her a ring, and we went to the bar to party.

In the shade on our twenty acres near Orofino, we lay together and talked over plans for our future house.  We finished our beer and dozed in the spring sun, a few flies buzzing, a neighbor’s rooster crowing, and warblers singing in the trees.  With lunch over, I decided it was time to do a little burning, so I raked up a pile of brown grass, soaked it with diesel, lit a match, and set it to the pile. Nothing happened. 

I raked up more grass, doused it with plenty of diesel, and lit it.  The pile smoldered and finally flames licked through the pile.  With the pitchfork, I spread the flames to grass lying dead along side the dirt road that cut across our land. The fire went out.

Barb kept saying I was nuts.  The dead grass was fine. This place has looked liked this for years,] she said, and it hadn’t burned.  I, however, was insistent and kept trying. Come summer, I said, it would be a fire hazard.  Better to get rid of the dead grass near the road now.

After about an hour of fooling around with piles of grass and diesel, plus a little gasoline, I still hadn’t burned more than a few yards along the road.  But we had run out of fuel. So I convinced Barb to drive back to town with the empty plastic jug to get more diesel and beer while I tried one more time to get things burning.

She left, repeating I was nuts, and I continued my mission.  The day was warming.  The wind was rising. I set another pile on fire.  It took off.  I spread the flames to the next clump of grass.  Slowly it began to burn, and I spread the flames further.

Soon the grass was smoldering and burning on its own.  Then instead of trying to encourage the fire, I started trying to keep the flames contained to the grass near the road.  I put out one spot, but the warm afternoon wind blew the flames to another, then another.  I tried to stand in front of the burning edge of fire and beat the flames out with my shovel.   The flames, however, were too hot. I couldn’t get near them.

The wind picked up.  The flames raced across our field and headed up the hill toward the adjoining property. I dropped my shovel and ran like hell to the nearest neighbor’s house, praying to heaven that my fire wouldn’t hurt anyone.  Cows looked at me curiously as I sprinted up the road. Magpies cackled from the brush.  Dogs barked.  At the neighbor’s door, I knocked furiously and waited.  No one came to the door.  I shouted hello. No one answered. Hesitating a moment, as I had never been in the house and had talked to these people only once, I tried the door.  It was unlocked.  I ran in, found the phone, and dialed 911.

The operator was amused.  April was too early for fire season she said, and no one had any fire rigs ready.  I begged for help.  She said she’d see what she could do.

Defeated, I hiked back to our property to see what destruction my fire had wrought.  The fire had galloped across our field and up the hill, burning through the grass covering the lower part of our ponderosa pine stand. Then it continued across the grassy hill onto another neighbor’s property, met a gravel road, and burned itself out. 

The area smelled of burned grass, soot, and burning pine.  A few stumps smoldered.  A clump of brush crackled as it burned. 

I walked around beating out hot spots with my shovel.  Men from the fire protection district arrived in red pickups.  They commented on what a fine job I had done burning off the field, talked about the weather, and mused this was one field they wouldn’t have to worry about when things turned dry in the coming August.  As the red pickups departed down our road, Barb returned with the jug full of diesel.  She said, “I guess you won’t need this now.”  I shook my head and answered, “I’d be glad to take one of the beers you brought.”  She looked at me like I might not get one. 

That summer, we had a beautiful stand of grass. Although my plan had worked and happily I had not destroyed any property or burned up any timber, I forswore setting open fires.  The theory made sense, but the practice was too scary.  

A friend once told me that I was playing with fire marrying a red head like Barb. Actually, I said, she was a strawberry blond, but he insisted that color was close enough.  Years later, before we divorced, I told Barb that it seemed the fire had gone out.  She said I still didn’t know how to say, “fire.”

Textbooks tell us that fire requires three elements: air, fuel, and heat.  Based on my experience, even with all three you still won’t have a fire unless conditions are just right. Also, experience tells me that once a fire starts to create its own heat, if it has enough fuel and enough air – in the form of wind – there’s darn little you can do to stop it.

Like fire, love sometimes is difficult to get started and requires fuel along with energy to keep it going.  When love is burning bright, it’s like a raging blaze that is nearly impossible to extinguish. But when love’s fire turns to cold ashes, it’s darn hard to rekindle the flame.