Young Men and Fire

For the last few days the leading news story in my corner of the world has been the shocking loss of almost an entire team of smokejumpers - nineteen out of twenty guys - who were fighting a lightning-sparked wildfire near Prescott, Arizona.  Watching the reports on what happened and why, and the sorrowing but somehow pragmatic faces of the spokespersons ("sometimes you do everything you know and everything you're taught, and it just doesn't work out"), I've found myself thinking again about a book I read maybe fifteen years ago by Norman Maclean, mainly known as the author of A River Runs Through It, called - like this post, because I can't better it - Young Men and Fire.  It's a non-fiction work about another wildfire, the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire outside of Helena, Montana, and the team of 16 young flame-jumpers who were dropped on it in what was supposed to be a routine mission until the wind changed, the fire leaped the ravine ahead of them, and they ended up in a race for their lives to the top of the ridge.  The book ambles along at a deceptively leisurely pace considering its dramatic subject, and it does tell you somewhat more than you may want to know about the science of wildfire - you have to whack your way through a lot of stuff about relative wind velocity etc -  but Maclean's clean, direct style is strangely compelling, and the story is layered like Peer Gynt's onion with tangential meditations on the impassive brutality of nature and the  tragic bravado of youth, on history and science and literature, and the peculiar sense of obligation Maclean began to feel towards the young men whose story he was trying to tell and who seemed to be asking him to find in their fragmented and incomplete history an adequate explanation for what happened to them.  He doesn't go on and on about anything, he just sets it down gently in the light of his lucid prose and leaves you to consider it on your own time.

A very effective strategy, as it turns out.  I had no particular expectations about the book one way or the other when I read it, and at the time I wouldn't have thought it had the staying power that it's proved to have, one of those books that keeps on whispering to you in various ways for years afterwards, particularly when current event so closely echoes its story. In retrospect it's begun to seem to me to be about, among other things, the nature of faith, and of courage.  There was a time when I subscribed somewhat to the theory that heroes are people without imagination - in the sense that they can act as they do because they don't project the outcome - but now that I'm more mature in both years and understanding I see that it's more complicated and more impressive than that.  Courage, I think now, isn't about the absence of imagination; it's about the transcendence of it - knowing the danger, and feeling the fear, and going forward anyway.   Just as there's no trick - and no weight - to forgiveness if the wrong is forgotten, there's no challenge to being brave if there's nothing to be frightened of.  And in these times, when such a high value is put on the need to be Forever 21 and our elderly are too often shuffled away so we don't have to see them and be forcibly reminded that we won't, it seems that nothing frightens us more than the idea of dying.  

It may be partly due to our wiring.  I read somewhere that the one thing the human brain in all its infinite complexity cannot wrap itself around is the idea of its own cessation; it can make metaphors for itself to try to understand that as an intellectual construct, but it's fundamentally a narcissistic organ, and it can't imagine a world that exists without its being there to perceive it. (You can test this out at home.  It's true.)  It's also a fear that underlies many of the messages delivered to us daily by film, television and advertising.  Every day in one way or another it's implied to us that if we just eat these foods, take these pills, buy this mattress, we won't die - it's like that game where you add the words "in bed" to ordinary phrases, try it with television commercials, you'll be amazed how often it fits.  American society spends an enormous amount of time, energy and money denying the one thing that is an absolute certainty, impartially, for everything that lives.  We can barely bring ourselves to even use The D Word anymore, referring gingerly instead to "end of life," "passing into spirit," "taking a message to the other side," anything to avoid the short sharp shock of that one blunt syllable and the great mystery that stands behind it, as if we think if we don't name it, it'll forget about us.   But people like smoke-jumpers, cops, firefighters, soldiers - anyone whose job description actually includes the considerable possibility of getting killed while doing it - are the opposite.  They own their mortality, every day, in a peculiarly healthy and well-adjusted way - because they have to, sure, and maybe also in some cases for the rush, but also because they are so fucking brave.  They balance out the rest of us. They open their arms to what the majority of us are afraid to look at, and stand up to it armed with the only things they have:  their belief in their own skill, their mastery of the best tools we can give them, and their faith that doing something of value for a greater good is, should circumstances turn against them, a worthy way to go out. 

I'm what I guess I would describe as a spiritual agnostic with pagan leanings (I think there's something out there bigger than Phil, to quote Mel Brooks, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go) and I don't know what I think comes next when we're done here,  although I believe something does.  This isn't the dress rehearsal, but the show is continuous.  Someone I knew years ago said she thought that Heaven was getting to go back to the significant moments in your life when you had to decide between two equally attractive options and make the other choice, which is a nice idea.  Maybe our after, or interim, lives are shaped by what we imagine them to be.  Maybe it's different for everyone.  If that's true, then I hope for the Prescott Jumpers there was a calm green place waiting, with a benign and cooling breeze, the music of flowing water, and the spirits of grateful trees to greet and protect them.

They've earned that.