In a new book, Fire and
Ashes, author John N. Maclean leads readers through three
sweaty-palmed stories about human encounters with
wildfire.
Maclean returns to the ground his father, Norman
Maclean, covered in the 1992 book, Young Men and Fire. He joins the
last living survivor of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana to
retrace the final steps and moments of the 13 smokejumpers who
died, and to re-evaluate government reports and his father’s
own conclusions. The author also pushes us into thick chaparral in
California during the 1953 Rattlesnake Fire; the arson-caused blaze
killed 15 firefighters, 14 of them volunteers from a
“missionary boot camp” in the hills. Both fires taught
sweeping lessons about fire behavior that came at a tragic
cost.
In the book’s central story, Maclean drops us
into the northern Nevada desert in 1999. On the Sadler Fire, a fire
whirl — the near-supernatural spawn of a dust devil and
flames, scarier than any horror-film stalker — entraps six
inexperienced firefighters who are saved by an inexplicable,
last-second change of wind. The story, which began as a column
Maclean wrote for HCN’s Writers on the Range in 1999,
chronicles a new era in firefighting where crews can “just
say ‘no’ ” to dangerous situations.
John
Maclean’s accounts of people and flames are threaded with
themes of faith, mortality and the mysteries of the natural and the
supernatural. “As long as no one is standing in its way, a
(wildfire) is a natural event,” writes Maclean. “Put
people in front of it, and it becomes the stuff of
tragedy.”
Fire and Ashes: On the Front Lines of
American Wildfire
by John N. Maclean
238
pages, hardcover $25.
Henry Holt and Company,
2003.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Back down the fireline.
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