November 15, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is M. R. O’Connor’s brilliant “Towering Infernos,” an account of her experience fighting the Dixie Fire in California. The piece tells about her training to be a wildland firefighter. She learned, among other things, to “blackline”:

We “blacklined” for hours on end, starting fires with our torches and controlling their spread with hand tools or water hoses. Our work left behind undulating, blackened squiggles, about thirty feet wide, which marked the perimeters of the areas we intended to ignite. The early spring weather was frigid. Often, I stood on a patch of smoldering prairie, letting the heat warm my leather boots. The smells of diesel fuel and burning bluestem grass combined into something like incense.

It then moves to the scene of the ferocious Dixie Fire. This part is riveting; it puts us squarely there with O’Connor and the unit she’s embedded with: 

We spent our first day in Plumas National Forest, in Indian Valley, prepping homes for the coming fire by digging perimeters of bare dirt. The area sat under a smoke inversion, in which a cap of warm air trapped cooler air and smoke low to the ground; the mountains around us were invisible in the pall. The temperature was a hundred degrees, and the Air Quality Index was 368—a “hazardous” rating. An opened but undrunk can of Budweiser sat on the patio of an abandoned house, and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant. We took our breaks sitting inside idling trucks, where we could breathe conditioned air instead of toxic smoke.

That “and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant” is very fine. Her description of a mop-up patrol is superb. Here’s an excerpt:

Another crew member joined me, and we began to excavate. We dug through the powdery soil and sent up brown clouds of dust. The deeper we went, the hotter the ground became. The heat permeated the soles of our boots—eventually, we were dancing to relieve the discomfort. I stepped away from the pit and took in the situation. We were standing on an oven. Yards away from us, other crew members were also digging. Together, we were uncovering a single network of still smoldering roots.

Reading that, I could almost feel those smouldering roots beneath my own feet. “Towering Infernos” immerses us in the reality of megafire. It’s harrowing! (But the writing is delightful.)