Finding Feather

By: Nicole Pepaj

I’m writing this on my phone from some broke-off ridgeline, eating those depression crackers in the Chili Mac MRE.

The land is scorched earth—ash-grey for miles like the bomb went off on Nagasaki all over again. A tuffshed skeleton juts from the dirt, echoing Chernobyl. The air smells like napalm and sage.

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!

I shove my camp spoon back in my man-purse—white birch from Alaska, unshaped by my Leatherman, lacquered by flammable pitch that’s stained the wood red-amber. People say they’ve never seen anyone eat cereal with a stick. What I do isn’t meant to be seen. 

Men have fought fire since Tribes ruled the Great Plains, before horses arrived, before handtools were forged. Cultural burning was a thing before things were a thing. The land has always burned, and we’ve always fought it the same way. Planes, drones, science—they help. But fire will always need men and women to walk in on foot and meet it.

And oh the people who come here to fight fire—ex-gang members, discharged veterans, displaced intellectuals, lost college athletes. We used to send men to the mines, now we send them to the woods.

This is the way.

I sound like one of those kids trying to join the Marines. I guess that’s what this was to me, my Marine Corps. I drank the Kool-aid hard, shoved it into my brain through a metal IV tube, rewired every neuron for one relentless purpose.

Being a Hotshot.

My Superintendent told me “you always remember your first crew, and your best crew.” I don’t know if I’ve met my best crew, but I do remember my first.

I started off on a crew with a thing about feathers. “Earning them” was important—probably a carryover from all the Native Americans in firefighting. I showed up wearing a bandana, a pair of gloves clipped to my belt loop, and a fanny pack for holding my wallet and phone—I thought I was so clever.

Now I throw a money-clip in a cargo pocket, and my phone is velcroed to my harness—quick-draw. I stand up, slinging my pack over my shoulders in one fluid motion. I’ve learned to keep my fire shelter in a side canteen pouch to distribute weight for the hike up. I’m good at hiking now. But I didn’t used to be…

The first crew hike began with a long deceptive walk down a ravine. This enthusiastic rookie took a chainsaw, and those under-stimulated, punk Leads let me. I’d trained all month on the bleacher machine at Planet Fitness to earn the chainsaw spot on a Hotshot Crew!

Now, I carry the Dolmar for Saw Three. It’s heavier than the chainsaw, and the fuel splashes around stressing my stability muscles. I throw it on my tool handle over my shoulder, where a leak in the seal once chemical burned a perfect heart into my collar bone that the medic took a picture of and I sent to my mom.

I fall in line behind my sawyer, in step with him as we attack the hill. His chewing tobacco still in my back pocket from the last store stop, I made a mental note to give it to him at the top as we chipped away at the slick shale cliff. A loose rock made him stumble back, but my hand caught his pack to push him up over the lip. Sometimes all you need is a push to get back to crew pace.

I had people who pushed me…

I remember running eleven miles in tool order along a lake at a pace slow enough for me to manage. That made the run excruciating for everyone else. By the end of mile one, I was out of gas, but kept going, plodding, trudging, hallucinating, crying. Sweat and snot slid down my face as I died to stay in line. I wanted to be in that line more than I wanted to be alive, and I decided that keeping up was worth dying for.

Only now do I realize that while I was keeping up, they were keeping me going, catching me, not letting me fall out. My Leads on all sides of me encouraging with each mile that passed, and somehow, through sheer desperation, mile eleven fell away as the buggies fell into view.

Now I run barefoot on a trail in Upper Park. I doubt it’s actually made me faster or stronger, but it makes me feel like the badass I most certainly am not.

Christopher McCandless from Into The Wild said it’s important not just to be strong but to feel strong. That’s part of what being here does to people, I think. There are many strong firefighters in the overarching umbrella of this bizarre brotherhood, but Hotshot is a title earned in blood and brass. What people go through to earn it, and why, oh why…

I jump out of the buggy with my yellow, hard hat, and pack already on in the flawless two minutes that it takes to line out. We pull-cord at the heel of the fire and start punching line up the Tish Tang. A cultural burn had taken off and made a run from the river, threatening a trailer park. An arsonist. The call had come in damn near at midnight. We had six guys within the callback window.

Everyone knows what tools to grab, things we are going to need, how to pick up the slack. We’ve got a medkit, a monkey paw, one guy grabbed someone else’s pack in the scramble but whatever. Line it out. Anchor in. Give it hell. Our Lead always takes point, but in the hustle the line up got shuffled, and I’d jumped up front.

“Let’s see what you’ve got!” my Lead yells as we pound two-foot scrape line up the side of God’s staircase, keeping on Saw One’s ass. We swing and step right up against the flames’ edge, our headlamps on low to conserve battery. That idle glow and snap-crackle hum does something diabolical in the body, blocking exhaustion like men at war. We beat the black’s edge in a mad dash to pull the ridgeline closer with our bare hands.

My Captain appears out of nowhere.

“Come with me!”

I bump out and follow him in big bounding strides up the slope. Others in the Police/Fire/EMS umbrella have asked us in awe how we do these things, and we reply We’re Hotshots. He shows me the check-line he’s scratched along the fire’s flank to mark our path. He wants me to see it, not our Lead, because right now I’m the Lead.

In the seconds before we take off back down the handline, he looks me dead in the eye.

“You are perfect for this job.”

That moment freezes time and space, and will stay with me for the rest of my life.

We tear back down the mountain to tie-in with the guys and continue our push, with me leading them along the swipes my Captain has drawn in the duff. It feels like someone has made a map for me, built steps all the way to the top of my own destiny. We holler like Indians at the smoke-capped sky, giving us the strength to charge on through an endless night.

I suck on my Camelpak nozzle for water, and nothing comes out. Adjust the valve stem, still nothing. Tug on the hose. Nothing. My line was kinked somewhere and I was on point. Stopping to gear down and mess with a water pouch was unacceptable when people were depending on me. There was no time in the scramble. I learned the hard way why running that really expensive six-liter MSR dromedary was a bad idea. I’d have to fight this fire without any water. We have a phrase for moments like this. Hotshotting up.

We chink line for hours into the darkness, hooking a finger of the fire. But we’re only human, we need to rest. We’ve got the fire checked up on the ridgeline. Saw One powers down and everyone plops where they stand.

“You’re a gangster!” he yells at me, leaning on his saw bar on the side of a mountain no human being has probably set foot on in one hundred years.

I sit down for a breath and look to my right, poison oak, look to my left, more poison oak, and directly in front of me…poison oak. I am deathly allergic to poison oak.

“No sympathy!” My Lead laughs at me as I begrudgingly pull out a Mountain House from my pack and eat it cold like a savage.

“Oh how nice it is to have hot food!” My lone scrape brags in my general direction. He can get bent. I was surviving not thriving.

“What are you even eating?”

“Horse food? It looks like horse food, tastes like horse food. I’m gonna go with horse food.”

It’s a Herculean effort to stand up and start swinging after your body has sat for a while, why many firefighters choose to eat on their feet or take a knee.

I eventually swap out spots with my lone scrape, letting him lead while I rake the back. He’d had a fever when the call came in, and I’d dragged him out of bed on an adrenaline high not realizing he was seeing double and didn’t know his own name. He ties us in strong with the hose lay and we flop down to grab a bit of sleep, going coyote on the side of a south slope so steep it’s a human rights violation.

We battled our demons that night, cutting hotline into the void with every desperate ounce of strength we could summon. We felt no pain, no exhaustion, no mercy for the mountain or the forces of nature. We have become forces of nature, forever imbued with fury in firelight. That night the f ire wasn’t on the Tish Tang, but somewhere deep inside us all.

I remember the call from my crew-boss after my first fire season with the feathers ended, when he tried to wash me to an engine.

“YOU ARE NOT CUT OUT FOR THIS LINE OF WORK AND YOU WILL NEVER BE A HOTSHOT!”

Now standing on the ridgeline in the sunrise with my brothers, seeing how our line held around a community—line that I lead—the words of my Captain ring in my soul.

You are perfect for this job.

I found the Why as I hiked down with my squad past the people who lived in those houses we’d protected, tears of relief in their eyes as they let their dogs run up to play with us.

People come here for many personal reasons, but I think just being here is the Why.

I was here, this meant something, and it matters.

We were there, my boys and I.

We’d argued a lot in the past about what status meant to each person. No matter what anyone said that night, we were Hotshots.

This is a brotherhood, but in life people come and go. A Smokejumper once told me “there will be so many crews and crewmembers in your career that you’ll get to a point where you don’t even remember their names.”

Like any relationship, one day you’re family and the next they’re moving out while you’re at work, taking the dog, leaving your socks, and you’ll never understand why. But maybe you don’t need to. Maybe you just need to grow.

No matter where I go in my career, what accomplishments and failures I wrack up and overcome, I will forever be on that ridgeline over the Tish Tang, watching the sunrise with a short squad of six. Demons went up with us, but none came down.

You must come up here! It’s beautiful! What problems assail you will be gone at the top. If you think no one is watching you, you’ll learn that people are always watching. People see you. Your hard work and good spirit are known to all, and the fires you fight in the dark will bring you to the light if you keep fighting.

Thank you to everyone who helped me keep fighting, and to everyone who fought me. You made me the firefighter I am. And our story isn’t over.

Be strong, and I’ll see you when you get here.