We Didn't Start the Fire

From The Ding Dong Altar Boy by Donald Osborn and Anna Henkens Schmidt. 

The bank across the street from Harry’s Conoco displayed the current time and temperature. I looked up from filling a customer’s car with gas and wiped the sweat out of my eyes to make sure I could see straight. The digital numbers read 120 degrees. Our small corner of western Nebraska had turned into the devil’s playground. And with half the world on fire, was it any wonder?

Half of anything depends on your starting number. In 1973, living as a high schooler in a town with a population of less than 6,000, my world at the time was pretty small. And that world burned with historical significance.

South of town by Chadron State Park near Dead Horse Road, a substantial portion of the Nebraska National Forest ignited with a hungry blaze, consuming thousands of acres. Volunteer firefighters from every town within driving distance arrived with shovels, water tanks, helicopters, and airplanes loaded with fire retardant. They fought as though battling a fire on the surface of the sun. The thirsty grass fields fueled the unstoppable flames. Though the firefighters worked around the clock, it seemed like the fire might win.

I recognized the next car in my gas line.

“Hey guys,” I said, the car loaded with several friends from high school. “How many gallons do you want?”

Tim McInnis rolled his window down and popped his head out of the backseat. “Forget the gas, Don. We’re gonna go fight the fire.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, they’re taking any able-bodied volunteers. Are you in?”

Something smoldered in Harry’s eyes when I told him I was skipping work to go fight the fire, but I leapt in the backseat before he could yell after me.

We cracked all the windows and burned rubber down 385 South, the acrid smell of smoke thickening each mile we drew closer. “That must be it,” one of us said, pointing to a ragtag group of men carrying shovels, pickaxes, and other implements. Volunteers were supposed to bring whatever tools they had, but we didn’t have anything except inflated egos and shared aspirations of becoming superheroes. In hindsight, this should have been our first clue we were in over our heads.

A frazzled man in the center of the group attempted the impossible job of organizing volunteers with no idea what they were doing. Not an enviable task. Too many people were eager to help without the skills to actually be helpful.

He assigned duties like watching for traffic and being on-hand to dig ditches, but mostly people stood around helplessly as the fire raged out of sight.

One guy grew tired of waiting. “Let’s just head up there and help,” he said. Anxious to accomplish something more glamorous than watching for traffic, a bunch of us started walking up the hill. We passed a farmer who owned property west of Chadron State Park. He drove his plow in circles, overturning the vegetation on his property, a desperate attempt to starve the fire should it creep on to his farm looking for food.

We pressed on, a blaze of fervent souls climbing the hill. The wisest of the group, the men who had come most prepared, lagged behind. Wisdom, for all its goodness, also brought sore knees and overgrown bellies. Leading with brawn, rather than brains, Tim and I soon outpaced the rest of the volunteers and reached the top of the ridge far ahead of everyone else.

From our viewpoint, we could see planes swooping down, dropping streams of reddish-orange fire retardant. The sky looked dark, filled with black ominous clouds that didn’t hold a drop of rain. Without a watch, you’d be hard pressed to tell afternoon from dinnertime.

“Hold up there!” the men called after us. We looked down at the guys struggling for breath as they made the final ascent. The smoky air combined with clogged arteries made this a difficult climb for them. They kept calling at us to stop, the way wisdom pleads with folly.

“Well heck,” Tim said. “We’ll never get there if we have to wait for those old fogies.”

“I’m not stopping,” I said. “We’re not going to run away from it.”

We ignored the calls of prudence. If a burning bush spoke to us, we wouldn’t have listened to it either. We hiked down a small incline before ascending an even higher hill. That’s when we felt the heat. “What should we do now?” I yelled.

Before Tim could respond, we witnessed something I’d never seen before or since. Deer, porcupines, rabbits, and raccoons ran down the hill towards us, away from the fire. Heedless of our proximity, they swerved around us, unafraid for once of human presence, solely focused on survival.

With even a fraction of today’s wisdom, I might’ve recognized the stupidity in running toward the fire; but being young and dumb, and having already left wisdom lagging on the hill behind us, we looked at each other and said, “Cool.”

And then we kept walking.

We climbed the next ridge, and in the valley below we saw three hotshot crews. Each of the professional firefighters was outfitted with a helmet, heavy protective clothing, and sophisticated equipment. I looked down at my sweat-stained Harry’s Conoco T-shirt and blue jeans. We hiked down the embankment and approached the fire fighters.

“Holy crap, what are you two doing out here?”

We’d been spotted. A firefighter approached us, his yellow jacket nearly brown from dirt and ash. “We’re volunteers,” Tim said.

The man’s skeptical look was a little insulting. “You kids can’t be down here.” He turned and shouted to a group working behind him. “Hey, we gotta get these kids out of here!”

By now, darkness descended, making it too late in the day to take wayward teens back to safety. These hotshot teams didn’t need one more logistical nightmare. Instead, another guy handed Tim and I a hard hat and a bright colored vest and told us to hop in the back of a nearby pickup.

“Stay there and do not move. Do you understand?”

We nodded, a little dumbstruck.

Some might have thought we’d wandered into one of the circles of hell. There we were, two ill-prepared teenage boys sitting in the back of a pickup truck surrounded by busy firefighters and facing an oncoming fire of epic proportions. But for us, we’d reached seventh heaven. We looked at each other and exchanged stupid grins. Could we do anything cooler than what we were doing?

Our heads swiveled back and forth as though we were watching a tennis match. In one quadrant of the scene, crews talked on radio to helicopters and airplanes, calling in locations and communicating important information over the static. In another area, workers set out flagging tape, marking firelines and ditches. To the right, we watched hotshots run burnout operations, intentionally lighting fires to meet the oncoming flames. The higher the fires climbed on the hill, the faster they went. For every ten degrees of slope, the fire doubled its speed. We didn’t need to sit in a classroom to learn the physics of heat transfer and airflow dynamics. We were immersed in an unfilmed documentary, and the images burned into our minds. Another group of men used shovels and pickaxes, digging premarked ditches.

“Hey Tim,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Look at all these shovels.”

Pickaxes, shovels, and other equipment filled the back of the pickup. Tim and I didn’t know anything about communicating directions over the radio or marking firelines, but we were good Nebraska boys. We knew shovels and dirt.

The gleam in Tim’s eyes told me everything I needed to know. He was on board. “Alright,” I said, “let’s start digging.”

I jumped out of the truck bed, stopping only to grab a shovel. Walking up the side of the hill in my hard hat, jeans, and vest, I imagined myself to be hot stuff, and not only because I could taste the ash which fell in dandruff-like flakes from the sky. My eyes watered from smoke and the back of my throat tickled, but I wouldn’t have traded this for an afternoon of pumping gas at Harry’s.

Tim had a pickaxe in-hand and joined a row of men. We worked steadily with rivulets of sweat streaking black lines down our smoke and dirt-covered faces.

Soon, we heard cussing. “Hey, I told you kids to stay in that pickup!”

We’d been caught. After giving us a thorough verbal thrashing, the fireman wandered off, and one of the other diggers looked back at us. “Don’t worry about him. Keep doing what you’re doing, but make sure you stay behind me.”

“Yes, sir!”

The shovels continued in steady rhythm until the only light remaining came from the defensive firelines and distant flames. Darkness encompassed the entire sky, erasing even the stars. Clouds of ash devoured the moon and any light it might have given. We were alone with the darkness and one of the biggest fires in the history of western Nebraska.

Crews set up camp, which consisted of simple safety blankets for shut-eye in between watch shifts. At that point, there was no way for Tim and I to return to the volunteer station, and unbeknownst to us, all the volunteers had been sent back to town for the night. Camping with the hotshot crews was our only choice, whether we liked it or not.

And we liked it.

For the next two nights and three days, Tim and I spent every waking moment with shovels and pickaxes in our hands. When we weren’t digging, we were sent to fetch tools. We filled water canteens, worked as errand boys and messengers, living out a little boy fantasy camp. We were having a blast.

Looking back, I wonder what the hotshots truly thought of a couple of over-eager kids playacting as firemen. But we were too caught up in the moment to care. Where they saw life and death, we saw adventure.

You’d think there’d have been a feeling of elation when news came announcing the fire was contained. But all I felt was deflated. No more ditches to dig. No more water canteens to refill. We looked like the dregs of a burnt-out campfire. Our clothes stuck to our bodies, blackened beyond recognition. Layers of soot on our faces made it impossible to tell whether we were 16 or 60. We missed our ride home by two days and since we were so far out in the country, we loaded up into the firetrucks. My sadness grew as I watched the blackened grass and broken trees become smaller out the window. I wanted nothing more than to stay and fight fires for the rest of my life.

Not once had we thought to contact our parents. Had it crossed our minds, we would have been out of luck, because cell phones didn’t exist. No search parties came looking for us. In fact, no one seemed all that worried at all.

When I walked in the front door, my mom wasn’t too concerned, though she told me to make sure my clothes went straight in the wash. “Harry said you headed out there. I figured you were out there doing some good,” was all she said.

When I returned to work the next day, Harry said something to the tune of, “I suppose that was more fun than working here.” He didn’t know the half of it.

If two teenage boys went missing during a wildfire today, there’d be nothing else on the news channels. But I can remember how unconcerned everybody was. Our world had been on fire, and someone had to do something about it. Why not us? Sure, it started out as an adventure. Dirt needed shoveled, and we could shovel it. We weren’t going to complain that it wasn’t our job.

Several months later I was back at Harry’s Conoco and the bank across the street only registered double digits. Tim pulled up in his car, and I asked him how much gas he wanted.

“No gas,” he said. “I was stopping by to see if you’d seen the newspaper.”

“Can’t say I have.”

“There’s an article that says whoever volunteered during the fire can come down to the station and fill out a form and there’s a fund to pay the volunteers.”

“No kidding?”

“Dead serious. What time do you get off?”

I looked at the clock on the bank. “In about twenty minutes.”

“I’ll wait for you and we can go down to the station together.”

Being broke-ass high school kids, we were eager to fill out those forms. I slipped out of work five minutes early and went straight to the station. We had to include the location where we served and the number of hours worked. Since money was involved, I made sure my handwriting was legible. We handed them the paperwork, and they handed us a check for $173, which was more money than God had at the time. We couldn’t believe our good fortune.

We were rich, and all because we’d been too dumb to know if all of God’s creatures were running away from the fire, we should turn around and run too.

Tim and I shared a guilty grin as we pocketed the check. It felt like we’d pulled off a heist. Sure, the money felt good, but nothing compared to those three days in the ash and smoke. As we left the station, I could still feel the weight of that shovel in my hands, the heat of the fire on my face. I think Tim and I both would have paid good money for those experiences, but we’d stumbled into double fortune. In addition to the experience and paycheck, we carried a newfound sense of pride.

We didn’t start the fire, but we sure as hell helped put it out.

"We Didn't Start the Fire" originally appeared in The Ding Dong Altar Boy, a memoir collection by Donald Osborn and Anna Henkens Schmidt. For more stories of adventure, bad decisions, and the occasional moment of accidental wisdom, the book is available now.