Forest Fires

I remember being frightened, but I don't think I was ever as afraid as I should have been.  

Started fighting and covering wild fires in about 1973, first on casual crews out of the Forest Service station at Jerseydale, then for whoever would pay me to go watch and report back.  So, mostly then it was humungous campaign fires, the ones that totally blew out to burn down subdivisions and this and that thousand acres of timber.  Fires you could see from ten miles away when bowls of fire popped out of a ridge.  Not the scary part.

If you've been smoked by a campfire or fireplace sometime and done that hold-your-breath-and-dodge thing, that's the scary part, only on a wild fire there's no place to dodge.  The smoke suddenly blinds you and worst case there's no information about which way to run.  And it's always steep, so not so much run as scramble.  And you can't see.  Or breathe. Kind of a dry waterboarding I'd guess.  Pretty bad.  I never walk past a hillside of Bear Clover, as my suffering family knows, without thinking what a freaking misery it is in a fire.  Just a ten-inch-tall little plant, hardly worth looking at, that produces in fire a godawful dense oily smoke.  Makes my throat catch to remember it at all.

Night shift

The private plane went into the Lake Michigan trying to land on Christmas Eve.  I was working evenings, 6 to 2 AM so I was there when it happened and the city editor sent a photographer went over to Meigs Field which was on landfill off downtown.  Meigs is no longer an airport, but is very big in the world of video games.  It was on a peninsula, so it was easy to land in the Lake if you were careless, or drunk, as this pilot probably was.  We sent a photographer over who said the cops told him it had been the woosy end of an office Christmas party, that there had been three aboard, and that the young woman had been pulled out of the water alive but not the two guys.  They were dead.

So back at the paper we had to find and call the families at home on Christmas Eve to discuss the violent, and probably scandalous death of husband/father.  Boss handed out the names.  I got one.

Usually the papers print language like – 'Authorities have not released the names pending notification of the next of kin.'  Actually, at least then, we got the names about as quickly as anybody knew them.  At Meigs Field that night I think they gave the names to our photographer.  There was no question of waiting for some official to get around to finding the families because there was another newspaper in town, the Tribune, and they bloody well were not waiting.