About the time I turned eighteen, I got my very first job that involved neither coffee nor bagels. I had been hired to work for nearly nothing as a field biology intern with The Institute for Bird Populations. By some remarkable blessing of fate, I had been handed my dream job. My partner, Dayna, and I were going to spend the summer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in search of the rare and elusive Sierra Nevada Great Gray Owl. Specifically, we were hoping to find owls living on the drier, rockier eastern slope of the mountains. That was me, back-country owl scholar.
It should be mentioned right now that Great Gray Owls almost certainly do not live on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas anymore. We knew that we were unlikely to find any owls from the outset of the project. No Great Gray Owls had been seen in that region for over thirty-five years, and wanting something to exist will not make it so. I didn’t mind not finding owls. I was happy to simply be exploring real mountains for the first time in my life, and in those mountains I was truly happy for the first time in my memory. It’s hard not to be when you are high above the rest of the world amid the blue skies in a wildflower covered alpine flat.
Still, it is difficult to explain to people that your job is to go out into the forest and look for owls. It is even more difficult to explain to people that your job is to look for owls, and after three months of searching, you have yet to find a single one. And it was almost impossible to explain this fact to the people I was living with at the Bridgeport Ranger District barracks: the Forest Service fire fighters.
Firefighters are a unique class of human beings. There is a certain type of impulsive, noble, suicidal idiot that chooses a career that involves walking directly the flame. There is a bit of Don Quixote in almost every firefighter I’ve been friends with, although they would like for you to believe it was really a bit of cowboy. As housemates, they bring a certain amount of chaos to any daily routine. During that spring of unprecedented precipitation, they spent the fireless days drunk, bored, and irritable. The often berated me and insisted that us owl girls never really did any work.
Despite their accusations, Dayna and I actually worked quite hard. We typically spent ten days at a time in the field, hiking through the wilderness to owl habitat and spending those nights looking for the hypothetical owls. Great Gray Owl habitat is wet mountain meadows, which means that after a full day of hiking in extreme heat over steep ridges, you spent your nights knee-deep in rapidly chilling water battling mosquitoes only to finally arrive to your tent cold, wet, and exhausted late the night. Making matters worse, you do not simply look for the owls, but you have to call for them. Great gray owls are so large, and their hoot is so deep that a full sized stereo system needs to be hauled into forest in-order to accomplish this. On top of extra weight, this also meant hours of sitting around in the dark listening to deafening recorded owl hoots and hoping that one day a real one will hoot back.
On the other hand, on days when the study areas were close, we didn’t bother to wake up until the sun warmed our tents and forced us out. We would slowly eat breakfast by the fire, maybe swim in the creeks full of docile cutthroat trout and melt water, watch sapsuckers feeding their loud and demanding young, read in the shade awhile, and then maybe after all of that we could pack up at a leisurely pace and move the mile or two to the next meadow.
On the days that we were really lucky, we would stay at Paiute Meadow, where an old cow-camp cabin still stood with the forest and the meadow very slowly sneaking back into it. There's something odd about having been out in the woods for days without seeing a single other person, yet finding yourself surrounded by four walls, but I loved the feeling of standing on the doorstep between nature and civilization drinking a mug of real coffee and looking out at the view. You could see range after range of ridges stacked up with the appropriately named castle peak and tower peaks sitting most prominently in not-too-far distance. I realized in those moments that there was nothing in the world a person needed that was not in that cabin. Even the cabin itself was a luxury.
Perhaps my favorite thing about the cabin was the poetic graffiti left behind from the previous visitors. The graffiti read things like "Long live the Paiute cuttroat," left by biologists and things like "we need women," and "wiskey's almost gone," by the partiers. I guess I can relate to both, but I prefer envisioning people just like me trying to restore the near-extinct Paiute cuttroat trout to it's native habitat in the mid seventies. I was sustained by idealism then, and everything was beautiful for it.
Perhaps this is why the firefighters accused me of never working. Much of my time on the job were spent exactly how I liked to spend my days off. Although, there was one important difference: my days off also included the firefighters. At that point in my life I could match them drink for drink and shot for shot, and that meant my days off were trouble. As the lone eighteen-year-old girl drinking along with bored, irritable firefighters, I found myself receiving a more attention that I was capable of handling.
Luckily, once first fire of season started, my problems were solved. It happened on the third of July during a rather strange Fourth of July Eve soiree. I had just arrived back from the field, dirty and tired as usual. The moment I stepped into the boy’s side of the barracks, I was instantly met with a larger than average shot glass full of Jack Daniels and the phrase “have a little guy.” The fire fighters were going to be in the Bridgeport, California annual Independence Day parade, the biggest annual event in town. Until then the boys were determined to celebrate to the fullest.
My friend Chris decided to put himself at the center of this event, and spent much of the evening enthusiastically pouring drinks with his one good hand. As long as I knew him, his right arm had to be held crossed against his chest in a sling. Before my arrival he was involved in a drunken four-wheeler accident that had left him sitting in pain for over six hours as he waited for somebody to sober up enough to drive him to the nearest hospital over two and a half hours away in Carson City, Nevada.
Although a lesson may have been learned from this, the incident did not seem to have put a damper on the joy he took in drinking. “Have a little guy,” became the chorus for Chris’s evening, who was now going around pushing shot glasses into everyone’s hands. “Have a little guy… hhhev a littel guay. Hv uh little gyy.” Eventually it came to a point where his speech is devoid of vowels as he drinks any shots turned down.
I liked Chris, maybe because he seemed too strange to exist. He had this tendency to make a hell of a lot of eye contact when he spoke to people, and he is always giving people this weird sideways look. It only got worse when he was drinking. I think it had something to do with the fact his eyes were two drastically different colors, and he wanted people to notice. It was disarming. He seemed to enjoy it. It creeped me out, but it certainly caught my attention.
As it got later and later, people became tempted to leave or sleep, but all attempts to escape failed. Chris has given up as the tender of the whisky bar and had taken to patrolling outside of the bunkhouse to prevent people from abandoning the party. Although we all lived in the same building, each of our rooms were accessed from the outside, and unreachable through Chris's barracade. As you exited the building he'd come upon you and demand "where are you going?" He then proceeded to talk at you - and this is a fellow that's very good at talking at you. Actually, what he does is yell. Not in an angry way, he just seems to prefer yelling to normal speaking, even when sober. The further you got from the house, the worse it became. The only reprieve was to give up and go back in to where the party was disjointedly happening.
Eventually I decide I really have no choice, I needed to sleep. Too many drinks and too many miles of hiking had taken place. Chris somehow knew I was going even before I made it to the door, however. He was blocking my exit and making a point I noticed his brown and blue eyes. “Don’t go. You’re always going. I mean. Jesus. Fuck.” Somehow without seeming to have made a single move, he picked up a wooden chair and threw it directly at me. The chair was unwieldy and his aim was poor, so I avoided getting hit, but a few inches from my left shoulder the chair smashed into fragments on the concrete wall. The he just looked at the broken piece of furniture and laughed, and for some reason I just accepted the action.
I suppose my priorities were very wrong, but my worry was that the pieces of broken chair were telling evidence, not that a man I was involved with had just thrown a chair at me. I was more concerned that the powers-that-be at the ranger station would know we were having another drunken event upon seeing broken chair shards, and we had been warned and I was the one underage one.
I eventually hit upon a solution and decide that I could kill a few birds with one stone by escaping out back and having a nice bon-fire to destroy the evidence. Broken furniture is one thing, but nobody would ever notice furniture that isn’t there. So, I go and gather news paper and kindling and start to enjoy myself by a nice crackling flame. The chair burns pretty well, although the upholstery does give off a disconcerting smell.
Eventually, Chris wanders up and joins me. He's still yelling a bit in his friendly sort of way, but his demeanor is changed. Mostly, he's trying to apologize in a way that does not directly admit any actions. He insists he’d never do anything that might hurt me, but clearly he already did. I accept his half appologies, and the fire gradually dies down into coals.
Things seem less manic finally, and I get up with the idea of finally, after hours of trying, going to sleep. Chris gets up too, with the idea of following me, but the alcohol pulls him back down and he falls directly into the fire as suddenly as te firewood was created. Between Jack Daniels and a broken collarbone he cannot pull himself out, and I struggle to help him. He is so much bigger than myself. In the perception of a panicked person, it took forever to finally get him free. Chris is finally standing on his feet again, wobbling, and his apologies start coming out again. “I deserved this. I am such a piece of shit… I…” and he stutters, and steps week-kneed to one side and falls again, right into the fire.
I pull him out quicker this time, but now I can barely think. Help. He needs help. Luckily, in a house full of firefighters, there is more than one trained EMTs. We wake up Taylor, the most responsible and well-trained of the group and start to explain what happened. Chris is already trying to create some alibi, but it doesn’t really matter what we are saying. Neither the truth nor the crazy lie fit into the story Taylor already has in his head. He gives me this look of stunned respect, and I suddenly see what he is thinking.
“You think I pushed Chris in the fire?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But…?”
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“No!”
“No? Yes you did. I don’t believe you. But it’s fine.”
“Fine?”
Did I really seem like the sort of person who might have done such a thing? I started to ponder this as I drifted away from the events and finally went to sleep. Sleep could not have been much more than an hour, however, as we were woken up once again to the radio screaming. There was a fire, finally. There was finally something to do, but there wasn’t a long way to go. The fire was directly behind the house. My chair fire had gotten loose, and the fire fighters had to spend the rest of the morning battling it. In turn, I spent the rest of the morning worrying about the boy I burned and the forest fire I had started.
I guess the fire must not have been too bad, nor Chris too horribly hurt because that afternoon in town I saw him standing as planned with the other hung over fire fighters on the forest service float. He smiled and waved his bandaged arm under a professionally printed banner that read “I am concerned about camp-fire safety.”
My time in Bridgeport was a lot calmer after that. Nobody gave me trouble, and nobody ever accused me of not working. Most importantly, I am now concerned about campfire safety.
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