Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [45]
The jumpers pulled two-piece, beige Kevlar suits over their fire retardant clothing and stuffed their pockets with granola packs and Hershey bars. Hudson stowed a dog-eared copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. Their parachutes went on next, secured with a network of black straps cinched up tight over their shoulders and around their thighs. As spotter, Sherry would be coming back without jumping, but she also put on the complete outfit with main and reserve parachutes in case she fell out of the plane.
Clare watched, comparing their gear with her turnouts, air pack, and axe.
The pilot, a lanky dark-haired man with a red handlebar mustache, smoked a preflight Winston. “We’re headed to the northeast corner of Yellowstone to a plume sighted from outside the park,” he told Clare. “If they’re only sending two jumpers, this one’s gonna be a cakewalk.”
Sherry had her gear on first and while they waited, she told Clare about the Smokejumpers’ running contest to land closest and cleanest to whatever target the spotter chose. How if they landed in a tree they wanted to spread their canopy square over the top, so they didn’t slip and slide down through the limbs, or ‘burn through’ as they called it.
Despite the advent of helicopter use in firefighting, the jumpers were never picked up. After they’d felled and buried burned trees and waited until the ashes were cold, they hiked out to the nearest highway. On these treks that sometimes took several days they carried out everything they had jumped in with. In training, the brutal march with over a hundred pounds separated successful candidates from washouts.
All three jumpers secured blue helmets with protective metal grates over their faces. Looking to Clare like space warriors from a sci-fi movie, they headed toward their waiting twin-engine Beechcraft B99.
While they checked equipment, Clare climbed in and sat forward on the bench seat. Tape-reinforced corrugated boxes strapped to metal tracks cramped her knees. She’d been told they contained water, food, Pulaskis, shovels, and sleeping bags.
The heavily laden Smokejumpers piled aboard. As the turboprops spooled up and the plane began to taxi, Clare realized the rear door had been removed. Sherry sat in front so that she could gauge the approach to the fire and decide the best landing target.
The jumpers clipped their static lines to a cable along the floor, so if anyone fell out the line would open their primary chute.
When they reached the end of the West Yellowstone runway, Hudson said, “Hi, ho.” Through the metal mask, Clare saw a big smile on his ruddy face. He hummed a bit more of the Seven Dwarfs song about going back to work. It made Clare think what her first day back at the station in Houston would be like . . . she’d probably be whistling in the dark as well.
The engines revved into a whine. Wind rushed through the open door and the noise forestalled further efforts at conversation. Clare had always enjoyed flying and found the sensation of lift-off with fresh air in her face exhilarating.
Once aloft, she had a good view of the gently rolling terrain around the town, with mountains to the west and east. To the south, she identified Yellowstone’s boundary by the line where the timber clear-cuts stopped and unbroken forest began. She recognized the area where she had taken Sergeant Ron Travis and his troops for training. In a few days, she’d have a new group of soldiers and she hoped the cocky bantam leader would have a difficult time on the line. He’d continued to be outright rude, even as she held her tongue.
The plane banked around and headed into the park. Within minutes, the terrain began to climb and they sighted the craggy pinnacles of Bighorn Peak. To the east, towering columns of smoke built skyward from the Fan Fire. Hudson bumped Clare with his elbow and shouted, “The Fan started on June twenty-fifth, back when they were letting lightning-caused blazes burn. Looks like maybe they should have let us at it.”
Sherry called, “How about the North