Infernos to Battle

by Jon Billman

I put in two aimless years in college at Iowa Wesleyan as, of all things, a physical education major, because I was determined only not to enter the adult world. Then a relationship dissolved, and I realized I needed a new direction. I sold my aluminum canoe for $75, bought a bus ticket, and went on the Trailways to Rapid City, South Dakota. I arrived in the middle of the night, walked around humping an army duffel bag until daylight, then hitchhiked to Lead in the northern Black Hills. There I began what I thought of as my career as a wildland firefighter.

The northern woods that summer were damp and cool and quiet. Every afternoon we would watch a cold thunderstorm roll over the Black Hills, bellyfull of hail. After work I’d saddle-up on my bicycle—mountain biking was still new and bikes were stiff and heavy and bombproof—and roll to Deadwood to meet the Nemo crew for a 20-mile pedal through the hills followed by nickel beers and free popcorn at the Anaconda Casino.

That summer, two kids in Arizona dunked a lizard in gasoline, lit it on fire, set it down, and watched it scramble into the brush. Several days later we were sitting in the kitchen adjacent to the crew quarters, reading the sit. report off the wire: Tonto Nat'l Forest, Historic Zane Grey Cabin Threatened.

A lot of Zane Greys sat on a shelf under a mounted rattlesnake hide in the crew quarters. I had tried to read him, but could never finish one of his sagas. I got bored with his endless landscape details and with his characters, who, as far as I was concerned, were far less interesting than the firefighters I worked with, to say nothing of the Hell’s Angels who bounced the bars in Deadwood and Sturgis. I had infernos to battle and a Nemo-district redhead to chase on my bike. And I had Kentucky Fried Chicken! Original Recipe, delivered in the wilderness—dropped from the sky by a helicopter.

I had long been wary of the term “writer.” Less so, perhaps, than “poet” or “novelist.” With “writer,” at least, comes the possibility that you earn your board with words. I admire journalists like Pete Hamill and Carl Hiassen, who wield word processors like flamethrowers during the day, work on the Great American Novel by lamplight, and throw in liberal doses of sportfishing. I admire writers like Tim Cahill, who set out to become a great novelist and, without apology, found himself paying the bills with great travel writing. A writer, by my narrow terms, must first be a doer. Zane Grey was a doer. I respect the hell out of the man—he gave up a dentistry career in New York—for his sportfishing records. He wrote hard and fished hard and lived a life worthy of writing about, wanting and getting more than a life of looking into people’s mouths.

I thought I could hide behind the title “firefighter.” The barmaid at the Buffalo Bar in Deadwood set me up with free draws when I introduced myself as a firefighter. Tourists used to buy us rounds in Dirty Nellies, a thanks for not letting a fire ruin their vacation.

I was sent to a fire in the Utah desert that had already burned out. The crew boss put us to work anyway, walking around kicking squirrel caches and smoldering stumps. I would wander away to hide under juniper trees, eat the extra Colorado peaches that I’d pinched from camp and stuffed into my firepack, and scratch notes that I thought of at the time as poetry. I had by then abandoned Zane Grey and discovered Thomas McGuane (a champion cutting-horse competitor and world-class fly fisherman, a doer) and Gary Snyder—I carried an old Turtle Island in my pack.

Mop-ups gave me long, dry hours to contemplate my future. I knew I wanted to play for a living. Someday, sure, I wanted to make a difference. As a firefighter, I knew I was only playing. The truth is, fire suppression American-style is counterproductive and a colossal waste of tax dollars. Besides, the only full-time Forest Service jobs available were being filled with women and minorities, or, ideally, minority women. Hell, I liked to read didn’t I, maybe I could do something where I got to read. I declared my major back at school, English Education. I would become a teacher.

My mom still teaches home-ec—from her I learned to cook; I’m threatening to go to culinary arts school some day and learn enough about being a chef to be just a little dangerous. My dad taught art in public schools for 39 years. I wished he had taken his own painting more seriously, but I suppose he made the adjustments he had to make. Now, in retirement, he’s content to build bird houses and tie first-rate trout and salmon flies. Every couple of weeks I receive a manila envelope full of wooly buggers, hare’s ears, nymphs. and renegades. But, I wish he’d pick up a paint brush again. In any case, he’s always been a raconteur, like my grandfather, and some of my earliest memories are of listening to their stories. My idea of my dad at work is of him playing with paint and clay all day and getting paid for it; of course, that had very little to do with the realities of teaching, but I wanted to get paid for something like that.

I took my best offer from Kemmerer, Wyoming, which turns out to be a kind of end of the road. Teachers move here because they were fired somewhere else or are hiding from something or someone. Some people teach here after teaching on the reservation, a small step up for them. My first day of school, before the first bell, I had to step in between two 17-year-old cowboys fighting outside my room—I’m six-feet-one and I looked up at both of them. While supervising Tuesday-night detention, I sat on a tack one of the delinquents put on my chair, requiring me to get a tetanus booster. A Mormon parent went to the school board to have me fired because a student in her daughter’s class read aloud a poem with “fucking” used as an adjective. Most new teachers stay here one year. I lasted two.

Toward the end of my brief term in the ninth grade, I would write while my students took tests. Write during films. Write during teachers’ meetings. I appeared to be taking diligent notes. I wrote of the world around me, the characters I worked with, the charlatans I worked for, the few females in town, a wild red-headed mining engineer, frontier ministers, bad Mormons and good Mormons. I turned my scribbles into a story that was, I now see, abominable, but it got me into graduate school! So writing is what saved me from becoming an alcoholic or worse.

Eastern Washington University must have needed my money, because I got in with out-of-state graduate tuition and no breaks other than the hair shirt that is my student loan.

I invited myself to my favorite teacher’s farm for Thanksgiving dinner. Hell, I thought, I’ve sacrificed to get here, I’m gonna absorb everything in two years, gonna see the elephant. John Keeble had also invited Dan Sisson, who writes for Field and Stream. We ran bird dogs and I asked them questions all day and didn’t leave until after dark. That afternoon John gave me the best writing advice I’ve ever heard. He said, simply, “Write hard.”

Then Howard Junker, the editor of ZYZZYVA, liked one of my stories. He worked on it with me for almost a year, and I learned as much from that process as I did in my two years of M.F.A.
After graduation, I went back to the woods.

It took about a month before I realized I’d outgrown firefighting. I’d read an article about how a day on the fireline is like smoking five cartons of cigarettes. I didn’t have health insurance and I needed to do something less solipsistic, something that mattered more. So I left the Black Hills with the idea of writing for a living. I moved my pickup-load of possessions into a cabin in northern Utah. I was prepared to winter and write and fulfill another desire that had been with me much longer than my desire to write: to be a ski bum. I bought a new chainsaw, a season pass to Beaver Mountain, and a new pair of Karhu telemark skis.

In the fall, writing time was spent cutting and hauling the pine, spruce, and aspen that would get us, my wife-to-be and I, through the winter. Once winter hit, I spent most of my writing time skiing. Groceries (with heavy racks of bottled beer and bags of bulk garlic) had to be pulled uphill in a pulk made out of an ordinary children’s sled. Dirty laundry had to be skied down, driven to town; clean laundry pulled back up. I skied manuscripts to the post office, rejection letters back up to use as fire starter. At night, for entertainment—no TV—we cooked elaborate meals of elk and trout, drank good beer and jug wine, made love, and listened to radio stations from as far away as Los Angeles and Calgary. I read Stephen Ambrose and Faulkner, Charles Darwin, Robert Stone, and the Bible. Spring—mud season—was spent doing carpentry work on the old cabin.

I grew strong that year; mere living required physical work. I grew stronger mentally as well, strong in my sense of what writing should be. I finished my manuscript, ran out of money, and took a one-year job in town, back in Kemmerer, this time teaching seventh grade. I didn’t have an agent, few contacts, only the determination that this would be my last teaching job. I sent my book manuscript out like grapeshot, no allegiances, no loyalties; as long as someone still had my manuscript and hadn’t rejected me, I had hope. As an afterthought, I mailed a copy to the zip code of Annie Proulx, who had recently moved to Wyoming to fish, ski, canoe, and hide. Two days later she called me. “Who are you?” she asked. Then she sent my manuscript to her own agent: my lucky break. My first book, a collection of fiction, When We Were Wolves, is being published by Random House in the summer of ’99.

I’m still self-conscious about calling myself a writer. This is dangerous, because I get asked to speak at Rotary and back at the high school. The students in my college-outreach night class like the idea that their instructor is a writer, but it’s funny that not one of them has ever asked to see my work.

My new work clothes are flannel pajamas. I don’t wear a wristwatch. I turn west at the coffee machine, and half a minute later I’m seated at my desk, a Korean-era army-clerk’s desk that Ron, a wildlife biologist who wants to be a writer, helped me move—it was made from the melted-down carcass of a jeep, he says. In any case, my best ideas come when I’m skiing or running.

I realize my collection of stories was just my foot in the door; I’m under a daunting contract to write a novel, which is what I’m doing now, head down, not looking up for fear of seeing the beast that is the possibility of writing 700 pages of horseshit and not knowing it until I’ve finished. Worse yet is taking mincing little steps through the process and not writing the hell out of what you know, but what a small part of you thinks someone else wants to hear.

An old lady cornered me in the local museum recently, suspicious of me because it was daytime and I wasn’t at the mine, a real job. She said, “I hear you’re getting a book published.” Yes, I told her, I am. She narrowed her eyes. Her nose wrinkled back. Through bright pursed lipstick she said, “That must be costing you a bundle.”

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Jon Billman (ZYZZYVA 46) lives in Kemmerer, Wyoming. His most recent book is When We Were Wolves (Random House). E-mail: billman@hamsfork.net