Ash

by Jon Billman

      Her name was Ashley Elkind, but we called her Ash. She wasn't a smoke-eater like the rest of us, but she lived in the crew quarters, two bunks down from me, and she slept in nothing. In the mornings she'd get up in nothing, stretch, and walk to the shower room that way. It was something we appreciated at first, the surprise of it, the surprise of her, all woman, every curve, every fold and jiggle. Pretending to sleep, through the slits under our eyelids, like toads, we watched her walk across the cold pine floor-sunburned neck, arms, and legs, nipples hard as pine nuts. But, alas, we got used to it after a week or so, because it was animal and because it was no longer new. And because she was big. Not sloppy. Not classically voluptuous. Big. She could hold her own.
      Soon enough her buckwheat pancakes were what we mostly got excited about mornings.
      We were what is called a Type II wildland outfit. Groundlings. No parachuting into the torching bowels of the forest on fire. No helicoptors or air tankers. No anything that would get us attention from our job title alone, like the Hot Shots from Logan or the tanker crews out of Greybull. We often worked at night and knew that if you stared too long at the fire, like a moon-blind horse, your vision could not adjust to the dark. But we stared anyway.
      A Woodsy Owl calendar hung on the wall in our map room. We used a black pen to cross the days off. We used a red pen to mark the days we had fires. Red pins were used to chart fires nationwide; we got the situation reports every morning off the wire from Boise.
      My girlfriend lived out east. She was going to graduate school in philosophy. She had been a cheerleader and still gave money to her sorority. Her name was Jennifer and she wrote a letter on blue stationery once a week that said, "It must be so lonely for you on those cold Wyoming nights." The way she said it was more like a question.
      Ash came from northern Arizona and she would interpret dreams. The second thing she ever said to me was, "Fire is a good thing, favorable to the dreamer." She carried a paperback of The Wordsworth Dictionary of Dreams. She had it with her everywhere she went, as if it were government issue. She was a rangeland biologist. To the Forest Service, riparian land management means steak and wool; her job was cows and sheep. Deer, too. Antelope, some moose and elk, trout and cowfish. But mostly cows and sheep. She was pretty, but too bulky to be beautiful. "If, of course, the dreamer doesn't get burned," was the third thing she said. Red hair, less like a flame than a willow when the sap starts to rise in the spring.

      We wanted fires. Smokey the Bear went straight against our grain. What we did, we fought fires, and it was as much a part of our inner selves as right and wrong. We might have pretended otherwise in order to appease Cappy, our boss, who had Tabasco in his veins but was up to his hard hat in politics, but we wanted fires. An evening dry-lightning storm was cause for celebration-"Tequila tonight, tomorrow we ride!" We liked the pay we got, but we loved fires more. We liked them for everything infernal they were, everything volatile they could be. Our hearts worked like this: flames or no flames, fire or no fire. Red or green. Hungry or satisfied. No sooty-gray in-between. Since fire was seasonal, the essence of temporary, that made it all the more precious.

      They said about Hams Fork, Wyoming, there's a pretty girl behind every tree. The nearest tree-small scrub pine-was 30 miles to the north of town. We would match up on the first days of every season. I finally had a little seniority in the pecking order, but the other guys didn't want Ash for other reasons. There was a saying: "The summer's too short to dance with a fat girl." Maybe they didn't know or couldn't remember how long a slow, wet fire season could be. Ash was wide at the base like a spruce tree, sturdy and strong. I brought her Milky Ways and coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I couldn't say to the other guys she wasn't big, because she was. The beautiful girls in Hams Fork were mostly Mormons who lived in Utah and did not work for the Forest Service. Anyway, we didn't go into town very often, because there wasn't that much to go there for.
      On our dates Ash showed me where horned toads lived in the roots of sagebrush, and the little mountain scorpions no bigger than Lincoln's head on a penny. "I never dream of fires," she said one afternoon while we were walking in the blue dusk. "I tend to dream of fish. Fish are a good thing. What do you dream of?"
      The dreams that stood out in my memory were of railroad tracks, spiders, sex, and tornadoes. "Sharks?" I said, not meaning it as a question. The freckled skin around her mouth tightened and her eyes became cautious. She studied me. She knew it was a line, and not a very good one. I became convinced she could know a lie and what kind of lie it was the same way I could smell smoke and identify the fuel. "To dream of catching fish is good," she said, finally, as if to take me seriously. "If you fail to catch any in your dreams, it will be bad for you."
      "Does that include sharks?" I said. "What about sharks?"
      She fumbled through her dream dictionary. "Sharks are not good," she said, frowning. She smelled like horsemint. It was almost Flag Day before she let me hold her hand.

      I had my useless degree in English lit, which took me six and a half years to get. I majored in English because I liked reading. Or at least I didn't mind it. I wanted to fight forest fires during the season and do nothing in the wintertime. Maybe some skiing. Maybe read some books. It was that time of my life-my mid-twenties-when I hadn't yet realized that fortune wasn't going to fall from the sky, knock me down, and stick to me like slurry.
      Many evenings Ash and I would hike up a deer trail to the top of Sarpy Ridge and watch Utah's lightning, which was better than our own. We'd take Cokes and a blanket, and it was like the Fourth of July. Some nights we would smoke the marijuana Ash had brought with her from Arizona. Most nights it would just be distant heat lightning. We would kiss or make animal sounds in the boredom-birds, coyotes, moose. Sometimes the lightning struck hard and green and beautiful, and it was like a celebration.

      Ash was running a study up near the Montana border. She spent a couple days a week up there, counting warrior grasshoppers and Mormon crickets. When she returned, she spent most workdays behind a computer in the map room, long hair pulled back, gold-framed glasses on her big, wind-tanned cheeks, red and serious.
      She taught me that worms do not have eyes, but can sense light through their skin. She taught me that mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue. She told me about the Australian fire beetle. The females are colored exactly like the males, but are a good deal larger. "Size is everything in their mating habits," she said. "The males are attracted to the largest, strongest females." Road-train drivers would toss Emu beer bottles onto the roadside. Male fire beetles would come by the hundreds to mate with the bottles, which looked like big female fire beetles.
      She taught me how to tell the temperature by counting snowy tree-cricket chirps. "Count the chirps over 13 seconds," she said as we stood in the desert and I held my Indiglo watch to my eyes, listening, counting, "then add 40." We compared the Fahrenheit of the crickets to the thermometer she carried on her belt. The crickets were nearly right-on each time, give or take a degree each way.
      I taught her that a smart arsonist can make a time-delayed incendiary device by mixing brake fluid and antifreeze in a styrofoam coffee cup. Plant the little bomb in some tinder at night and stroll away. Once the temperature reached 60 the next morning, whoomph, fire.
      It was a warm summer.

      The camp's cat was named Cinder. He was black as a witch's cat, and during the day he insisted on sleeping on my bunk. He was a mouser and his ears twitched when he dreamt. Ash bought him half-and-half to put on his dry food. Some of the guys didn't like cats and weren't above kicking him when he got in their way.

      Raphael bunked out at the dirt-strip airport. He was under Forest Service contract, and we used him for everything from shuttling biologists around the desert to tracking livestock movements to searching for smokes after a lightning storm to dropping boxes of fried chicken to us on the fire line. He was always reading in the little hangar closet he bunked in, feet propped up on a parts crate, sipping a Coke. He read pilot magazines and A. B. Guthrie novels. Very often the Bible. I tried to not like him, but it wasn't easy. He and Ash slept in a dome tent under the wing of his Cessna when he flew her up to the border. She told me when I asked about hotel accommodations on her trips.
      His name was Raphael, but they called him Ralph. He kept to himself. He wasn't passionate about fires like the rest of us, and the whole of him didn't quite fit in.
      He was a foreigner, from the East. He was olive-skinned and not tall, with short dark hair. The little extra weight he carried made him appear almost but not quite puffy. Not hard and lean like those of us who swung chainsaws and Pulaskis. He was studying to be a minister at one of those little Bible colleges in the Midwest and he drove a '72 Cadillac ambulance with a bike rack and a CD player. "Don't you want to fly B-17s, Canadairs, Orions," I asked him once, "instead of that little Cessna?"
      "No," he said. "I am content with this." What I thought he meant was that he was content with Ash.
      Without thinking of the consequences, I asked him, "Does she haul your ashes?"
      "You don't need to know that," Raphael said. I expected he would hit me and was a little disappointed when he didn't.

      "Your survival in the wilderness might depend on it," she said, breaking the green-and-brown hopper's legs at the joints like expensive crab. She popped the insect into her mouth whole. The exoskeleton cracked in her teeth and what might have been an antenna or a leg poked out until she retrieved it with her tongue. Her neck jiggled a little as she swallowed.
      "Just let me die," I said.

      "I can't help but to feel for him," Ash told me after her third or fourth plane ride to the border. "Raphael is an angel."
      "What in hell does that mean?" I knew damn well what it meant to me, but I wanted her take on the matter.
      Ash's eyes told me she would not answer, but not because it wasn't any of my business. In Wyoming, in the Forest Service, silence is an acceptable response, often encouraged.
      That afternoon the mosquitoes were thick. I smeared my arms with government-surplus Desert Storm bug juice. The mint-green door paint on my truck had begun to peel where the sweat from my left arm smeared against it. Though it looked like I was going to come up the loser in a toss of the I-Ching, I became determined not to let her go before October. She was something to hold onto for a summer in Hams Fork, something many, even most people there did not have. That summer she was the only thing.

      The Eternal Flame was the dump fire that would not go out. It had been burning for years, from deep in the ground where newspapers and plastic diapers and snow tires and condoms and motor oil and couches, beer bottles and flashlight batteries, smoldered and sometimes torched enough to shoot up a little flame, bigger than a pilot light, smaller than a camp fire. Mostly it wasn't an eternal flame, it was just smoke. They covered it up, but it burned and coughed, burned and coughed. We would get called, because from town it sometimes looked like Utah or the western heel of the Bridger-Teton National Forest was on fire. The Smokey propaganda poster over our kitchen stove showed a burned-over Oldsmobile in a black-and-white apocalypse. It said: HARRY'S TRASH FIRE GOT AWAY. DON'T LET YOURS. We knew it was just the dump, but we had to go.
      Once there, we might walk out into the dump with eight-gallon piss-pumps on our backs and squirt some water on the little flame. Most often we just looked around at what was new in the dump and made comments about what could have been saved-a couch, a refrigerator, a TV, a mattress.

      I lost a third-of-July game of cards fair and square and had to be Smokey the goddamn Bear in the Hams Fork Independence Day Parade.

      On a supermarket atlas, the southwest corner of Wyoming goes from B.L.M. white to Forest Service green as you run your finger northward. The reason we needed rangeland biologists was because of Lapland. The B.L.M. sagebrush desert lapped into our Forest Service sagebrush desert, which slowly turned into thin scrub copse and, eventually, as you got higher, thick crops of pine. Nothing is green in Lapland, save for the sage crowns and the grasses in early spring.
      The crew quarters was a good hour-drive away, over this moonscape, from the nearest forest fire-the deep-pine fires that smelled like smoked Christmas-because Lapland sat between Hams Fork to the south and the real woods of the north. Many cows. Many sheep.
      The B.L.M. men were government cowboys who thought like ranchers and had little patience for small and insignificant things like jackrabbits and coyotes. They wore cowboy boots and Stetsons and loved nothing better than running wild mustangs or control-burning thousands of acres of high desert. We couldn't blame them for that, though we did not always get along and often referred to them as the B.M.
      Our Forest Service people were government lumberjacks who had little patience for anything that did not grow tall and burn hard. We wore cork-sole logging boots and farmer caps, and we could put an edge to a chainsaw in two and a half minutes with a pocket file, overhaul it in 20 with a Swiss Army knife. We worked like loggers. And most of us thought like pyromaniacs. "Let it burn to the road, burn her to the road!"
      Ranchers leased B.L.M. and Forest Service land for next to nothing and overgrazed their herds until a grasshopper would starve to death; mining and logging paid the bills. The cowboys called us the Forest Circus. The Hams Fork Gazette editorial page called the B.L.M. and us "outmoded government tumors."

      The reason we needed Smokey the Bear and his "Only You!" campaign was less apparent than why we needed Ash. For over 50 years Smokey had had an impact on kids and campers. He kept fire minimized. We, Smokey and us firefighters, did our jobs so well that the forest had evolved into an unhealthy monoculture of stunted ponderosa pine. In the draws too steep to log were the ironwood trees, pulpy cottonwoods, choked pine starts, and weeds. This treescape was what we called "dense fuel, which burned like billyhell when it did catch fire. Our fires were mostly caused by lightning. After a fire and the spring snowmelt, serviceberries, raspberries, fireweed, and bunchgrass would return. And wildlife-deer, moose, elk, bears, gamebirds, rabbits-would feed in the new meadows. Fires were a good thing, but millions of tax dollars went each year to try to prevent them and put them out."