As longtime readers of this website would tell you, wildfires hold a certain morbid fascination for the Defector staff. As observers of the ice caps and fans of "going outside" would tell you, the medium and long-term future will both be infernal ones. The more I learn about the theory and practice of wildfire combat, forest management, and the history of megafires, the more fascinated I become. A phenomenon that seems inexorable and fundamentally uncontainable emerges, through the smoke, as a far more subjective problem. This month's DRAB selection is a famed nonfiction look at one of the most infamous wildfire disasters in United States history.
Norman Maclean published Young Men and Fire in 1992, 43 years after the Mann Gulch fire killed 13 wildland firefighters. From what I gather, the book begins with the disaster and radiates outward from it in pulses, getting into deeper philosophical territory yet holding true to the hub at its center. The New York Times review both refers to Maclean as a great artist and contains the phrase "cornball pastoral," which makes the book seem like turf worth mining. It is raining all along the West Coast as I write this and somehow we have avoided a catastrophic fire season for the third year running, which would seem to make a book about a summer occurrence an odd choice for an early winter DRAB selection. Great news there, though: The book also seems to be about the phenomenology of death. "There's a lot of tragedy in the universe that has missing parts and comes to no conclusion, including probably the tragedy that awaits you and me," Maclean, who would die two years before the publication of Young Men and Fire, writes.
The titular Young Men in Maclean's work are smokejumpers, the shock troops who parachute into the riskiest wildland fire situations armed with hand tools. I've known several wildland firefighters in my day, and all of them—the person who coordinates fire retardant drops out of a DC-10, the volunteer firefighter in the alpine part of Santa Cruz County, the aspiring hand crew chopper—all talk about smokejumpers with a reverential awe. They are the people in closest conflict with a wildfire: not quite the first line of defense, nor the best line of defense, but the most direct line of defense. I'm a little scared of this book, but I'm excited to get into it with you sometime in the week before Christmas, probably Tuesday, December 17 or Wednesday, December 18. When we nail down precise scheduling, we will announce it in the Cipher (subscribe!) and in the Defector Programming widget on the website.
