On the Burning Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

Iowa’s cornfields, even what little patches of wildland still exist on Long Island: At one point or another, all of it has probably burned, and most of it will burn again. Every few years, Alaska’s endless wilderness torches with such intensity that the fires uproot century-old trees. These behemoth blazes can generate vortices of swirling wind, flames, and smoke so powerfulthat they carry half-ton logs thousands of feet into the air. Somehow fire finds the conditions it needs to thrive in the swamps of Florida’s Everglades and the bogs of Louisiana. The natural process of flame and regrowth is many millennia old. For four hundred million years, fuel, oxygen, and heat have combined to make flame.
    Americans have been aggressively putting out wildfires only since the beginning of the twentieth century, but in that time we’ve invented firefighting tools as varied as the landscapes where they’re used. Recently, some of the tools have become higher-tech: There are oversize four-wheel-drive fire engines with water turrets that drain twenty-five-hundred-gallon tanks in minutes, helicopter-borne torches that can set ablaze thousands of acres of grasslands in a single pass, remotely piloted drones used to scout potential fire lines without endangering life, and infrared cameras mounted on small planes to map a fire’s perimeter and intensity.
    But a hotshot’s work depends on the relatively simple tools he carries in his hands, and there’s one tool every hotshot and wildland firefighter in the country knows intimately: the Pulaski. In 1910, the thirty-five-hundred-person timber town of Wallace, Idaho, sat in the path of a blaze that would grow to the size of Connecticut. Ed Pulaski, a Forest Service ranger, had been tasked with keeping the flames out of Wallace. At one point, he commanded fifty farmers, fathers, and drunks enlisted from the town’s doorsteps and bars. Few, if any, knew how to fight fires. When the wind rose and the fire exploded, flames trapped Pulaski and his crew in a canyon. Against their screams and protests, the ranger forced his men into a mineshaft and blockaded the entrance with his body. To run was to die. Pulaski drew his .44 revolver and said, “The next man who tries to leave the tunnel I will shoot.”
    The militia of firefighters lay down beside one another like sardines, sucking in the cool air puddled on the bottom of the mineshaft. Orange light cast by the fire sprung into the darkness, and it grew so hot, the wooden joists and braces caught flame. Pulaski lost consciousness. When the fire passed and the first of the forty-five or so survivors crawled over their leader’s lifeless body, someone said, “Come on outside, boys—the boss is dead.”
    “Like hell he is,” came Pulaski’s response. He lay in the ash, his hands and arms burned and one eye blinded from the smoke. The Big Burn, as the fire came to be known, gutted Wallace and killed at least eighty-seven firefighters and townsfolk. Five of those men were under Pulaski’s command. He never fully recovered. For the rest of his life, he tended to the graves of the fallen and rarely left his home and blacksmith shop in Wallace, where he invented his namesake tool and the icon of wildland firefighting. The ax on one side of the tool’s head can be used to chop limbs from trees or cut thick roots; the adze on the other end can clear pine needles and leaves from the forest floor. As such, from Colorado’s plains to Southern California’s brush to Tennessee’s thick timber, the Pulaski works well in every fuel type. Today, firefighters’ caches all across the country store tens of thousands of the tools that bear Pulaski’s name.
    At least four of the hotshots on Granite Mountain were using Pulaskis the day of the training fire. Donut, who is six feet tall, had customized his with a longer handle. As lead Pulaski, he went first, cutting roots and mats of pine needles and otherwise setting the path for the line. The ten