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The Way the Wind Is Blowing by Amanda Monthei
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Mountain Gazette Library
The Way the Wind Is Blowing by Amanda Monthei
Hello and welcome back to the Mountain Gazette Library. I'm John Booster, and this week we explore the world of wildland firefighting through the eyes of Amanda Montai. To invest as we delve into the camaraderie, resilience, and challenges faced by those firefighters in the rugged landscape they call home. [MUSIC] Mountain Gazette Library is proudly presented by Steel, designed, developed, and tested at the base of the Tetons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Steel was founded to inspire connection with the outdoors through premium technical apparel for the epic and everyday. Learn more at Steel.com, stio.com. Steel, let the outside in. The Mountain Gazette Library is proudly presented by Gordini. Based in Vermont and family run, Gordini has focused on the same mission since 1956 to keep you outside longer. Our gloves, socks, and goggles aren't merely accessories. They're critical pieces of equipment that are built to last season after season. We take our commitment to people and the planet seriously and build that into every detail. From introducing the first-ever down mitts to knitting quilted dual-layer socks, innovation is always done in the spirit of progress. Learn more about what drives our passions and products at Gordini.com, G-O-R, D-I, and I.com. Mountain Gazette Library is also proudly presented by Visit Idaho and Visit Sun Valley. Discover where adventure meets style in Sun Valley, Idaho. Welcome to America's pioneering mountain town that veers off the beaten path. Explore five distinct mountain races, over 200 miles of single-track mountain biking trails, a myriad of fly fishing waters, exciting events, and inviting dining options. Find your summer escape at visit sunvalley.com. The Way the Wind is Blowing, written by Amanda Montai from Mountain Gazette 195. Two summers ago, I was on desert fire with the Hot Shot Crew, a 20-person wildland firefighting team I used to work with. It was a classic Eastern Washington fire and sagebrush and grass, ripping one minute and completely cold the next, and weed shone up when it was leaning toward the former, when nothing remained but small bits of heat and lots of blackened sagebrush. A few days into the assignment, still on that dead fire, one of our senior firefighters gave us the morning briefing, covering weather and fire potential and telling us to keep our heads up for rattlesnakes and dehydration. We stood in a circle, shuffling from foot to foot or kicking rocks in the early morning sun, only vaguely listening because morning briefings become more or less repetitive after a week in the same place. "It's hot, fire potential is high, drink some damn water, rattlesnakes exist, so don't be dumb." "I have one more thing to add," he said. One of my old buddies from another Hot Shot Crew died by suicide last night. He was a good dude, and I just want you guys to know. He didn't cry, but he looked at the ground as we gave our sympathies from around the briefing circle. Everyone lined up to give a hug or a handshake, or one of those half-hug-half handshake things. Others stood back, tears in their eyes, surely recalling when they were that friend who just heard of a fire buddy's fire line death or suicide. And wild land fire? "It's not if, but when you will lose a friend." He looked up and made eye contact with the crew. "If you guys ever need to talk, just please," he said, pausing. "Please let me know." Heads nodded in quiet reverence and deep understanding. A few more crew members worked through the line, not unlike those at weddings and funerals. To pay their hushed respects. The circle dispersed. We had acknowledged our friend's grief, and now there was work to be done. Wild land firefighters are inordinately impacted by suicide, as well as a whole slew of other mental health struggles. This isn't that story. This is a story of people who do this job, love this job. Despite a myriad of reasons to hate it, even despite losing friends, relationships, and any semblance of normal life to it. The people drawn to this job can't be shoehorned into any one stereotype. Despite the fact that many of them are undoubtedly dudes with beards, I'm not saying that wild land fire wouldn't benefit from some serious diversification effort. Still, I've worked alongside LGBTQ folks and people whose first language was in English. I've swung a tool next to aspiring Ph.D. students and 19-year-old kids fresh out of high school, teleschiers, nomads, hippies, and, as you can imagine, quite a few straight edge decidedly corn fed boys. Some of my former coworkers grew up throwing hay bales. Some grew up in Portland, Oregon. Some grew up in Mexico. Some had shrapnel in their arms, brought back from combat in Afghanistan. There are those who came to fire after struggling with addiction and alcoholism, and those who still struggled with drinking and drugs. Some were single, many had partners, and some were divorced, or in the process of getting divorced. Some of the people I've met in this work even fought fire while in prison, got out, and worked like hell to get a job in fire again. Every one of my former coworkers made sacrifices to work in fire and had untold conditions and life changes to reckon with. For one, there was smoke and dust inhalation, a near-daily exposure that you eventually just quit trying to avoid. Then there's the bizarre schedule that results in maybe eight or ten days off from July to October. Working in the sun and extreme heat is an obvious part of the job, but it's relatively easy to acclimate to. Hot tip, drinking a gallon of water every day helps virtually everything that ails you. Finally, there's the weird diet. This ranges from packaged government rations that preppers keep in their basement in the event of an apocalypse, to lunches filled with sugar and mystery meat sandwiches, as we call them. Or sometimes just three or four un-crestables. Those little PB&J sandwiches that they'd give you in elementary school if you forgot your lunch. Dinners were often pretty good, but fueling exclusively with snickers and gummy snacks all day certainly takes a toll by September. The reason this is all ultimately deemed acceptable is because fire also promises experiences. Helicopter rides into wilderness areas and regularly lighting things on fire for a couple. And perhaps most valuable above all, a deep camaraderie with crew members that is uncommon, non-existent even, in normal life. City is probably one of the most alluring elements of wildland firefighting. Fire, for all of its other highs and lows, is a unique opportunity to develop deep relationships with the people with whom you spend nearly every waking moment from April to October. An average season on a hotshot crew can involve 110 or more days on active fires, which totals more than 300 meals together on assignments, and untold others while at the station or traveling. On most fires, firefighters can be awake about 17 hours a day, and every moment but the occasional P-break is spent with those same 20 people. Beyond sharing a disgusting amount of time together, I had assumed that relationship development would hinge heavily on the types of experiences and conversations people have while working in the woods and doing hard things together. What I hadn't considered was the role I would need to play when a co-worker's friend died, or the shoulder I would provide when someone was bummed about missing their kid's birthday. I quickly learned that trauma and grief were the foundation of these relationships. Alongside momentary valor so fleeting in nonchalant, I often didn't even know if I should acknowledge it. I hesitate to toss the word "heroic" around very often, particularly so when I talk about wildland firefighting. Most of the wildland firefighters I know grimace, like physically real, at the idea of being called heroes. They're just doing their jobs, they'll say. Hero worship, in fact, is often counterproductive in that it makes it easier to poorly compensate the people doing said heroics. Plus, it takes a massive coordinated effort to save homes and lives, of which hotshot crews are only a small, though important, piece of the puzzle. The heroics I witnessed and took note of were more often untold small actions that, when compounded, felt less like heroics and more like a group of people who committed every day to watching out for each other. As far as I can tell, I had only one close call with serious injury or death as a firefighter, but it was a moment of this sort of nonchalant heroism that left me unscathed. It was my first fire as a hotshot, and we were in the southwest, chasing desert fires and red flag warnings, high heat, high winds, low humidities. I'd spent most of the assignments scared shitless and feeling largely inept. I couldn't stop messing up in small ways that felt profoundly less small when considered altogether, a power point of mistakes that wouldn't stop clicking through my mind. We ended up on a fire in rocky, steep terrain on the interior hillside of an ancient caldera, high enough in the alpine that our lungs burned with every hike off the line and out of the pit of an age-old volcano. Every day that I made it back to the buggy felt like an accomplishment, and a deep sense of dread to find my headspace for the first six days of the assignment. What would my next mistake be? Would I get hurt? What would our next assignment require? What fresh hell would come next? With little real-life context as to how hotshot crews worked, I made vast assumptions to answer these questions and scared myself sleepless in the process. One night on the creek where we had spread out our sleeping bags for the night, I lay awake for hours, listening to the soft flow of water over cobble, hoping and waiting for sleep, but finding some small solace in the meditation of water over rocks, of hearing it all wash downstream nonetheless. The next day, while walking off the line at the end of our shift, about half of the crew, including me, was nearly hit by a falling tree. Its roots were burned out, but not visibly enough for us to have registered it as a threat. The only reason I didn't get hit by that tree was because a co-worker, a combat veteran who'd served in Afghanistan, yelled, "Run left!" as half of us ran right, which was the same path as the falling tree. We heard him, changed course, and escaped the branches by mere inches. I hadn't considered that relationships in fire would be built like this, too. For all the reasons we convince ourselves to fight the fire, there are countless others that ultimately make us question that decision obsessively almost every hour of every day. Any firefighter will tell you that this job is the deepest love-hate relationship they've ever experienced. Within a few months of doing fire, I realized that if I wasn't questioning my life decisions at least three times a day, I wasn't doing it right, or not doing a hard enough assignment. Because at the end of the day, we'd have collectively accomplished something that felt difficult and important, and the satisfaction of having completed it would be enough to galvanize and even deeper love for the job. The experiences, comradery, and humility of digging in line for 12 hours, only to have the fire cross it all the same the next day. This is what we get into the fire for. What we didn't expect, what ultimately ends up tipping the scales toward leaving, our mental health issues, relationship problems, future health concerns, poor pay, and lack of benefits, despite increased experience and training, as well as limited opportunities for upward mobility. When I finally got out of the fire in 2019, after just four years, I did it because it felt like more of a sacrifice than it was worth. I often say I wish I'd found fire when I was 22, instead of 26, so that I could have spent more of my nomadic phase chasing fires and living out of a duffel bag. But by 29, I'd learned on a deeply intimate level, just how difficult it is to balance life with fire. I understood how important the work was, for the land, and perhaps even more so, for myself. But I couldn't kick the feeling that I'd done what I could do, and it wasn't for me anymore. I'd felt the glory and experienced a season that ended with 1,000 hours of overtime. For those in fire, this is a point of celebration and exhaustion, a simple way of saying, "It was a hell of a fire season, before sleeping for two weeks straight." As I wrote in my notebook in the back of the buggy in July of that first season with the crew, "This is all important, I'm just not good at balancing it." There's no balance in fire, just an on-and-off switch that has flipped spontaneously every day of the summer, and then turned off entirely from October to April. This is what wreaks havoc on the minds of wildland firefighters. Not the work itself, but the downtime, when the switch flips abruptly to off. And there's nothing left to do, but think about the moments and traumas, and long, hard days that defined the previous six months. We've got a big wind switch, guys! Tie it in quick and RTO! The fire, fanned by 25 mile per hour gusts, made it difficult to hear the radio, but I could just make out RTO. This means reverse tool order, or in other words, turn your asses around and get out. We weren't in any immediate danger, but the smoke quickly became suffocating. The wind had been favorable all night, pushing inward as we burned off a section of the line along a road in Oregon, hoping to starve the coming fire by taking away its fuel. The wind switched abruptly around 9 p.m., on a day that had started at 5.30 a.m., and what had been a normal burn operation quickly became a last ditch effort to knock down the spot fires that began crossing the line. I was at the front of the burn, responsible for lighting the last little chunk of land between our burn and another hotshot crew. The golden spike, as it were. My captain grabbed my arm as soon as my fire met what had already been laid. "Get back to the buggy," he said. A guy of about 40, he had 15 years of experience on fire crews all over Oregon, and regularly kicked all of our asses on crew runs. He stayed behind to gauge just how much of a mess was about to be made, as the fire crossed the road, which was not part of the plan. I paced through the smoke to locate the rest of the crew, and soon found a few crew members waiting for me. We collectively decided to try to knock down a few of the small fires that had started above us, a hail-merry effort to not completely lose the burn. We caught up the cut bank and stomped at embers before they could ignite nearby brush. Before long, our stomping grew ineffective, and spot fires had developed all around us, so we bumped back down to the road, forming a line and nearly jogging back to the buggies. I attempted to crouch low enough to find fresh air, of which there wasn't any. The smoke stung my eyes and throat, the kind of smoke that makes you wake up feeling like you smoked a pack of Marlborough's, while embers snuck in between my eyes and sunglasses. We made it back to the buggies, where we took refuge from the smoke and prepared to drive back to camp. While a few guys slept, the rest of us laughed about how shitty things got at the end of the burn, sharing what little remained of our lunches from the day. Gummies, candy bars, peanuts. This night undoubtedly sucked. Southern Oregon and Northern California are notoriously heinous, largely because of the poison oak, but also because of the land. Country to be humbled in. I wrote the next day in the composition book I always kept on hand, and humbled was probably an understatement. The land was steep and brushy. I just spent 20 minutes inhaling only smoke. I was in the midst of yet another fire season breakup. A few friends were on a raft trip, and I was jealous. Photos of barbecues filled my Instagram feed. Was this really what I wanted? To be sucking smoke and avoiding poison oak and bees in some rural corner of Oregon, while my friends drank beers and got chaco tans? I was talking with a fire friend recently, someone who's going into his third season on a hot shot crew. He loves his job, but simultaneously laments the time away from his girlfriend and the paradoxical nature of wildland firefighting, particularly thinking that it's actually a sustainable or ecologically beneficial career path. I got into this job because I thought I could make a difference, but it seems like most of what we do in wildland just feels like a band-aid. He told me. What he means is that our deeply rooted land management issues are far beyond what a bunch of people with hoses, saws, and pilaskis can realistically deal with. The West's forests are suffocated by brush, irreversibly void of the type of low intensity fire that had kept them healthy for millennia prior to the arrival of Europeans, and eventually, full suppression firefighting. Indigenous tribes have long used fire as an ecological tool and reset, encouraging plant growth and clearing underbrush for ease of movement and hunting. But these efforts were extinguished when the homes, railways, and infrastructure of early pioneers became threatened. Fire has not had a fair chance to reintegrate with the landscape since. For just one alarming juxtaposition, data from the National Interagency Fire Center shows that in the last 10 years, the average number of acres burned in the U.S. every year has hovered around $7 million, 3 times the average acreage burned annually in the 1970s and 80s. Fire seasons have grown longer, more destructive, and more severe. Meanwhile, federal wildland firefighter numbers hover somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 annually, many of whom are seasonal like me and most of the people I've worked with over the years. Federal wildland firefighters have neither the numbers nor the job structure to do meaningful prevention and mitigation work in the off-season. Things like prescribed burns and thinning projects that would lessen the impact of future wildfires and ultimately make the suppression part of wildland firefighting easier down the road. As such, wildland firefighting has developed into a last-ditch effort to save homes or critical infrastructure. Efforts that often hang precipitously on acts of nature. The way the wind's blowing, the way fire interacts with a certain landscape, a couple digit rise in temperature. And it's exceedingly easy to think that when the wind does switch and shit hits the fan, it was your fault. You should have seen that coming. You should have known the upslope winds always come at sunset here and that the burnout operation wouldn't be completed until well after dusk. You could have reinforced the line and could have done something differently. When things go right, there's rarely a moment to celebrate. And when things go wrong, it can weigh on you for months. As fire seasons grow longer and more intense, the weight of these decisions and wildfires and even climate change as a whole will continue to land squarely on the already pretty sore shoulders of wildland firefighters. These are people who just missed their kid's birthday party to dig in line for 16 hours. People who haven't spoken to their spouses in days because there's no cell service at fire camp. Men who have a new baby at home, but have barely seen them all summer. Women firefighters start out making around $12 an hour. During my last season, I made $15 an hour. Every seasonal firefighter, those who work as 1039 employees, which limits hours worked to just below the 1040 hour threshold for permanent employment, makes around $15 an hour. If you know any wildland firefighters, particularly guys in their 20s, you've probably seen them by a new truck after fire season. This is because we do end up making decent money, by ski bump standards anyway, by working boatloads of overtime, of which we can get up to 1,000 or even 1,200 hours a season. In essence, wildland firefighters work the same amount in five to six months, as most people do in an entire year. They do get affordable healthcare while they're employed, but since there's little free time or flexibility in the summer, making doctor's appointments is an impossible task. But they lose health insurance in the winter, so getting those appointments done in the summer while you actually have employer-provided health insurance is sometimes the only healthcare seasonal firefighters get through the year. I either didn't have insurance or used Medicaid during my four winters off from fire. This inevitably makes firefighters feel left behind by their employers. In response, organizations like the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters Committee, which advocates for better pay, benefits, classification, and mental health resources for wildland firefighters, known by their employers as "forestry technicians," have begun popping up and encouraging more widespread change through policy reform. Meanwhile, organizations like the Wildland Firefighter Foundation help pick up the pieces when wildland firefighters suffer fire line injuries or assist the families of wildland firefighters who died on or off the line. They help connect wildland firefighters with mental health resources and cover lost wages. They fly fallen firefighters back to their home towns and cover funeral expenses. The fact that organizations like this exist is evidence that the federal agencies that employ the vast majority of wildland firefighters aren't doing nearly enough to support those firefighters when things go wrong, when the wind inevitably switches and things don't go as planned. One August night on a fire in central Washington, our crew became technically entrapped after the fire had burned over the one road out of the area where we were working. This left us, and more than 200 others, stuck on the mountain overnight. We spent hours looking for a good place to set up camp, all in places that had recently burned over and were therefore susceptible to falling trees. We eventually found a spot somewhere along a road deep inside the fire's recent burn scar. We surveyed the area for sketchy trees and finally sat down to eat MREs, pre-prepared meals like beef chili and jalapeno beef patty, which we eat when there's no other food available. We set our sleeping bags out alongside the buggies. A few guys put theirs under the buggies to feel safer against the potential for falling trees. I found a spot next to a few crew members and proceeded to lie in my sleeping bag for nearly an hour, closely monitoring the burned over tree directly above me that had been swaying in the wind, emitting a deep groan with every arc. I thought about how that tree could kill me while I slept. As I spiraled deeper into that fear, a meteor trailed across the sky, followed by another one a few seconds later. The pairseid's meteor shower was peaking that night, and as the meteors fell from the sky, I noticed that the fire was burning on the distant horizon, visible through the skeletons of the trees that had been recently burned over. It looked like a small enemy fire in the distance, growing in brief spurts as it burned individual trees before fizzling out again. I smiled there in my sleeping bag, below shooting stars, and two dead trees that could fall at any time, and fell asleep at peace against all odds. We woke up to find that no trees had come down that night, and we made coffee on the tailgate of the buggy while blasting funk music and dancing in the cold morning sun. It was pure beauty, a moment I'll never forget, magic amidst destruction and fear. It's hard to explain why, amidst it all, people still choose to become wildland firefighters, whether for a few years or a few decades. What's the draw? There are the sunsets and the helicopter rides, sure. Part of its allure is not knowing what each day will bring, but dealing with it all the same. To me, the closest parallel has come from standing on top of ski lines I've never looked at or skied, finding my way down even when it sucks or I'm scared, and coming out the bottom completely stoked nonetheless. Similarly, there's the deep, almost indescribable satisfaction of a completed day, assignment, or fire season, and above all that, there's the people. Most of the important things I know about myself, my resilience, my strength, my innumerable weaknesses, were learned on the fire line, taught to me by people who were tired and hungry and thirsty and frustrated, but just kept on digging anyway. People may have just lost a friend, or people may have wondered if there was a divorce on the horizon. People who hadn't seen their kids in weeks, they taught me how to find some semblance of peace in a swinging tool or in a successful burnout, but most of all, they taught me how to put my head down and do the thing that needs to be done despite everything else. They taught me the power of committing all of myself to one single thing, that motley blend of 20 people and the wild ride of a fire season for six months a year. Fire in all its moods taught me humility. The people in all of their moods taught me to simply love what must be done. Mountain Gazette Library is produced by Mountain Gazette, executive produced by Mike Rokey, produced and hosted by John Boozdar. Austin Holt is our marketing director. No part of this podcast or the magazine can be reproduced or used to train large language models without express written consent from verb cabin LLC. That means you open AI. To learn more about Mountain Gazette, please visit us at mountaingazette.com. [MUSIC]