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Author Sebastian Junger on His Trials by Wildfire |
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By Tom Foreman Inside Base Camp |
| June 25, 2003 |
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The deaths of 14 firefighters on Colorado's Storm King Mountain in 1994 reawakened public awareness about wildfire dangers. Now, with wildfires taking hundreds of homes, those concerns are once again front and center out West. And no doubt, that is attracting the attention of a most notable writer. Long before he became the best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger was captivated by the daring efforts of men and women who take on these runaway blazes. Whenever Sebastian comes by my studio we talk about writing, chess, his latest travels and inevitably, fire. Sebastian Junger: I was on an enormous fire in Idaho in '92. And back then, I didn't really have any credentials as a journalist. I was working as a climber for tree companies, and to make more money, I was writing a little bit, getting [stories] published in local newspapers. Tom Foreman: But you wanted to see a wildland fire? Sebastian Junger: I wanted to write a book about dangerous jobs and this was the first one I came up with: fighting wildfires. And I just went out West and talked my way into a fire camp and watched these guys fight fire. And, as a job, it was everything. If I could have switched from being a journalist to being a smokejumper, right then I would have done it and never looked back. I just thought, "This job has everything a man could ever want." Tom Foreman: Let me ask you a bit about that. I've spent a lot of time on fire lines over the years as a journalist, and there are moments of intense drama when the fire's coming, but there are also unending hours of tedium and waiting and digging trenches. Sebastian Junger: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure eventually if I had gotten my dream job, I would have found some dissatisfaction in it. But there was something about the fact that these groups of 20, mostly men, are out in the mountains fighting something as sort of primal and ancient as fire. And it's not war. I mean, war is so ugly, you know, but it has all the drama of war without that ugliness. God, what other job tests you like that? Tom Foreman: You wrote about Storm King Mountain where the 14 young firefighters died in that sudden burst of flame up that hillside. How did that strike you? Sebastian Junger: I was out at Storm King a couple of days after the tragedy. Tom Foreman: You and I were likely there together because I was covering it at the same time. Sebastian Junger: Yeah, that's right. Tom Foreman: What did you think when you looked up on that mountain? Sebastian Junger: Well, you know, I hiked up there and everyone says this, but it looked like a bomb had gone off. I mean it just was a completely incinerated landscape. And that was very powerful to think, "My, God, people were stuck in this." That was really horrifying. Tom Foreman: It was so steep. Sebastian Junger: Yeah, and the amount of gear that those guys carry. My article, my assignment was to try to figure out if it was avoidable. And what I wound up concluding was that the science is sophisticated enough that we can predict fire behavior pretty well, and what happened at Storm King Mountain was predictable. If you had the information they had the day before, feed it through the math, and it would have told you what happened. Tom Foreman: I know one of the questions that has been raised in other circumstances where firefighters have gotten into trouble is that even the people who are trained to be safe, many of them want to be there Sebastian Junger: Right. Tom Foreman: and there's a tendency to push too far, a tendency to say, "This is where it's happening, we'll jump in and be the heroes." Sebastian Junger: Right, and at every level the management, they're dealing with hundreds of fires throughout the West, and maybe this small fire they're not focused on the dangers of it. It's totally regrettable, but understandable, right down to the hot shots on the ground who have a bit of a swagger to them. "Hey, we can handle this; this is nothing." So at every level there are people saying, "You know it's not that big a danger, let's just do it." And that's exactly what happened at Storm King. Tom Foreman: What is it out there you most want to do, briefly here? Sebastian Junger: I want to keep doing foreign reporting, and I want to write another book, I mean, not a collection of them (news stories) but another real nonfiction book. Tom Foreman: Is this danger thing a young person's game? Sebastian Junger: I hope not. (Laughter.) 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