Episode 13
Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning of the American West
Wildfire Days
"Wildfire is actually a natural part of our ecosystems and our landscape, particularly in the American West. Fires had been burning naturally for millennia and keeping the forest healthy."
"It's the most incredible job. It's so fulfilling and exciting and fascinating... just seeing how fire moves on the landscape and how we can use fire intentionally to stop wildfires."
-Kelly Ramsey
The historical context of wildfire management reveals a legacy of suppression dating back to the Big Burn of 1910, which initiated a paradigm shift in how we perceive and respond to fire in our ecosystems.
In this engaging episode, we confront the alarming reality of wildfires in California and the American West with someone who was on the front lines fighting wildfires during the most devastating and destructive years in California's history, when more than 4 million acres burned in 2020.
My guest, Kelly Ramsey, is an engaging storyteller who brings a fresh perspective to the conversation as a hotshot firefighter and author of "Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning of the American West."
With a background in poetry and fiction, Kelly's journey to the fire line adds a unique and captivating narrative to the discussion. Our discussion touches on the pressing need for policy reform that embraces fire as a natural part of the landscape rather than something to be eradicated at all costs. In addition, she candidly shares her challenges as a female firefighter in a male-dominated crew and the complex dynamics of teamwork under extreme conditions.
Through intimate storytelling, she reveals the physical and psychological demands of fighting fires on the front lines, the century-old forest management policies that have intensified today's wildfire crisis, what it takes to earn respect as the only woman on a testosterone-rich elite wildfire crew, and the complex dynamics of teamwork under extreme conditions.
Our conversation weaves together personal narrative, environmental urgency, and a call to action for supporting the firefighters who risk everything to protect our forests and communities. Kelly's insights challenge common misconceptions about wildfire suppression while offering hope through indigenous fire management practices and community engagement.
As we explore the psychological and physical demands of firefighting, this episode serves as a vital reminder of the human stories behind the statistics and the urgent need for community engagement and policy transformation in forest management.
Takeaways:
- The historical suppression of wildfires has led to dangerously dense forests, increasing fire intensity.
- Indigenous practices of fire management are crucial for restoring ecosystems and preventing catastrophic wildfires.
- Wildland firefighting is a physically and mentally demanding job that comes with significant health risks and challenges.
- The mismanagement of forest resources has resulted in a crisis where climate change and wildfires converge dangerously.
- Despite the heroic efforts of firefighters, the system often undervalues their contributions and struggles with staffing shortages.
- Kelly Ramsey's journey from writer to firefighter illustrates the unexpected paths one can take in pursuing passion and purpose.
Resources:
Grassroots Wildland Firefighters: A Voice for Federal Wildland Firefighters
ABC 10 (Opening Audio):
https://youtu.be/roLRvN4W2XI?si=oPN0gwmmU-zLUBBm
Transcript
There's the wildfires raging throughout the state. That's right.
Speaker B:More than two and a half quarter million acres burned in California this year.
Speaker A:Already. We have live team coverage tonight.
Speaker B:A sense of place. The rhythms of wind and rain, hot and cold, fire and growth tug at our connection to the earth.
The native inhabitants of what is now Washington, Oregon and California understood fire as part of the natural rhythm of their homeland. A sense of place and then manifest destiny spread across the west, decimating the ways of understanding the land.
Cities grew out of a booming population. Seekers of wealth and adventure, plunderers of the land reduced the value of forest to the price a log could fetch on the open market.
The big burn of: and unchecked. Jump ahead to: ,:The wildfire season came and went more or less on schedule, but this was emblematic of something new. More fire. Bigger fire. Perpetual fire. Whole towns burnt to the ground. That year, 8,648 wildfires burned 4,304,379 acres in California.
In the most devastating wildfire year in the state's history, we have lost. The largest of these was the August complex Gigafire, which scorched over 1 million acres.
On the scene was Kelly Ramsey, a new member of the Rowdy River Hotshot Wildland Fire crew. Ramsey is the author of Wildfire Days, A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and the Burning of the American West.
And my guest on this episode of Global Warming is real.
With a bachelor's degree in poetry and a master of Fine arts in fiction, Ramsay's journey to working on a hotshot wildfire crew during the most intense wildfire season in the state's history is, I feel safe to say, not typical. Kelly did what most writers with postgraduate degrees do. Struggled, wandered, waited tables and taught others how to write.
Then she discovered her love of the outdoors. She took up backpacking to places like Peru, falling further in love with being in the wilderness next to the earth. Its physical and mental demands.
A volunteer opportunity on the Klamath National Forest Trail crew in Northern California morphed her passion into a new career in the Forest Service as a wilderness ranger.
From struggling rider to wilderness ranger, then hotshot crew, and then closing the circle as a published author, Kelly Ramsey's talent weaves a personal narrative leading through the burning embers of a dry ocean, overgrown landscape. The too slow shift from more than a century of forest mismanagement and market misincentives.
And now, despite the vast majority of California's forests being on federal land, the three word policy goading California to rake the forest does more harm than good. If our approach to wildfire is shifting, its glacial pace does not meet the demands of the climate change world we now inhabit.
But there's a very human, accessible and compelling thread leading through Ramsay's book. She tells the story of her life and being the sole female crew member on a testosterone rich, hotshot wildland fire crew.
When you're not cutting fire line, life goes on. Let's let Kelly Ramsey, author of Wildfire, A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning of the American west, pick it up from here.
Speaker C:News this morning about the Trump administration rescinding the roadless rule.
Speaker A:Ooh, yeah, I did not hear about that yet.
Speaker C:Yeah. So what do you think about that?
I mean, and they're claiming us because we need to thin the forests, and it sounds like they just want to get at the logs. Really?
Speaker A:I was going to say it sounds to me like it's about logging, because what the roadless rule protects from is excessive extraction of lumber. And you would need to read up on the nuances of what happened.
Of course, I haven't even read about it, but my gut reaction is like, that sounds very suspicious.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:And probably not good for our forests.
Speaker C:Let's talk about forests and the problems that suppression at all costs of the last century or so. How has that impacted wildfire today? What would you say are the. The best approach as a. As opposed to cutting down all the trees?
Speaker A: ildfires started in the early: ice following the big burn of:And if people want to learn a lot about that, they can read the wonderful book the Big Burn, which is one of my favorite fire texts of all time by Timothy Egan. So as he chronicles really well, they were frightened.
You know, the Forest Service was founded not primarily to Protect lands, although they made it sound like that. But it was also really founded on this basis of timber harvest.
And that's why the Forest Service was lodged within the Department of Agriculture as opposed to the Department of the Interior. Forests were meant to be productive.
And I think they started shaking their boots when this million plus acre fire happened in Idaho and Montana and leveled a lot of the tree, incinerated a lot of the trees they had been hoping to use to houses. So anyway, that's just a little deep background. But then, so what they started doing was suppressing all wildfires as soon as they began.
And this is a problem because wildfire is actually a natural part of our ecosystems and our landscape, particularly in the American West. And fires had been burning naturally for millennia and keeping the forest healthy.
So clearing out a lot of that brush, clearing out a lot of the small diameter trees and keeping forests more park, like they like to say.
But you know, having these openings between trees, which is really important because when the next fire comes, the fire can move along the forest floor and not torch mass stands of trees. So what you see now after a hundred years of this policy of full suppression of wildfires are forests that are incredibly, unnaturally dense.
They're actually, they look beautiful. Like I, I love, you know, you see that ridge that's fully green and just packed with, with like conifers that are stacked on top of one another.
It's absolutely picturesque. But it actually, that's a very unhealthy forest.
So fire starts as they inevitably do, and it burns way hotter, way faster, and it burns a lot more landscape than it ever did before. So we're in this crisis partly because of global climate change, but partly largely, I would say, because of this policy of full suppression.
And to answer the second part of your question, what we need to do in order to change it is essentially to go back to the way that indigenous people managed their ecosystems. We need to intentionally burn the landscape with prescribed fire and indigenous cultural fire, which are kind of two sides of the same coin.
But we need to be putting fire on the landscape under safe conditions whenever possible to reduce that vegetation so that when wildfire happens, it doesn't become this catastrophic event.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker C:How are we doing with the changing of the policy?
Speaker A:Not great.
Speaker C:Not great.
Speaker A:Yeah, I would say I think there is some positive change. Like I notice a lot more awareness around prescribed burning than there was even five years ago. Like it's much more part of the conversation.
Almost every article I read about fire or a story I listened to about fire Prescribed fire seems to come up, and there are also more organizations pushing for good fire and trying to involve communities in that process, as opposed to just waiting for the federal government to do it for us. I would say on a federal level, both in a policy sense and in a funding and manpower sense, we are so far behind.
We need to be burning millions of acres, and we're burning hundreds of thousands, maybe. Okay, Burning thousands, yeah.
Speaker C:Well, how does it work when you're dealing with local communities and the federal government? How is the conversation? It might be kind of fraught right now, but just generally speaking, how. How does that work?
Speaker A:Well, yeah, it's a little bit difficult because on federal lands, you pretty much can only have burning conducted by federal employees. And already we're in a crisis of understaffing.
And the current administration has, of course, only deepened that crisis, so that can be a little tense.
But there is a lot of community scale fuels reduction and burning that community members and volunteers can do sort of in that land that's maybe privately owned or publicly owned by a town or a municipality. So, yeah, there is work that can be done there.
But in terms of the bulk of the acreage that needs to be treated, and this, like, what we call, like, landscape scale treatment is federal. So we really need policy to come down from Congress and funding to come down from Congress for that to happen.
Speaker C:Yeah, I remember it was the first Trump administration. I can't remember which. And you would know much more than I. The fires just kind of kept coming and coming, and there was.
t was the park fire. Was that: Speaker A: That was the campfire. Was: Speaker D:Okay.
Speaker C:Yeah. It's hard.
Speaker A:It's hard to keep.
Speaker C:Hard to keep track.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:But there was one. Trump came down here and with Newsom, and he was talking about raking the forest and.
Speaker A: Oh, that was in: Speaker C: It was in: Speaker A:I wasn't on that fire, but I was firefighting that year. And, you know, came out in Trump says, rake the forest. And, like, we just joking about it for weeks, like, oh, you got your rake up there.
Speaker C:Yeah, that must be. I mean, just from my perspective, somebody that was listening to this and lives in the area, that was frustrating.
But for somebody like you, that's out next to the fire, that must be really frustrating to hear such. I don't know how to put it. Clueless talk.
Speaker A:Yeah, I was tempted to say ignorant. That might be too harsh, but I don't know. Yeah. It's maddening.
And that was the same year that Congressman McClintock famously said that firefighting is unskilled labor. He said it was hot and brutal, but it's fundamentally unskilled. And nothing could be further from the truth.
Speaker D:Sure, yeah.
Speaker A:Complex technical labor. I mean, it's physical as well, but there's a lot that you need to understand technically to do the job.
And people have been doing it 15, 20 years before they reach the level that they can, like lead a hotshot crew, for example. So it's just like things like that. It's maddening.
Speaker C:You can't just strap a pack on.
Speaker B:Your back and get.
Speaker C:What is it? A Pulaski.
Speaker A:Get a Pulaski and go out, go up there, and you're the lowest of the low.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And it's such dangerous work. How can you assume that that is unskilled when you're putting yourself at such risk and danger? Some of the descriptions in your book.
Was it Luke that got the tree that fell on him? And he's okay, right? As far as you know, he's okay.
Speaker A:Yeah, he is. Yeah, he's good.
Speaker C:Which is another question. How is your health specifically and just generally the health of firefighters?
As I described earlier, I was in San Francisco, hundreds of miles from some of these fires, and I was breathing in the smoke.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:How is it for. What is the lasting impact of firefighters? Like your experience?
Speaker A:Yeah. So, you know, I only did it for a couple years. I stepped away initially because I was dealing with an autoimmune condition.
I have that sort of well managed. It's just a thyroid condition. So you. You take a medication and you're pretty much fine. And I have that well managed. And I feel pretty good.
Although I had a child this year, so.
Speaker C:Congratulations. That's right. I just. I read your Sierra.
Speaker A:Oh.
Speaker C:And. And you mentioned that you were.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah. I was pregnant in the smoke. That was interesting. So. Yeah.
But for me, even with the two years and for firefighters who do it longer, the lasting impacts are incalculable. You know, people get cancer at incredible rates, have lung damage, difficulty breathing, some develop asthma.
And I think a lot of those problems are possibly underreported because they're not tracked well. So people leave the agency, they leave firefighting, and then later develop these health problems, have a correlation or cause.
It's not always connected to the job. But we all know, you know, we all.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Know what we've inhaled. Right. And that's to say nothing of the psychological toll that the job takes on firefighters.
So it's, it really is a doozy between the possible injury and risk of death on the job. And then the smoke exposure, the heavy metals, the other toxins that you breathe in for months at a time for some people over a period of years.
And then, yeah, their bodies break down in various ways and then psychologically they really tend to struggle from the trauma of the job.
Speaker C:So could you talk a little more about the psychological impact?
Speaker A:Sure, yeah. So it's interesting because I think the stresses are so multi directional. So you know, you have the actual stress of your life is on the line.
Something could happen to you, something could happen to a colleague. That fear kind of wears on you. But then you actually see the devastation of ecosystems.
You know, you see the forest burn, you see animals lose their lives. I'm, I'm an environmentalist. I'm a person who loves the woods. That's why I got into this job in the first place.
So for me, even seeing a forest burn is really heartbreaking. Right. It's devastating.
And the feeling that you couldn't prevent it, and then you see communities burn and people lose their homes, and that is truly traumatic because it is your job to protect those people.
So it's on so many levels, you know, the stress and the trauma and firefighters really struggle with ptsd, depression, substance abuse, and rates of suicide among wildland firefighters are far higher than the general population.
Speaker D:Right, okay.
Speaker A:Yeah. So it's, I would say it's a almost crisis level endemic of mental health problems.
Speaker C:Given all that, given the physical aspects of the job, psychological aspects of the job, what attracts people to the job?
Speaker A:Okay, well, so yeah, all of that aside, I'm glad you asked that question. It's the most incredible job. It's so fulfilling and exciting and fascinating.
You know, just seeing how fire moves on the landscape and how we can use fire intentionally to stop wildfires and use fire intentionally to prevent bigger problems is absolutely amazing. It's like this miraculous force that can be both a destroyer and a creator. So just understanding and seeing fire up close is really amazing.
And then there's incredible camaraderie in working with this crew of 20 to 25 people. And, you know, you live together essentially 24 hours a day for this entire six months. So that bond is really incredible.
And then the job itself is, you know, like no two days are ever the same. So one day you're putting in Fireline on this ridge and the next day you're switched to night shift and you're burning through the Night. And.
But then you suddenly you're sent to Arizona. Suddenly you're sent to a different part of California. It's very exciting.
And that can be a positive and a negative because you can become addicted to the adrenaline of the whole thing. But in general, I think it's just an absolutely extraordinary job.
And you also see parts of the world and the woods that you would never otherwise see.
Speaker D:Right, right.
Speaker A:So it's. It's incredible.
Speaker C:You really describe it very well in the book. It seems like it's essential for the job is the camaraderie.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker C:Because the times where you describe where there was tension, you could see if that were to have continued, that would break down the teamwork and then seems like it would put everybody in risk.
Speaker B:Greater risk.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:It's pretty much mandatory that you have this cohesion as a group in order to know that you're protecting each other, that you're watching out for each other, and also that you're able to work seamlessly as a unit.
Because there's a lot of sort of verbal and non verbal communication that goes into, like, as you're moving along building this fire line, all the sawyers and their swampers who remove what they've cut, they. Those saw teams need to be able to work together almost without speaking.
And then this line of people digging with hand tools needs to be able to work together and keep pace together. And so being able to get along, feeling bonded to each other is critical both for your survival and your productivity.
Speaker C:So you were in a hotshot crew. Did you do fire before the hotshot fire?
Speaker A:Just a little bit. I was technically a wilderness ranger, but I filled in on a crew for several months at the end of my season.
Speaker C:Okay, what is the difference between a regular firefighting crew and a hotshot crew?
Speaker A:Yeah. So all wildland firefighters do a job that is very grueling, very physical, and very technical and exhausting.
But hotshots are often considered like the special forces of outland fire.
So train at a higher level physically and operationally to be able to handle the toughest assignments, maybe the most complicated and maybe the most dangerous parts of a fire line. So we're hiking the farthest or going up some weird crazy cliffs to put in fire line.
Or, you know, they task us to do a backfire or burnout operation that other people would say, well, this is never going to work. And crew is like, man, we could pull that. Because we have trained for that.
And there are very specific standards for a crew to be certified as a hotshot crew in order to do all of that work.
Speaker C:A couple years ago I was able to visit. It's outside of Boise.
Speaker A:Oh, the interagency.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:Cool.
Speaker C:And yeah, we met some smoke jumpers and.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah.
Speaker C:Uh, I guess they're.
Speaker A:They're even more elite. Well, it depends. Some people think hotshots are sort of the top dogs and some would say jumpers. Um, that job is incredible.
My partner did that for a season.
Speaker D:Did he? Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. Really wild.
Speaker C:But how did he like it?
Speaker D:Did he.
Speaker A:He did not like it as much as hot shotting because the pace of work is so different. So when you're on a crew, you go out on a 14 day assignment, come home for a couple days.
By the time your days off are done, you have another assignment. So you're just constantly going to fires for the whole season. It's very busy when you're a smokejumper.
If it's not a busy season, you're waiting around in station for this alarm to go off and then you have to go in two minutes and be in the plane in order to parachute out of it into a fire. And that dynamic of waiting for days or weeks and then having to go in a moment's notice, that was just not his pace.
It was more stressful to him than constantly going on a fire.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:So it ultimately wasn't for him, but it was, I think, a huge personal triumph just to be able to enter that profession at all.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:Just the idea of jumping out of an airplane into a fire.
Speaker A:So wild. Yeah. And when you watch, I don't know if you've watched the videos of the jumps, but it's absolutely breathtaking to watch them do this work.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:So let's talk about pay. I think you mentioned, like what? I don't know, I can't remember. $17. The base pay is some. That's ridiculous.
Speaker A: t level now, but I was making:And then of course, you make overtime and hazard pay when you're on an incident, but only when you're on an active wildfire. So unfortunately, this sets up firefighters to be absolutely 100% reliant on going to fires.
So almost no money when they're in station and then creates this weird dynamic of like you don't want fires to happen, but when you're a firefighter you need them to happen.
Speaker C:Two years, it sounded like you were mostly on fires. There was pretty active two years, very busy.
Speaker A: ah. Just the way it lined up.:And that was my first year. And I just sort of assumed, like, is it always going to be this busy?
Speaker C:So your undergrad is in poetry and your MFA is in. Is it fiction?
Speaker A:Fiction, yeah, fiction.
Speaker C:So let's talk about that journey a little bit.
Speaker A:Yeah. I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was 19.
And, you know, my second semester of college took a poetry writing workshop, and I was like, this is it. This is my destiny. I'm devoting my life to this.
And of course, like most people who devote their lives to writing, didn't make any money doing it and always had to have another career. So did a bunch of different things. Moved around a lot, lived on an island, started a nonprofit, lived in Texas, taught writing, and waited tables.
There was a lot of waiting tables and bartending between other things.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:So working as a nanny, and then I was living in Austin, Texas, and I got really into the outdoors.
So I was doing a lot of backpacking, a lot of solo backpacking trips, and a lot of sort of international outdoor travel and climbing, all that kind of thing. So I decided that I wanted to try to make a living working outside, but I had no, you know, experience. I had degrees that were completely unrelated.
And I found this volunteer position on the Klamath National Forest on a trail crew, and it advertised itself as, you know, come work on this trail crew for a summer and get all the experience you need to launch your career in public lands. Like, this is it, you know?
So I saved my money for a few months, got into the volunteer program and just threw all my stuff in storage and drove out to California. And it actually did launch a career in public lands for me. Yeah, Yeah. I think I was really lucky in that way, too.
But it was so cool, because this thing that I had been doing as a recreationist as a hobby then became my job, living, and in many ways, my calling.
And although I then ended up writing a book about fighting fire, I still feel like the outdoors and that work, it's so important to me, you know, like, it meant so much to me. It meant almost more than my original calling of trying to become a writer.
Speaker C:That's interesting. And I assume that when you went out to Klamath, you had no I'm going to eventually be a hotshot. Didn't happen.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, I didn't even know what.
Speaker C:What a hotshot was.
Speaker A:I didn't know what a hotshot was. I didn't even know what wildfires really were or what they were like.
But when you grow up in the south and on the east coast, as I did, that is just something especially, you know, in the time that I grew up. I think people have more awareness of wildfires throughout the country now, but I had no awareness.
So I show up in the town of Happy Camp, which has pretty much is besieged by fire every summer. First major fire happens my first summer, and, oh, the camp fire happened in paradise that summer. So I'm hearing about that, seeing footage of that.
And we had a smaller fire right outside of our town, and the town fills with smoke and I was like, what is happening? What is this? You know, I had never seen anything like it. So, no, there was no agenda to become a firefighter at all. I just wanted to work outside.
Speaker C:And was it your association with other females that you were with in your first as a ranger and they were firefighters, is that right? And then that kind of got you. That got it into your head that you might want to do that?
Speaker A:Absolutely, yeah. So I was living in government barracks my first two summers out there, first working on the trail crew and then being a wilderness ranger.
And my roommates were female firefighters. Especially my second year. I think every single person in this house that we shared was a firefighter.
And then there was just me, the wilderness ranger. And so they would all go off. They'd all be gone for like weeks. And I'd be by myself in the house.
And then they'd come back and they would have the craziest stories. And they smelled like wood smoke. And they just seemed like this job was so fulfilling and so empowering.
They looked so strong and they were such fast runners and. Yeah. And I was just like, wow. Yeah, that. That really sparked something for me.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:Would you describe the physical aspect of it? You know, 90 pound pack up a 45 degree. I mean, I've just gone, oh my God. You know, that anybody could do that. Pretty amazing.
How long did it take you? So, okay, how did you get the job as a hotshot?
Speaker A:So I had those few months where I filled in on this local crew, this type 2 initial attack crew in Happy Camp. So I had the barest tiniest bit of experience.
Cause I didn't really go on any big fires, but did some prescribed burning, hiked with the crew, learned the job and the tools. So I applied to the hotshot crew, and I think they were probably understandably skeptical.
Usually most people have a few Years of firefighting experience. I didn't have that. I was basically coming from being a wilderness ranger.
So what you have to do to get on these crews is you have to be really persistent. So I started calling and emailing and saying, hey, really want to get on this crew. Hey, really interested in this.
And then I actually drove over the mountain range, went to the station, and met them in person. And so I think my showing that much eagerness really helped me to get the job. But then also the fact that when.
While I hadn't primarily been a firefighter, I had been hiking all around the backcountry carrying heavy weight for two summers. So I had a certain base level of fitness and an understanding of what it took to live out there in the woods.
So I think for that reason, they were willing to give me a shot.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And I assume it before you could get hired, you have to demonstrate a basic level of fitness.
Speaker A:Yeah. Well, basically, you get hired and you show up, and then if you don't have that level of fitness and competency, they kind of. That you'll wash out.
Like, they'll let you go. So it could be a pretty dire situation where this is your only job and you show up for the job, and then they're like, no, you don't have one.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker D:What.
Speaker C:Do you have any idea what the washout rate is for?
Speaker A:I don't know. On a hotshot crew. I'm not sure.
I know every year there are people who show up, not necessarily on our crew every year, but every year there are people who show up for hotshot crews and just don't make it. Yeah, it's. I don't know what percentage. Yeah.
Speaker C:But I can just imagine people showing up.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:No, I think that's the other thing is, like, there's some who wash out because they just can't do it and they're told to leave. But then there's a fair number who show up and they're like, I don't want to be here. This isn't for me.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:They choose to leave so they could.
Speaker C:Do it, but they just don't want to do it.
Speaker A:Right, Right. Because, you know, not everyone would at all love.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker C:What was it like? And you talk about it in the book, but if you could talk a little bit about what it's like to be the only woman in a. What I assume is a pretty male.
Dominant. Obviously male. I'm thinking of a better. Trying to think of a better phrase, but, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Macho. Macho.
Speaker A:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely very interesting at first because I showed up as the only woman.
You know, 19 men, and most of the other rookies, you know, the other people who are new there, are a lot younger than me. You know, there's six rookies.
I think they were all at least 10 years younger than me as well, being men and just so athletic, such fast runners, such fast hikers. And they hadn't had a woman in about a decade on this crew.
So there was just this level of discomfort, you know, like a kind of clamming up around me. Think they were afraid to say the wrong thing. They had gotten a lecture about, don't harass the woman, be weird with her.
And so they were like, okay, to avoid being weird. We're going to be really weird by this.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker D:Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker A:So it was awkward. And then as.
As you, I'm sure, read in the book, I really struggled on my initial hikes and initial runs and was one of the slowest people, and that did not help my case at all.
So it took a while first to prove myself physically, to hike fast enough, run fast enough, show that I would just, like, hustle and dig line all day long.
And then it took longer, I would say, to prove myself in a more social way, to, like, build relationships and find out where I fit in, and in some ways to kind of like, shift my demeanor to act a little more like one of the guys, while at the same time getting them more accustomed to, well, there's a girl here, and she. Sometimes she's going to be a girl. I say that in quotes because all behavior is conditioned.
Speaker C:How long did you think it took you to feel comfortable in that situation?
Speaker A:I would say a couple months to. Probably two to three months. Probably halfway through the season to feel like I was like, okay, I have enough relationships here.
I'm close enough with the people here.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:To feel like I'm. Yeah, I'm just part of this now. I felt really like an outsider for quite a while.
Speaker C:You'd mentioned in the book there were a time was at the end of the first season where I can't remember who it was. Mac or somebody called you a dude. You're a dude.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Okay. I'm part of this group now.
Speaker A:Yeah. Yeah. That was this guy. He's called Benji. In the book, they all have, but in the book, he's veg. Yeah, you're the dude now. And I was like, oh, okay.
That's weird, but cool.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. Like, I see what you're saying, what you're saying is that I'm a part of this. I'm one of you, right. I belong here.
Speaker C:I assume that this is kind of a young person's game, like an athlete.
Speaker A:Yes. Well, for multiple reasons. So for one thing, the work. Yeah, it really beats down your body. It's really hard on your joints.
So even if you aren't developing lung problems or health problems from all the exposure, just carrying all that weight and being on your feet so much, people start to get knee problems and the actual labor of bending over and digging line, all sorts of different, like, injuries and wear and tear can happen. People's bodies get just, like, kind of janky. So, yeah, people leave for that reason.
But I think it's also a young person's game and largely male because the job is so unfriendly to family life and like, regular adult life. You know, you're. You're gone for two weeks at a time, minimum, sometimes a month at a time.
And that is really hard on anybody who has children, for example. So I think that in some ways, that keeps women from really progressing through the profession if they decide they want to have families.
But a lot of men leave the job, too, because they're like, I want to be home with my kids. I want to be home with my partner. So you see this attrition, you see people leaving the job in their 30s. A lot of times it kind of.
Speaker C:Makes me think of being a musician on the road or something like that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:After a while, it's fun for a little while, but after a while, I just want to be home, you know?
Speaker A:Yeah. Just like I was. Like, I just want to have, like, a garden that. Because I was always gone or.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Normal. A little bit of normal life.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:What was the process of writing the book? Did you intend when you became a hotshot? Did you have in your head that, I'm going to write a book about this?
Speaker A:No, I just wanted to do the job. I was just totally fascinated by fire and the culture and the job.
But because I am a writer and I've spent my life processing my experience through words, I just kept notes. So I would have my phone on the line. I didn't have, like, a paper journal. The job is way too dirty for that.
But I'd have my phone, and I would just sort of write down, like, what happened that day or something somebody said and. Or, you know, what the fire did.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:And usually I'd write, like, what the date was and what day of the assignment we were on. Cause you're always tracking like, oh, this is day 12 of 14. This is day right. And so I took these notes just cuz.
And then probably after one season, I was like, these notes are actually really building up. There's a lot of material here. I started to think, I want to write something, but I thought maybe a novel.
And then my second season, I had said that to somebody, and also they could see the other guys could see me writing the notes. So people started making fun of me, like, oh, Kelly's writing a book about us. What's your book? Where are you staying at your book?
Did you make me look good?
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:And so probably sometime during the second season, I was like, I'm gonna end up writing about this for sure.
But it was only after the two seasons ended and I put all those notes into a document and started really looking through it that I realized that, like, probably this was gonna be a book.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:I had so much to say, and I felt such urgency and excitement about telling the story of my experience.
Speaker C:It's so detailed. I was wondering how you.
Speaker A:How wondering.
Speaker C:And you were on a fire line and go, how did you do that?
Speaker D:You know, Right?
Speaker A:Well, to some extent, yeah. The notes and then to some extent. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but when something is really intense, I remember it better.
So every time I go on a really cool trip, like the first time I went to Peru and saw the Andes, I feel like I remembered everything.
The color of the mountains and what somebody was wearing and what they said to me, you know, like, I think that your mind just caches memory differently when something is a. An intense and novel experience.
And so I think partly it was the notes and partly it was that fire was so overwhelmingly intense that my brain was just sort of like on record.
Speaker D:Yeah, right.
Speaker C:Have you of the. The guys you worked with, any reactions of the book from them?
Speaker A:Yeah, so a few of them read it in draft stages just to kind of fact check me, gut check, you know, did I get this right? Was I fair about this thing? And I got some good feedback then.
But then in the last month, like right before the book came out, I sent it to most of the crew, I offered it to everybody, and I sent it to everyone who took me up on it. And I think a lot of them haven't read it yet. For one thing, it's fire season and they're busy.
But the few who have read it, I've gotten some really sweet responses and some nice texts. I think for them it's Very different than it would be for anyone else. Yeah, they were like, oh, this took me down memory lane.
You know, I forgot about when that thing happened. So that's been fun.
Speaker C:I'm curious. Have you heard from Addison?
Speaker A:No, not at all. And I didn't reach out for a long time. I reached out recently, but I haven't heard back, so we'll see.
Speaker C:So you're obviously promoting the book on a book tour and everything like that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:That's great. Otherwise, how is life after fire?
Speaker A:After fire? Yeah, it's a lot quieter. I definitely miss it, but I also think that my life is more balanced and healthier. Not doing it.
It's always that toss up of missing the job, but then knowing that maybe you're better off without it.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. And I have. We had a baby eight months ago.
Like, here, my partner's out in the hotel hallway just, like, making best friends between her and the hotel staff. She's very social, so that's been someone on book tour. She's just meeting everybody and becoming besties. But, yeah, it's. It's good.
I think I still would like to get back into working in public lands or maybe working in, like, prescribed fire at some point. My daughter's a little bit older because I just. I do miss being out there so much.
Speaker C:So basically now you're just focused on the book and your career as a writer, right?
Speaker A:Yeah. Writing and then parenting, obviously.
Speaker D:Yeah. Parent.
Speaker C:Yes, of course. Okay. What would you like people to know about wildfire? What. What are the misunderstandings that most people have about wildfire?
Like raking the forest, for instance, or making the forest.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:One of the big ones, I think, is the how we fight fires. So a lot of people think that we fight them primarily with water.
You know, that it's like that image of a firefighter standing with a hose, spraying it on a house. I think people just think we're like, spraying a hose on the forest or dropping bucket drops from. From aircraft on the forest. And that is not really.
I mean, we. We do use those methods for sure, but that is not the primary way we fight fires.
The primary way we do it is with line, like dandelion or dozer line or some other kind of fire line and then burning. And that is a huge, huge part of the way that we contain fires in one of the best ways that we contain them.
So I think that's a huge misnomer that people don't really understand that we can't mechanize the process still with all the Technology that we have, it takes a helicopter a really long time to go back and forth from a water source to the fire line.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:Have enough helicopters for the miles and miles, hundreds of miles of the fire's edge. We really rely on people, just you bodies on the ground hiking out there manually creating these fire lines. And it still is the best way.
And so we really need to support those people.
I think that's the second part is a lot of people don't understand that federal firefighters are underpaid, they're under supported, they don't have year round health insurance.
And so you really need to be finding a better way to support people in this profession because they are leaving in droves and going to work for city fire instead or for Cal Fire because you know, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, so to speak.
Speaker C:Right. It's kind of hard to imagine that it would be getting any better right now. But is there any progress with payer health insurance?
So you just mentioned they don't have year round health insurance.
Speaker B:I mean that's.
Speaker A:Yeah, that has not changed. But there was a recent bill that went through that created a more permanent pay increase.
Unfortunately that pay increase is still not commensurate with what you would make for Cal fire. So it doesn't believe. Fix the problem believing to try to make more money elsewhere. But it is something.
So I do want to acknowledge like that finally, that piece finally got passed in Congress and I think that money, it took like a, there was a delay but I think that money is finally like hitting the accounts of people. But there's something, but it's like sad to say it's not quite enough. So yeah, we still need to do more.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And there is a shortage of federal fire.
Speaker A:Yes, absolutely. There has been pretty consistently for five to 10 years. But it's hard to pin down the numbers.
It's hard to get real data from federal agencies on how many positions are unfilled or need to be backfilled.
But for sure, every fire season these major incidents happen and they call for resources and they cannot get all the resources that they're asking for.
Speaker C:It just seems like it's not meeting the moment. Wildfires are getting more intense.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:Because of the policy of the past century as well as climate change. It's like everything's coming together.
Speaker A:Next storm, perfect storm and then we have fewer firefighters.
Speaker C:Fewer firefighters.
Speaker A:Very time when we need more.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:So it's like what needs to happen is an investment in really paying these people and maybe having an initiative to do more hiring. An initiative to hire more diverse firefighters in order to recruit not only more people, but more women, more people of color.
And instead we're going in the opposite way.
And it's like this willful ignorance of the fact that we are in crisis and people are going to lose their homes and their lives because we haven't done what's necessary to staff these fires adequately.
Speaker C:That's frustrating because these fires that I mentioned when Trump came out here and said rake the forest and everything, it's something like that happens. The campfire or any of the fires happens, and it's a. There's tragedy.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:And then there's. From the top levels of leadership. There's this blame game.
Speaker D:Like.
Speaker C:Like it's Gavin Newsom's fault or something like that, or the Democrats fault or.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker C:That doesn't help anything.
Speaker A:No, no. It's like instead we should be playing the solutions game. So, okay, this happened again. Yet another tragedy.
What is it that we all are collectively doing wrong? What have we been doing wrong for over a hundred years?
And how could we actually make meaningful reforms that will, in time, prevent more of these tragedies? But, yeah, the blame game is so. It's so ridiculous because, like, it's no. 1 factor. Right, right.
It's not the firefighters, it's not the water in the reservoir.
Speaker C:Yeah, there's that. The LA fires.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker A:It's. It's a million little things over a hundred years. So it's going to take a concerted effort to fix.
And the blame of one factor is absolutely useless to us.
Speaker C:Yeah, that's too bad. I'll let you go now. But I hope the book goes well. I mean, I really did enjoy the book. It was.
Speaker A:Oh, I'm still glad.
Speaker C:It's a great read and.
And you have a great story, and I was just completely impressed with the work you and your colleagues did and are doing, and hopefully some of this policy can turn around, and I hope so, things will get better.
Speaker A:There's, like, gradually more and more conversation about it and more awareness, and that gives me some hope.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:That, like, eventually, if there's enough of a critical mass of understanding of the problem, that will be a real push.
Speaker D:Hopefully.
Speaker C:Yes, though, you know, then you hear about rescinding the roadless. It just seems like they're not thinking about the real problem here.
Speaker A:No, not right now, but all I can tell myself is hopefully this is temporary, you know. Yeah, let's change.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know, and if we can just fight hard enough, push back on the worst of.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:Changes.
Speaker C:Until then, you're in a position to help move that policy forward, right?
Speaker A:I'm trying. I'm really trying.
Speaker C:Well, keep. Keep up the good work. This is a great conversation. I enjoyed this.
Speaker A:Thank you so much, Tom. It was great talking to you.
Speaker D:Okay.
Speaker C:Have a good day.
Speaker A:You too.
Speaker D:Okay. Bye. Bye.
Speaker A:Bye.
Speaker B:When I was a kid, maybe five or six, I must have sent off for some Smokey the Bear merch, probably with the help of my parents. I can't remember exactly what all the swag I received was. It was was a lifetime ago. But there's a misty image of a house in Lebanon, Ohio.
I'm standing in that house and Smoky is looking at me, saying, only you can prevent forest fires. It is up to each of us to prevent careless fire, of course, but Smoky is older and wiser.
Maybe what Smoky is telling us now is that we all can support thriving forest and wilderness ecosystems and the men and women who put their lives on the line, literally the fire line, to protect them.
Speaker C:See the show notes for more about.
Speaker B:Kelly's experience, her writing, and her book Wildfire, A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and the burning of the American West.
Speaker C:Thanks for listening.
Speaker B:I'm your host, Tom Schueneman, and we'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real. There's always more we can do to stop climate change. No amount of engagement is too little. And now more than ever, your involvement matters.
To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening. I'm your host, Tom Schuenemann. We'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real.
Speaker D:Sam, it.
