Chemistry of Fire Read online

  I asked Dorman: Why risk lives? Why go to all this trouble to move a little snow? (Well, okay, a lot of snow.) The answer, of course, is money. Two million people visit Glacier National Park each year, and most of them drive Going-to-the-Sun Road in July and August. Dorman said that the businesses in and around the park lose $1 million for every day that the road stays closed.

  Rick Smith told me, “Sure it’s dangerous. But we’d go crazy if we thought about it every day.” Rick hailed from southeastern Kentucky, and with his fierce blue eyes and a full mountain-man beard, he looked it. It was hard to get Rick to talk, but it was even harder to get him to stop. Like so many, Rick had been seduced by the unreal beauty of the place. Once he’d fallen under its spell, he was no good anywhere else. Most recently, he’d quit a $50,000-a-year long-haul trucking job to work this $12,000-a-year seasonal job.

  Rick was on his honeymoon with his first wife in 1976 when they drove Going-to-the-Sun Road the second day after opening. The crew was still cleaning the snow away, and he knew instinctively that this was the job he wanted. “I’m a man’s man,” Rick told me. “And I’ve always been an outsider.” A few years later, Russ Landt appeared in a National Geographic story, which portrayed the crew as an elite cadre of daredevils operating on the wild edge of things. Rick heard hair-raising tales that only made the job seem more romantic, such as Dennis Holden’s fall in 1974, which carried him six hundred feet down the mountain.

  Russ was making the pioneer cut, and Holden was his watchman. Russ had shut off the Cat and was walking back toward Holden when the avalanche took Holden down. Another few steps and Russ would have gone with him. “He went under five times,” Russ said. He watched as Holden submerged and surfaced over and over again. “He was textbook, swimming with the avalanche to stay up. Luckily, he was on top when it all stopped.” Holden dusted himself off and went to see his daughter in the school play that same night.

  “That clenched it,” Rick told me after recounting the tale. “This is my element.”

  Rick liked being up there in the snow, moving it, conquering it. He didn’t want it to end. “This place will harden you and temper you, or else it’ll break you,” he said. “But the worst day I’ve had up here, cold and wet and miserable, still beats the hell out of the best day I’ve had anywhere else.”

  Something draws them. They all said it in different ways. When Russ first came into the park, he worked trail. But he’d heard about the snow crew, and it held a fascination that he couldn’t describe. They were the Green Berets of the park, risking their lives to open the road. “The crew stories drew me,” Russ said. “The avalanches. No, not the avalanches really but seeing twelve avalanches in one day. Something big was happening up there, and I had to know what it was.”

  The problem now was that Russ was about to retire, and someone else had to learn where the road was before he moved on.

  As we talked, the clouds had gradually eaten our shadows. I could smell the park, a deep piney scent, lifting to us on those clouds. It was the smell of an untouched forest, rich and heady, which seduced us all. The valley was plunged into twilight, and I looked up the hill and saw the yellow dozer dissolve in mist. Through the sudden whiteout, I heard Rick’s voice. “We’re not moving,” he said.

  Walking out through dozer tracks, I heard Rick call behind me, “You hear a swishing sound up there, you grab the bank.” His idea was that if I held the inside wall, whatever came down might simply go over my head. A crewman grabbed the bank during an avalanche in 1953 and was buried for seven hours. He lived to tell about it. Two others were nearby but didn’t make it from the road to the bank. One man was recovered at once. The other was found dead of a broken neck.

  “We take avalanche training every year,” Russ said. “But being buried alive is a difficult thing to plan for.”

  They feel compelled to talk about what you can do or shouldn’t do to affect your chances of survival. It can sound like voodoo: Swim backward until the motion stops, then throw one arm over your face, and stick the other up in the air like you’re waving.

  There was an air of excitement when I showed up at six forty-five the next morning. Everyone was on alert because they were going to use explosives. The road office was a dim shack. Gray deck paint was peeling off the rough-cut floorboards. A hand-built table dominated the room under harsh fluorescent shop lights. Jim Dorman, the supervisor, sat talking with two Montana cowboys who’d come up to help. They wore crumpled cowboy hats, greasy vests, and threadbare jeans. One of them, Tim Sullivan, was the park’s official mule packer, a job his father had held before him.

  Dorman, from Victoria, Texas, had clear blue eyes and red hair that had begun to turn gray. He used to race motorcycles but quit in 1970. “I was doing a hundred twenty-six miles per hour on a dirt road at night between Francitas and San Felipe,” he explained, “and there were range cattle everywhere. I had two little girls, and I was twenty-nine years old, and I started thinking: What the hell am I doing? I never rode again.” It didn’t surprise me that Dorman had ended up here. He works fires in the off-season “because it gives me the excitement I lost when I quit racing motorcycles.”

  He went on: “I think if they were to try to build this road today, they simply wouldn’t be able to do it.” He meant for legal reasons. In the summer of 1996, for example, a couple was driving through the day after the road opened when a flake of rock peeled away from the cliff, cut through the car, and severed the man’s legs. His wife watched him bleed to death. “It devastated me,” Dorman said.

  I went out to the garage to watch Peter Steinkopf loading AMFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) for the shot. They call him the Powder Man, though no one uses black powder anymore. The term is a holdover from the 1920s. Peter was a big, studious-looking man who wore plastic specs and a full beard. The garage was an airless, Gothic place of bare boards. Huge tire chains hung on the walls. It stank of coal oil. Peter worked on the tailgate of a truck, using a grain scoop to measure the pellets into ziplock bags. I saw waxy cardboard cases of DuPont #18 dynamite and great spools of detonating cord in the bed of the truck. Peter showed me how to punch the sticks and thread the det. cord and complained about how strict government regulations had gotten concerning explosives. I wondered why everyone was so nervous about the use of explosives, a common enough construction tool, and he told me about a woman on ski patrol in Teton who had been setting off dynamite for avalanche control the year before.

  It was a simple bundle of dynamite. You light the fuse and throw it. She held the charge between her knees for leverage and pulled the starter—a sheath that fits over the fuse, which generates a spark when pulled to ignite it. But there was a howling wind up there that day, not uncommon. Also, the sun was bright. When she pulled the starter, she wasn’t sure the charge had lit. So she put it back between her knees and pulled the striker again. In the glare and the wind, she still wasn’t sure. A third time she put the charge between her knees. And not one of the crew members I asked wanted to say exactly what happened after that. Except that the woman had lost her life.

  Going up the mountain that day, Dorman gave me a yellow locator beacon called a Skadi, which I hung around my neck like a medallion. Rescue teams home in on them to find avalanche victims. We hiked past an eighteen-foot-high snow wall. The avalanche chute went up the mountain half a mile and kept on going out of sight. Dorman said, “Let’s go. If this came down now, we’d be dead.” It was difficult to imagine in such a peaceful scene with wild strawberries growing right through the snow and acres of watermelon snow down in the cirque and the sound of rushing water coming up from below.

  The rotary plow came into view. A dozer in front pushed snow back toward it, and the plow shot it in a beautiful arc over the cliff. We climbed a steep wall of snow. We could see Steve Garrow working the pioneer dozer up ahead.

  “This is intense,” Dorman said. “It makes my heart pump watching him. He has a foot and a half and that’s all. He could go over at any time.” In
addition, his men were working fifty-hour weeks, and they were all tired.

  We stopped at a spot where we’d shoot the snow off the wall. Marshall Stewart came ambling up with an ice auger and his Stanley thermos as Peter arrived to prepare the explosives. The crew was naturally cautious. Peter drilled holes in the wall with the auger. Then he packed the explosives with handfuls of snow and moved on. The process took on an interminable, dirgelike solemnity.

  I wandered off to explore in the snow and followed rabbit tracks until they ended abruptly in a ghostly snow angel. I asked Dorman what it was, and he said it was the imprint of an eagle’s wings, where the bird had dropped invisibly from above and left with the animal in its claws. Plowing up here, he said, he sometimes felt like that rabbit. I felt the invisible specter hanging above, ready to take us.

  I heard Peter on the radio. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled. “Fire in the hole!”

  I scrambled over the ridge just in time to see the shot. The sound was so loud that I jumped. The earth leaped and shrugged off a quarter mile of snow. The shot ejected yellow cordite smoke into the air over the cirque and tumbled immense boulders of hardened snow. Thunder went echoing away, clear down the valley to Kalispell.

  It began to rain. I was perched on a rock over the cirque. Debris was sliding down the chute, and the yellow smoke hung in the air for a while and then began to dissipate. It was a good shot. Somebody broke out a few candy bars. We were all laughing.

  I met Russ at the Spruce Park Cafe in Coram, Montana, which he calls “my office.”

  “This is my last season on the snow,” he said, sitting at the Formica counter, drinking coffee. His wide, sad face and watery blue eyes smiled at me. “In 1957 I headed to California to get a job and I stopped here. I still haven’t been to California. Thirty-six years I’ve played the odds, and sooner or later the odds are going to catch up with me. When a slide comes down behind you, you’ve got to walk out. If they come down again while you’re on the slide, then you have to run or hop, and I don’t hop quite so good anymore. That’s how you survive up there,” Russ said, summing it up: “Sometimes your gut tells you don’t do it, and you’ve got to listen.”

  Early the next morning, I watched as a Cat lifted smoke to meet the clouds. The backup screamer echoed off the dark cliffs. Behind the rotary plow, an arc of fluid snow spumed into the canyon, and when it stopped to turn, the trails of snow powder hung in the air and slowly drifted down like the remnants of a great silent firework.

  The pioneer dozer pushed a mountain of snow its own size and nudged it into great avalanches over the edge and into the cirque where dirty snow gathered in rolls and ridges. With each stroke the dozer climbed up the pile of its own making and seemed to rear up on its hind leg and pounce and fall. Two eagles fled across the cirque at our level and eyed us curiously as they winged past and wheeled and turned.

  The pioneer dozer was a beautiful piece of steel sculpture. The bucket was thirteen feet across and welded expertly in three sections, which were angled to make it concave. At start-up, it roared and clattered and spit clouds of dense smoke, and the exhaust port, black with soot, flapped loosely, and the hammering of the engine gradually smoothed and sped. It stank of fuel oil, but it was beautiful, all yellow and scarred like an old bear hide made of steel.

  Jerry Burgess, the new park engineer, conferred with Dorman about plans to repair the North Fork Road, and the two men drew pictures in the snow with their fingers, like nomads drawing in the sand, as the sun angled up the morning.

  We broke through to bare road between Rimrock and the visitor center, where the wind off the cirque scoured the pavement all winter and wouldn’t leave snow sitting for long. I volunteered to help Jerry place stakes to mark this switchback section of road.

  It was a true fact that no one except Russ knew where the road was. In this section, traditionally, pine poles were placed before the first snow to mark the edge of the road, and we could see them ahead in a chaotic zigzag over this arctic-looking landscape. But the previous fall Jerry had installed a locator wire along the edge to see if it might make finding the road easier, and now he walked along with an instrument and earphones, and wherever he punched a hole with his locator, I placed a stake with an orange flag on it.

  We walked out of the groves of dwarf trees and inched along in huge snowfields just short of the Big Drift, placing our stakes and listening to occasional radio chatter. Then we came around a curve and saw the visitor center.

  It looked like gingerbread house by Frank Lloyd Wright. Snow reached the roof of the building and climbed part of the way up. We hiked across, encountering a stop sign at our knee level. We slid down a mountainous drift and into a dark snow cavern lit with blue sunlight. We found stone steps and climbed to discover the main entrance in a cave made by the overhanging roof and fifteen-foot drifts. The world was completely silent, completely cold.

  Jerry checked the key code on the lock and then his ring of keys. He hadn’t planned it this way, but he happened to have the right key. He turned the lock, and the door swung open. Jerry was the first man into the visitor center, which was something of a spring ritual—first man in buys the beer—because it signaled the end of plowing, since plows were coming from the other side and were meant to meet us there, at the highest point on Going-to-the-Sun Road. I followed him in. There was something spooky and exhilarating about being up there, way up there, in the wilderness in this modernistic crystal palace. All the exhibits were covered with tarps. The whole building lay completely buried most of the year. Sun streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. We looked at the landscape all around, and Jerry said, “Now would be the perfect time to see a grizzly bear.”

  We went looking around, and I found a wall clock set on a shelf. There was no electricity up there, so someone had neatly removed the battery when they’d closed in the fall and set it on the shelf beside the clock. “What time is it?” I asked Jerry. He looked at his watch and said, “One thirty.” I put the battery in and set the clock.

  We went outside and sat on the roof of the visitor center and watched the eastside crew come through the tunnel by Big Drift. Both crews were closing in. It was only a matter of days and of a few cases of dynamite. From up there we could see how insignificant it all was. We could see how miniscule was the effort to open this road or perhaps how amazing, to run a dozer along a banjo string, like a circus high-wire act.

  We heard the eastside pioneer dozer operator on the radio. His voice seemed clear and close. We saw his plow pushing a huge mountain of snow—this black and noisy dot, this pixel in the great frame of Montana wilderness, smaller than a single star in the black sky, and suddenly the static broke with his tiny voice, and he said, “I can’t get through this snowbank. It’s never ending!” And we laughed. That’s right. It’s never ending. That statement suddenly seemed like the truest thing that either of us had ever heard, and we laughed and laughed up there on the roof. Soon the parking lot before us, under ten feet of snow, would be packed with cars. A serpent of Winnebagos would be inching across that thin ribbon of asphalt, absorbed in the landscape for a few short weeks, before these mountains made their weather once again, and the snow reclaimed it all.

  10

  Johnny Winter

  JOHNNY WINTER’S LONG pink fingers open and close as if trying to make a pattern in the air, a pattern that he can’t get quite right. His hands float above his lap to the level of his face. Again, again, he makes the pattern, the luminescent fingers falling in twos and threes. A guitar lies untouched in his lap. He lets his head hang forward, lets his slender neck stick out. His long ice-white hair falls across his chest, which is bare except where covered by a small silver vest. The unearthly fingers, alien apparitions, move faster, and Johnny squints against the light, which hurts his eyes. He is composing music in his head, and it comes off the tips of his fingers.

  No one is watching. The dressing room at Madison Square Garden is noisy with people in bizarre costumes—girls in se
e-through clothing with scaphoid breasts loose inside, bejeweled men in leather who jangle as they laugh and talk. They are eating and drinking, caught up in the state of being in the same room with Johnny, who sits like an emaciated idol, looking as if he’s been living in a darkened cave beneath a flat rock and has slithered into this harsh light that is now assaulting his pink eyes. Johnny is pure albino, unarmed with the pigments that normally protect the skin and hair and eyes, as if some force in the universe annealed him with its lightning. He’s hard to look at, almost as if he shines too bright. His beauty is metaphysical. He is a freak.

  “Hey!” he hollers as if suddenly awakened. His voice cuts through the noise. “I’ve got to try that new guitar!” It’s as if this idea has never occurred to him before. Try the new guitar. Somebody is upon him, snatching the Stratocaster from his lap and handing him the new guitar. With no amplifier, Johnny plays a barely audible sheet of sound, lightning streaming down the sky, bright fingers disappearing in a blur of motion. Johnny is listening to what he just wrote.

  I used to play trumpet with Johnny in Houston. The last time I saw him before we were reunited in his dressing room was around 1968. At the time, he was not very well known outside the South, but to the people who worked with him, he was a star—a genius. Late one night, drinking Romilar CF cough syrup and riding in the front seat of a car with a beat poet named Peter Steele Byers and Johnny, I listened to him talk about his girlfriend: “Man, pussy is so wonderful. It’s just so soft and—man!—you can just put your fingers in it and touch it, oh man!” He couldn’t contain the very thought of how happy it made him. He stopped talking and grabbed his head as if it were going to explode. Things got to him that way. Life for Johnny was on constant overload, the light too bright, the volume too loud, the sensations always on the edge of pain and ecstasy at the same time. He was like that about music. And I sat there that night watching and listening to the only truly gentle musician I’d ever worked with and hoping that something good would happen to Johnny, something big and fine and stirring.