Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire

by Murry A. Taylor

Overview

During one incendiary summer, Murry Taylor kept an extensive journal of his day-to-day activities as an Alaskan smokejumper. It wasn't his first season fighting wildfires, and he's far from being a rookie—he's been on the job since 1965. Through this narrative of one busy season, Taylor reflects on the years of training, the harrowing adrenaline-fueled jumps, his brushes with death, the fires he conquered, and the ones that got away. It's a world full of bravado, one with epic battles of man versus nature, resulting in stories of death-defying defeats, serious injury, and occasionally tragedy. We witness Taylor's story; learn of the training, preparation, technology, and latest equipment used in fighting wildfires; and get to know his fellow smokejumpers in the ready room, on the tundra, and in the vast forests of one of the last great wilderness areas in the world. Often thrilling and informative and always entertaining, Taylor's memoir is one of the first autobiographical accounts of a legendary career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156013970
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/14/2001
Series:	Harvest Book
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	495,983
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Murry A. Taylor was a smokejumper on and off for more than thirty years. He was the oldest active smokejumper at the time of his retirement in 2000, and the oldest ever to do the job. He lives in northern California.

Read an Excerpt

The door of Jump 17 opens to an unnerving roar, swings aside, and reveals four hundred acres of fire crowning in black spruce. Orange tongues of burning gases lick high into the air. Coils of black smoke roll up from a flame front a mile wide. At the fire's head, flames eighty feet high whip back and forth as if trying to tear themselves free from the earth. At fifteen hundred feet, we orbit and look down. The smoke column rises out of a blue-green landscape to tower above us, its lower third brown and black, its middle a marbled yellow-gray, its top a crown of sunlit silver.

Air rushes into the airplane--thin mountain air, sweetly laced with the scent of wood smoke. The roar is so loud we can barely shout above it. Hitting turbulence, we bounce weightlessly, then slam down on the cargo. From the pit of my stomach nausea flows through the rest of my body. My breathing is rapid and shallow, tightly constrained by the chest strap on my jump harness. I struggle to my feet, grab the overhead cable, and make my way to the door. We have an eight-man load. I will jump first.

Jump 17 lines up for our initial pass over the jump spot. Dalan Romero drops the first set of drift streamers. Banking into a turn, we watch the streamers--one red, one blue, and one yellow--flutter brightly against the backdrop of the dark forest, then suddenly waver, tumble end over end, and sweep in toward the fire. We make a second pass to drop another set. They do the same.

I watch through the door as the fire crests a ridge...Grave, but apparently satisfied with what he's seen, [Dalan] shouts over his headset to the pilots, "Take us to three thousand."

Dalan turns to me, holding up two fingers, and I step closer to the door and brace myself, being careful not to get sucked out by the slipstream. Kubichek, my jump partner, takes his place inches behind me.

"Looks like about five hundred yards of drift," Dalan yells. "The winds are tricky down low. Stay wide of the fire. The jump spot's in the shadow of the column there in that little meadow just north of the barn. Do you see it?"

I nod yes.

Again Dalan's head is out the door and looking forward under the plane. I hear the pilot over the intercom. "We got three thousand, Dalan, we got three thousand." Dalan says something back into his headset, and then his eyes are back on me.

"OK, two jumpers," he commands. "Are you ready?"

I nod yes.

"Get in the door."

I drop into a sitting position, my legs hanging out into the slipstream. Kubichek is close behind, waiting. Sitting there in the door, even though the fire is more than a mile away, I can feel the heat on my face.

Again Dalan's head is out and looking. My field of vision fills with a panorama of the Alaska Range. The land below runs in a flat incline, rising east to the cloud-shadowed foothills of the Toklat River Valley. Beyond the hills, thrusting up out of the earth, is a world of jagged black peaks, blue ice walls, and massive snowfields--the heart of Denali National Park, a stronghold left over from the Ice Age, at once forbidding and magnificent.

Dalan pulls his head in, shoots me a quick glance, then raises his arm behind my back. "Get ready!"

The slap comes down hard on my shoulder, and I propel myself forward with all my strength. In the next instant I am out and counting.

"Jump-thousand, look-thousand..."

The earth and the sky revolve in a blur of tilted horizons, aircraft wings, greens, blues, and rushing noise. My body pitches sideways to the right as I watch my boots fly higher than my head. I fall downward at ninety miles per hour. The forest, the fire, and the mountains rotate in a spin below. I look up as Kubichek clears the door--he, too, becomes a dark silhouette tumbling in the blue.

"Reach-thousand..."

My right hand reaches for the green rip cord. My fingers curl around it tightly.

"Wait-thousand..."

I am aware of what hangs in the balance of the next few seconds. Resisting the temptation to pull early, I wait out that odd, warped moment when time stretches, then begins to tear.

"Pull-thousand..."

My hand pulls right across my chest and shoots out to the side. I feel myself tilt forward, then a tugging sensation across my shoulders, and the chute is off my back and struggling to open. Tossing my head back, I watch, and there it comes, billowing into a gleaming rectangle of brilliant orange and white. In the aftermath of the roar there comes a startling silence.

I check the rear corners of my chute for tension knots, then reach for my steering toggles, pull down left, and come around into the wind. I look down. The head of the fire has temporarily halted along the crest of the ridge while the ground fire spills down into the valley.

Kubichek lets out a long, whooping yell. He, too, has just opened. I yell back, then turn and try to orient to the jump spot.

The smoke column rises high overhead, casting an ominous shadow far over the land. Facing into the wind, I try to locate the jump spot. I feel my gut tighten as I watch the ground pass below, appearing to surge one way and then the other as the chute rocks back and forth. Pulling down on the left toggle, I begin moving closer to the wind line. Still, I can't make out the jump spot. I yell at Kubichek that I can't see the spot. He yells something back and starts laughing.

Lightning arcs down out of the top of the smoke column and strikes the ground between me and the fire. Thunder cracks loudly, trailing off in a rumble. Sunlight streams down through a hole in the smoke to pool green and gold upon the land as it might on the floor of a cathedral. A small sunny meadow appears. Kubi and I yell out in unison. In that moment I feel as if I can fly on and on forever, sailing high above all the great forests and wilderness on earth, out beyond the farthest horizon, into the infinite darkness to drift among the stars.

What People are Saying About This

Pat Kelly

I've spent over thirty years fighting fires and leading fire-fighting organizations and Murry Taylor's Jumping Fire is an insightful and passionate account of the pain, pressure, sacrifices and rewards that make up the life of the seasonal firefighter. He captures the physical and mental commitment that the job demands and his passages on fire-fighting episodes are excellent.
— Pat Kelly, Former Assistant Director of the National Fire and Aviation Program, U.S.B.A. Forest Service

Michael Thoele

Michael Thoele, author of Fire Line: Summer Battles of the West
Jumping Fire is Murry Taylor's exquisite and revealing paean to smoke-jumping. Packing the scars of a fire fighting lifetime, Taylor captures West's last great itinerant lifestyle in a tale where the battles of mind and heart and body are as incandescent as a torching spruce.

John Maclean

From the Author of Fire on the Mountain: the True Story of the South Canyon Fire

Grab your boots and chutes. Murry Taylor puts you in the harness for a thrill-a-page account of smokejumping based on his already-legendary career. You see the stupendous landscapes, feel the crush of the brutal landings, work to exhaustion, and then hike out eager to be back on board, ready to jump again. Taylor has lived the dream; now he lets the rest of us in on it.?

Patrick McManus

Forget fiction. Jumping Fire is the best action/adventure thriller I've read in years! Murry Taylor is one terrific writer.

William Kittredge

From the Author of Hole in the Sky

Jumping from airplanes, fighting the fires, beating the odds, losing the new love? Murry Taylor gives us a modern story of adventure and on-the-job heroism. Nothing touristy or politically correct about it, Jumping Fire is the actual thing, and a vivid compelling story.?

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Jumping Fire
"A grand adventure that captures a lifestyle of violent oscillations between terror, boredom, and exhaustion."-Outside

"A beautifully crafted, wise yet thrilling book that will endure as long as there is an appetite for vicarious adventure and a curiosity about why people are driven to do dangerous things that most of us would consider crazy."-Los Angeles Times

"Terrifying, grimly funny . . . An affectionate portrait of a fraternity of daredevils."-The New Yorker

—

From the Publisher

The Wildfire West

In his gripping memoir Jumping Fire, veteran smokejumper Murry Taylor delivers unprecedented insights into the day-to-day life of Alaska's wilderness fire warriors. Through detailed journal entries that span one hellish summer, Taylor produces a frontline dispatch that indelibly recreates the terrifying realities of his all-consuming profession. From grueling training runs to the thrill of the jump and down into the monstrous fires themselves, this extraordinary record of do-or-die heroism is bound to become smokejumping's triumphant answer to The Right Stuff.

For over 30 years, Taylor has spent his summers leaping out of airplanes and parachuting into raging wildfires. He is a smokejumper -- part wilderness paratrooper, part firefighter -- a career that provides daily doses of an adventure junkie's favorite cocktail of adrenaline mixed with blood, sweat, and tears.

Much has been made in the media of the legendary bravado of smokejumpers and their noble task: to swoop out of the sky and contain raging infernos that threaten to gobble up property, acreage, and lives. Taylor's account certainly fans the flames of that myth, but he also manages to put a human face on its heroes while showing the gritty flip side to the glory. With intimate candor, Taylor's tell-it-like-it-is prose renders the surreality of the smokejumper's life in three palpable dimensions.

Each chapter is a series of journal entries that chronicle the nuts-and-bolts of the job through one incendiary May-September fire season. Along the way, readers are introduced to the tools of the trade, learn the ABC's of dousing blazes, and get to know the other jumpers in all their blustery, swaggering mountain-man glory.

As lightning continually ignites miles of parched Alaskan wilderness, Jumping Fire is punctuated by wild, real-time adventure sequences both in the air and on the smoldering ground. Even readers familiar with the spectacle of smokejumping will be awestruck by the sheer endurance and fortitude of these diehard personalities and the immensity of their task.

A forest fire turns out to be a lot more sinister than Smokey let on, and it's common for smokejumpers to forego days of sleep to put a blaze to bed. Not that most folks will blaze a trail to the local Forestry Service outpost in hopes of signing on as smokejumpers, but Taylor's hardly recruiting -- he's just letting the world know that an occupation this extreme really does exist.

Harrowing tales abound: close calls, gruesome accidents, personal tragedies. Airplane engines burst into flames, parachutes fail to deploy, jumpers are knocked unconscious as they careen into mountainsides, or else are left dangling from towering trees. Then there are the fires. Taylor alternates between breathless descriptions of the eerie beauty of a forest in flames and accounts of the all-too-real danger of blow-ups that can swallow up smokejumpers' lives in a heartbeat.

Much like traditional firemen, smokejumpers display an unflagging allegiance to duty, plus an intense camaraderie. Exhausting and frustrating, the job demands total commitment; but nobody's forcing these guys -- they have an inborn love for their work. The jumpers concur that they're "living a dream." But in the back of each man's mind is the knowledge that the dream can quickly melt into a nightmare -- as Taylor discovers himself on an Idaho mountainside:

We were running in fire. I had often imagined what it must be like to be trapped. The blinding heat, the horror. The fire is on you. Your body is burning. That detached observer within recognizes that your worst fear has, in fact, become your final reality. You are burning to death.

All this fear, all this danger, all this adrenaline -- at what cost? When removed from the drama of countless conflagrations, Taylor allows hints of a revealing melancholy, for the personal cost of his profession has been high, including his marriage. His is a life apart. "[M]ost normal people are at home sleeping in beds, with pillows and sheets, and maybe even other people, we're out here acting like a bunch of brush apes, running chain saws all night, swilling coffee that tastes like battery acid, eating stale candy bars, spilling gas and oil all over ourselves, filling our eyes with sawdust, ruining our hearing, and then lying in the dirt like a bunch of pigs." This recurring doubt haunts Taylor's thoughts, but having learned the lessons of his job, he stamps it out and gets right back to work.

Taylor's three decades of experience give him an educational and informative scope on his profession. The vocabulary can be a tangle for novices, but a consultation with the book's glossary will quickly demystify jargon like "burnout," "scratch line," or "snookie." The free, natural use of smokejumping argot adds yet another layer of authenticity to Taylor's on-the-scene observations.

In many ways, the narrative of Jumping Fire has the feel of a war story, and for all intents and purposes, the smokejumper's life is one of the closest peacetime equivalents. Smokejumping language further reinforces the parallels with talk of "air attacks," "cargo drops," and "barracks life." Taylor forcefully illustrates that doing battle with Mother Nature is every bit as hazardous as life on the war front, except these commandos aren't getting in a plane to exchange fire, but to extinguish it.

In the end, what impresses most is the indomitable spirit of not only Murry Taylor but this entire passionate breed of backwoods flyboys that sacrifice convention in exchange for the unique rewards of wrangling fire in a vast, unpredictable wilderness. Jumping Fire is a remarkable tribute to the brave souls who risk life, limb, and love to quell the scorching flames of nature's fury.

—Brad Hampton

bn.com

A grand adventure that captures a lifestyle of violent oscillations between terror, boredom, and exhaustion.
— Outside Magazine

Caroline Fraser

The author writes with authority and hair-raising detail about parachuting into remote locations to fight fires.
— Wall Street Journal

John Holkeboer

A grand adventure that captures a lifestyle of violent oscillations between terror, boredom, and exhaustion.

A grand adventure that captures a lifestyle of violent oscillations between terror, boredom, and exhaustion.

Outside

The author is a veteran forest fire fighter in Alaska, one of a corps of highly trained and conditioned specialists who are actually eager to jump out of an airplane into a raging fire. Taylor has spent 25 years doing this work, unusual longevity for such physically demanding activity. The work, which is seasonal and involves long periods of boredom punctuated by intense pain, exhaustion, and fear, would satisfy any testosterone addict. Additionally, the demands of the fire season mean that smokejumpers are separated from their families for months in an environment not exactly conducive to stable relationships. However, Taylor manages a thoughtful and readable exploration of a middle-aged man coming to terms with his life, his successes, and his failures, which unexpectedly struck a chord with this reviewer. For readers who like books like Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/00.]--Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

In the shadow of Mt. McKinley, above the Yukon River, and the Rocky Mountains are among the places Taylor has fought fires during his 20- year career. His account includes digging firelines, fighting off angry bears, telling funny stories around the campfire, and remembering jumpers who have fallen to their deaths and pilots who have perished in fiery crashes. He is the oldest living fire jumper, and the oldest ever to jump. He includes a glossary without a guide to pronunciation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews