Summer Battles
by Michael Thoele
Category: Science

Fire Line looks at the entire world of Western wildfire, with a strong, human-interest focus on the self-described adventurers and adrenaline junkies who go to battle in the West's annual summer war. Although its viewpoint is contemporary, it also deals with the historical backdrop of forest fire. Both rural and urban in scope, it covers wilderness fires that rage in such places as Alaska and Yellowstone National Park to the "urban interface" fires that sweep out of the mountains and into neighborhoods in such places as Los Angeles and Oakland, California. For generations, fighting fire in the forest has been a Western rite of passage. Almost everyone who lives in the West knows someone who has done it - a neighbor, a friend, a co-worker, a college roommate, a son, or these days, a daughter. The region is home to tens of thousands of adults who have had this experience. Those who go to battle against wildfire range from college students to Native American crews to perennial fire bums. Seasonal combatants led by full-time professionals, they work in a little-understood, paramilitary world that is America's version of the French Foreign Legion. In their annual campaigns, daring pilots dive into flaming canyons with retardant tanker planes. Smokejumpers leap into rugged wilderness regions. "Hotshots," the shock troops of wildland fire, take on giant conflagrations.