When Norman MacLean set out to write (in Young Men and Fire) the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire, he was haunted by one thing about it: fifteen elite Smokejumpers had dropped to fight the fire, and scarcely an hour later, ten of them were dead. Three men who survived to return from the mountain would bear the scars for the rest of their lives. For two more, life was over even as they described their escape to rescuers; they were mortally burned, and both were dead within a day.
MacLean could approach this tale from his own experience as a fire-fighter in Montana. He recounts his fear in trying, with cheaply hobnailed boots that slipped on the grassy slopes, to outrace a fire and reach safety at the ridgeline.
As a fire up a hillside closes in, everything becomes a mode of exhaustion—fear, thirst, terror, a twitch in the flesh that still has a preference to live, all become exhaustion. So on closer examination, burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times, not two times as has been said before—first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes you, and if you are a Catholic about all that remains of you is your cross.Catholic prayers and themes run throughout MacLean's tale. He likens the ordeal of the Smokejumpers time and again to stations of the cross, evoking the agony of Christ in their pain. Some of the Smokejumpers were Catholic; one body was identified by the remains of the medallion he customarily wore, that and a snake-bite kit loaned to him before the drop by the fire-fighter who found his body.
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