Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

As I pulled into the Pleasant Hill High School parking lot Tuesday night, I recalled other nights when forest fires had called me out of bed.

Four Red Cross volunteers greeted me as I approached the gymnasium and inquired about the evacuation center they had set up to accommodate people fleeing fires that threatened or destroyed their homes in Oakridge and other upper Highway 58 communities.

Only I slept in a former Civilian Conservation Corps building beside the Kootenai River in Libby, Mont., during the summer of 1949. I had traveled more than a thousand miles to a summer job of piling brush and fighting forest fires.

The forests there were largely lodgepole pine on mountainsides that were harvested for lumber. My crew of mostly college students spent most days chopping up and piling tree limbs left by loggers for burning during the winter.

It often rained briefly and sometimes snowed during the day, which discouraged forest fires.

My first experience with fire occurred at night in a lookout tower while we celebrated the birthday of the college guy manning the tower. Lightning put on a dazzling display outdoors as cannon-like explosions rocked the area and light danced across the metal stove in the middle of the tower. An impressive show even though I was acquainted with lightning as a farm boy in southern Missouri.

The first “fire call” occurred midway through the summer while our crew slept. We dressed quickly in cast-off Army fatigues and jackets and climbed aboard the back of a truck that hauled us to our daytime timber-whacking.

An hour later, we hauled cross-cut saws, Pulaski tools, water and grub from the truck and followed a grizzled oldtimer who “knew the woods.”

In those days, smokejumpers were a novelty and fire-fighting preparation and equipment were no match for today’s counterparts. We had been advised to take a handkerchief with us to fires. Soak it in water and tie it around your face to protect you from the smoke.

Fortunately, our first fire was mostly “mop-up” work because rain had dampened the area before we arrived. The smoke killed my eyes, and I wondered whether being paid 20 hours while on the job during a day of fire-fighting was worth the risk and effort.

I survived that fire and several others during my summer stay in Montana. Saved $500, which was enough to finance the following year’s expense of attending graduate school.

Tuesday night as I listened to the four Red Cross volunteers share stories, I recalled my experience of fighting forest fires in Montana, which were much less impressive than one I often recall about the Kootenai River.

My crewmates and I were restricted to camp on weekends because we had to be available to fight fires. That left a lot of downtime, which we began filling by cutting up downed trees along the river bank. We spent a couple of weekends showing off our muscles while swinging axes and pulling saws.

Then our crew boss, a retired Forest Service veteran, stopped his truck above us, walked down to our construction site and asked, “What are you boys doing?”

“Building a raft. When we get a weekend off, we’re going to float down to Libby and have a grand old time.”

“Get in the truck,” our crew boss said. We did. A half-mile downriver, he stopped the truck, pointed to a rapids and announced, “You die there.”

That’s when I began learning how to pitch horseshoes when I wasn’t piling brush or fighting forest fires.

Longtime Oregon journalist Dean Rea, widely known for his years as a University of Oregon journalism educator and editor at The Register-Guard in Eugene,  serves as a founding board member, correspondent and columnist for The Herald.