WILDFIRE DAYS

A hotshot firefighter recounts seasons in the burning wilderness.

In 2018, having ended a relationship and looking for a new life, Ramsey wound up in a Northern California hamlet called Happy Camp (“Yes, that’s a place”). There, in the formidable tangle of rivers, canyons, and mountains along the Klamath, she found the town in a “biblical crisis” of wildfire, and she volunteered to fight it. Not long after, she was offered a paying position with the U.S. Forest Service, training as a wildland firefighter after passing some tough tests; as her fellow firefighters, all men, learned, she was not just a woman but also much older than they—old enough, she reckons, that if she were an athlete she would have aged out. “Just me and nineteen men who were probably faster, stronger, and more knowledgeable than I was,” she writes. “No big deal.” Undaunted, she met the challenges of firefighting, which include having to pack heavy equipment into remote places, many reachable only on foot, to say nothing of working under cruel conditions: “There was no hiding from the sun, a punishing tyrant that baked our skin….The rocks were secondary suns radiating heat upward, so we were seared evenly, top and bottom, unhappy steaks.” Ramsey is as agile a writer as she was a firefighter, with a welcome sense of humor, as when she writes of a beetle species that can sense wildfires from 100 miles away and swarm there to deposit their eggs in the smoldering wood, safe from predators: “How metal is that?” Eventually, during the Covid-19 pandemic and a year of “millions of acres of the planet I love burning before my eyes,” Ramsey realized that her body was beginning to falter under the strains of the work and, with regret, retired from a job she had come to love.

A welcome addition to the burgeoning literature of fire.