Wildland Fire, Packrats, and the Dipshits Among Us: The Dipshit Part

This is the third installment of a series about being a woman amongst packrats and dipshits while fighting wildland fire in Central Idaho. Part One and Part Two can be found by following the links. This is the dipshit part.

The morning finds me too soon. Mother Nature has no snooze button out here. You can only bury your head in your sleeping bag and act like daylight doesn’t exist for so long. Eventually, the sun invades you, heating up said sleeping bag to an intolerable level, and forces you, unwillingly sometimes, into the day. I’m up, and I’m unhappy about it. Murray is up as well, and even less happy about it. Coffee hasn’t been made yet. I learned a few weeks ago on an IA with Murray that the man is more rabid animal than human in the first hour-or-so of his day before a coffee bean magically turns him into a very amiable creature. I won’t be saying a word to him for at least that hour.

I get dressed in my sleeping bag, a skill of mastery for every female firefighter. This isn’t a free T&A show, not to mention, the more these guys forget you’re a woman the better. These guys are a long way from a woman’s company most of the summer, and as one of the three single women on this crew, I have a cemented intention to make myself as physically and romantically undesirable as possible. No makeup, a bossy and abrasive persona I can deploy when necessary, and as little ass showing as humanly possible.

As I dress, I’m thinking about the damn packrat. As I breakfast tie, or loosely rig up my boots, I’m already thinking about what I’m going to do about that little son of a bitch. I head over to the rocky outcropping where last night’s debacle began.

I don’t know what I expected to find, but what I find kind of floors me for a minute. I noticed the pack straps on my line gear first. The little shit ate through an array of webbing and padding on it, mostly in areas probably highly saturated in sweat. Next, I pick up my hard hat. I was pretty certain the knocking sound that initially woke me up sounded like something knocking a hard hat against the rocks. I was right, and when I pick up my hard hat, there is nothing left of the sweat band and nearly all of the webbing in it has been eaten away, rending it mostly useless and even worse, uncomfortable as hell. My leather gloves had been secured to the webbing of the hard hat with a carabiner an

d now they also lay there like last night’s meal. The palmar surface is mostly gone as are the pointer and thumb fingers on both sides of each glove, again where I’m sure the most sweat had collected.

“That little piece of shit!” I say under my breath.

At this point, I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m real fucking angry. I fill up a Mountain House Blueberry Granola with some water and throw it on the rocks to soak for a few minutes. In that time, I’m furiously digging in my food bag for my weaponry of choice for this rodent problem. I finally find what I’m looking for: two MREs, or military rations. Each one usually has peanut butter or some form of a “cheese spread” included with the meal. Their interpretation of cheese is a real loose one I might add. I find a pouch of peanut butter first. It will do. I then begin looking through my line gear for my extra AA batteries.

“You got spare batteries for your radio?” I ask Murray, probably a bit too premature of his morning coffee.

“Uh-huh,” he mumbles, without looking up, while stirring a cup he has placed over a few hot embers.

That’s all I needed to know. As long as one of us has batteries, that’s all we need, and mine can now be used for the business at hand: poisoning a damn rat. I find my batteries, I grab a Pulaski, and begin using the blade of it to cut lengthwise into the metal exterior of the batteries. Keep your tools sharp kids, you never know when you may need to extricate battery acid. Once my batteries have been destroyed, I’m carrying them and my packet of peanut butter down to the face of the rock out-cropping near where it meets the earth and where I’m sure this little son of a bitch lives. I spread my peanut butter out on a rock, and begin using my pocket knife to extract my battery acid centers from my batteries. Once this is done, I mix them together into a nice paste on the rock. I grab the remnants of my batteries and head back up to camp, smiling, and a bit too proud of myself for my ingenuity.

Murray sees me coming up the hill with a Pulaski and a handful of battery carcasses. He gives me a real curious look over the rim of his coffee cup when he sees I’m smiling like a proud toddler who didn’t shit her pants today.

“What are you up to?” he asks.

“Making fucking rat poison,” I reply, again too proud of myself.

“Ugh. Okay, how’d ya go about that?” he asks.

“MRE peanut butter and battery acid, and then I put it down on those rocks,” I say just beaming with bravado.

“Agh, right,” Murray says with skepticism radiating from his eyes.

“We’ll see tonight, I guess,” I say, adding a bit more humility to my statement this time, in case I am merely making a fool of myself spreading peanut butter all over the forest, just to be tortured by the rodent again tonight.

“Yeah, I see it ate all your shit,” Murray states as he half laughs and looks over at my line gear and helmet.
I nod silently. I sit down and eat my granola and drink some water I’ve mixed with a bit of Gatorade powder. We eat in silence and take in the morning for a few minutes before I walk back to my hooch and grab my radio.

“Central Idaho Dispatch, Slaughterhouse IC on windy devil.”

I take another bite of soggy granola as I hear dispatch respond back.

“This is central Idaho, go ahead Slaughterhouse IC.”

“Yeah, just wanted to let you know we are back on the fire for the day. Any word on the additional firefighters I requested last night by chance?”

There’s a pause on the radio, as I expected, but I glance at my watch and realize we are up before anyone is probably at the air base for this poor girl to have even been able to ask. It wasn’t really worth asking, and I should have looked at the time before I stressed her out about it.

“Ugh, no information yet on those resources, but I will ask as soon as the air base comes on duty for the day,” she responds, hesitantly, and sounding like she’s bracing for an impact.

“Okay yeah, no rush,” I say, hoping to diffuse her so she doesn’t try to go above and beyond and call our superintendent before his work day begins.

Murray and myself take our time packing up camp a little for the day. We will leave almost everything as-is since we know we will probably be out here at least one more day. But stuffing our sleeping bags in stuff sacks, and generally keeping our personal items stashed away is pretty good practice so as not to have a full sleeping bag of ants meet you at the end of day.

We head over to the fire after breakfast and take a bit of time to size up what happened over night. The one jackpot of trees fully engulfed, one snag fell, and the cup trench was full of embers, rocks, and other roll-out debris. Generally, though, it looked pretty damn good. They always look good in the morning, after a cool night, some humidity recovery, and before sun gets on them again.

“Well, shall we bone pile some of this shit?” Murray says more as a statement than a question.

“Yeah, sounds good to me,” I reply.

Bone piling is basically taking anything that looks like it still has heat or fire potential in it, or is half-burned, and piling it in the center of the fire to burn up together like a bonfire of sorts. We start dragging everything off the lines toward the interior and a central pile we’ve started. It doesn’t take long before what was a bunch of smoldering half-smoking limbs to be fully engulfed in flames once laid together. Now that we have a decent pile, we start loading it up with all the available fuel we can find within the fire’s interior. If there’s no fuel to burn, a fire basically burns itself out, we’re just speeding up the process a bit. This is every firefighter’s favorite way to fight fire: burning shit. We’re all a bunch of pyromaniacs given purpose in reality. Say the words “back burn,” or hand a drip torch to someone and watch the inner child arise in every person in wildland fire. No exceptions. As I stand back to watch the pile burn, I hear my radio crack.

“Slaughterhouse IC, Central Idaho Dispatch on Windy Devil.”

“Go ahead dispatch,” I say into my radio as flames from the pile crack behind me.

“The airbase has two rappellers they can send your way this morning if you still need them. Do you need anything else resource-wise this morning?”

“No, the two rappellers are good, and you can tell them we are good on saws. They won’t need to bring another saw box. We hammered out the saw work last night. Tell them to send a cubee instead,” I respond, trying to save myself and my companions from an additional 75 pounds of gear to carry out that we don’t actually need. And a cubee is a five-gallon cube of water that we can always use.

“Okay, I’ll let them know and get back to you when I know an ETA on your rappellers.”

“Thanks,” I say ending the exchange.

Murray and I continue on with our bone pile for the next hour or so, periodically beefing up hand line in areas that need it as we go. Again, we work mostly independently, there’s no real need for direction or much dialogue on fires of this nature at a certain point. Eventually, I hear my radio crack and dispatch tells me our other rappellers will be leaving the air base in approximately 20 minutes. I look at my watch and register that whoever it is had just enough time to get to work, pack their gear on the helicopter and get sent to our fire. Not a bad way to start a day at all: no PT, and an operational rappel before noon. “Lucky shits,” I think to myself.

Nearly an hour later, I hear my radio crack.

“Slaughterhouse IC, Helicopter 409, air-to-ground,” I hear, and recognize instantly that our base manager Darren Foster is riding front seat today.

“Slaughterhouse, go ahead.”

“Hey Coop, we’re 15 out with Stevens and Lewis for ya. We’re rigged to rappel already, so we’ll see ya shortly,” he says with a tone of jovial familiarity.

“Alright, see ya then. We’ll get out of your way. You’re a bit late though. Dispatch said you were leaving almost an hour ago,” I chide back.

“Ugh, yeah, a bit of a delay,” Foster chimes back in a tone that lets me know he’s talking about one of the people riding backseat.

I’ve worked for Foster now for three seasons and have known him a bit longer. I call him “Uncle Darren” and his wife is a saint that has kept me fed for a few summers now, since I can barely cook a box of Hamburger Helper for myself. They are as close to family for me here during the summers, and honestly, closer than some of the family I do have. I’m almost certain the only reason Foster asked me to work on his crew was because I make a great addition to the crew softball team during tournament times, and I drink like only a Montana girl can. So here I am, three seasons of working for Foster, still a half-decent left fielder during tournament time, still drinking PBR like water, and not a half bad heli-rappeler.

“Fucking Lewis!” I hear Murray growl behind me.

“Yeah, he’s got to be talking about Lewis,” I agree.

Lewis happens to be this season’s “that guy” on the crew. Every crew has one: a person who somehow made it through the hiring process or slipped through some crack in the interview process and somehow has found a way to irritate and alienate himself from every person on the crew in short order. A guy who can literally fuck up, well, anything. I personally found myself thinking Lewis was “that guy” near the beginning of the season when he went into a diatribe, sitting in a hot tub during a crew barbeque, oddly enough, flanked by the poor soul he called a girlfriend.

“The clitoris doesn’t exist! Look it up, you won’t find it. It’s not a thing. It was created by ultra-feminists in order to make men feel inferior!” he professed with all the vigor of a man who knew not one fuck about to which he was speaking.

“Just because you haven’t found it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” quipped the crew’s token lesbian to an absolute uproar of laughter, further solidifying to me, why she was my best friend, and why he was the crew’s idiot for the season.

I was less than excited to hear Lewis’s name come through that radio. “For fuck’s sake, this is like one Rappeler forward and two back,” I thought to myself. I instantly regretted having asked for more people. I would have much rather just had Murray and myself out here. I tried to make the best of it by reminding myself that Stevens was with him. She was the crew’s token vegan. Slight yogi build, jet-black, short cut curls occasionally shaved into a mohawk, lots of facial piercings and tattoos with an undercurrent for anarchy and revolution. She scared half the guys on the crew and gave the other half a hard on. As another single woman on the crew, she preferred to instill terror as much as possible. In fact, one of my most vivid memories of Stevens happens to be when she disarmed a Texan who fancied himself a cage fighter with nothing more than a death ray glance after he mistakenly assumed an endearing tone and called her “kitten.” He never recovered, and I instantly loved her for it. At least Stevens is with him, she can dilute his dumbass I thought to myself.

Stevens and Lewis rappel in, mostly without incident. Lewis still looks like an absolute clown when he rappels, and all our checks and balances in this system were built just for ineptitude such as his. Murray and myself carry on with our own tasks as they pack up their ropes and get their gear. I had noticed when Foster did the gear let down that it still looked like there was a saw box with the load. I figured, to myself, that dispatch had forgotten or botched the message to leave it behind. Whatever, the pack-out is probably the shortest I’ve ever had on this forest, so the extra weight honestly shouldn’t be an issue.

Once I see Stevens and Lewis are mostly packed up and grabbing their line gear, I head up to them to give them a quick run down of the fire. I briefly walk them through what Murray and myself have done and what I want them to help us do in the next hours. Most of that being to continue bone-piling and fully lining the fire with a hand line in the places we haven’t tied in yet. Lewis is the first to raise objection, per usual.

“How about I get on the saw and start sawing around the line?” he asks far too eagerly.

“Well, all the saw work is pretty much done actually. Murray worked his ass to the bone last night finishing most of that up. There may be some bucking and limbing left but nothing major. He has his saw up and running already, so he can do any of that work we find. Honestly, I told dispatch we didn’t need another saw box so I could save you guys some pack-out weight but they must have forgotten that along the way.”

“Oh no, they didn’t forget. They told us to leave the saw box, but someone wouldn’t leave it behind,” Stevens quietly says under her breath as she starts hiking past me to the fire to tie in with Murray.

I instantly know she’s talking about Lewis and look at him quizzically.

“It’s a safety issue. I’m not going on a fire without a saw,” he says defensively. This has become his go-to tactic to do or get basically anything he wants this season. He’s found if he pipes off something about “safety” and argues himself into a circle that occasionally it works. I’m going to let it work in this instance. If this dumb shit wants to pack an empty saw around all day with his tool and then pack said saw out of this fire, I’m going to damn well let him learn that lesson.

“Well, maybe work on getting used to not having your security chainsaw blanket with you all the time Linus. This is the Salmon-Challis, there’s a lot of wilderness out here, and sometimes all you get is a misery whip and a Pulaski,” I say with the thickest sarcasm and finality as I also walk off toward the fire to tie in with Stevens and Murray.

Now I know what the hold up was. I would bet a whole fire check I just said a reiteration of something Foster and Stevens probably spent the last half hour arguing with him about. Here he is though, hiking behind me, fumbling a combi-tool and a chainsaw like a Gumby character with no thumbs trying to resituate them in a thousand different configurations until he finally settles on one. Unfortunately, the minute his body is at rest, is when his mouth and his mind have time to get back to work. Somehow, this guy also just doesn’t know when to take a cue that he needs to stay quiet for a minute.

“I really think you guys went at this fire all wrong if you don’t even have it fully lined yet. That should have been the first thing you did. That’s just the basics. Anchor and flank and line it,” he confidently announces behind me, sounding like he’s reading verbatim out of a fire line handbook.

Reasoning with this type is a fool’s errand, so I merely say, “Well, when you get eyes on the fire and see what we were dealing with you can send management your critiques in writing.” Apparently, my sarcasm and abrasiveness on that line were heavy enough to buy me a few minutes of silence while we hiked.

Finally, we tied in with Murray and Stevens. They had set into a sawyer and swamper duo bucking up some of the bigger timber and dragging it to the bone pile. A swamper is a person working in tandem with a sawyer pulling cut up debris, fuels, branches and generally moving things around in a way that the sawyer can just concentrate on sawing. They’re working methodically and in a rhythmic flow of saw and pull, that tends to develop with people when they’ve worked together in this way for a while. That, however, leaves me with Lewis, which I am sure was no mistake or chance happening on Stevens’ and Murray’s part. I don’t blame them. I would have done exactly the same thing. I’d pawn Lewis off as well. In a matter of seconds I had figured out exactly how to do that.

“Okay, great, it looks like they’ve got the saw work covered, so we’re “safe” there. I’m going to bump down to the cup trench and start tying in all the hand line with that as a good anchor on the left flank. How about you head to the right flank and tie in line on that side as well?” I say with all the sarcasm shots fired as intended.

“Ugh, yeah, I guess that works,” he replies.

“Okay, if you finish before me just tie back in and we’ll go from there,” I say, proud of myself that I just tactically figured out how to keep the guy literally on the other side of the fire from me for most of the day.

“Yeah,” he says as I start hiking away from him towards my flank of the fire.

We all worked methodically for hours from that point on. I made one comment over the radio about eating lunch to make sure everyone took a break, but other than that, I could pretty much let everyone be and we could all work in peace. The fire wasn’t overly active anymore. Our work yesterday and the temperature drop last night had mostly put this to bed for us. Now it was just all the unsexy work, or mop-up that we like to call it. Lots of digging, lots of dirt mixing hot fuels and ash pockets, lots of labor with no real fire to be seen. The shit they don’t show on CNN to the civvie public because it doesn’t look all that glamorous on the other end of a TV camera.

I finished my flank and began hiking down and back up the flank Lewis was on. You really do have to check this guy’s work, but thankfully, he digs better than he does most anything else, and it looks just fine. The whole fire is lined and we are all now working on mopping it up. We grid out and mop up the fire as we go. I make us do this whole process one more time to make sure we’ve got everything cold and dead out before we leave it. I’ve been doing initial attack on this forest for five years now and never had my name associated with re-burns or big escapes and I’d prefer to keep it that way for as long as possible and work a few more hours on the front end. Finally, I feel comfortable saying she’s dead out. I look at my watch and see it’s about 1800. I decide we’ll go eat dinner at camp, and then I can hike back over and look at it until nightfall and a bit after to make sure it’s done before I call it out to dispatch. We’ll pack up first thing in the morning and head out if all goes well.

“Let’s head over to camp and get dinner and bump all of Lewis and Stevens rappel gear and boxes with us on our way,” I say to everyone when we reached the top of the fire on our final grid.

Murray nods and starts hiking down with the saw on his shoulder with Stevens behind him. I motion to Lewis so he can hike in front of me, and I’ll carry up the rear. I again get to witness him sort himself out with his unused chainsaw and his tool and fall in line behind him. We all hike in silence. Shit, everything we did for the most part the rest of that night was in silence. No one wanted to give Lewis any ammunition or subject matter to talk on. To be fair, the guy is probably suffering from some really unmedicated or undiagnosed attention deficit disorder or something of that nature. I try to remind myself of that and give him some grace, but that grace only goes so far for any of us, and the grace often just comes in the form of silence at this point in the season. It’s been a long season of listening to the guy talk.

Murray finishes eating first and then says he’s “going to look at things from above.” I instantly know this just means he doesn’t want to sit here in silent awkwardness with all of us dancing on eggshells around Lewis and prefers to be hiking to the top of the ridgeline and spending some time alone. He’s done this on previous initial attack fires I’ve been on with him too. We’re all people attracted to this work because we like to be alone in the woods, and there’s no harm in a walkabout at this point in the fire.

“Sounds good. I’m going to head back to the fire and just watch it into the night a little bit before I call it out to dispatch,” I say as I grab my line gear and a Pulaski. Before I turn to walk off, I catch Stevens looking at me with a very dilute version of her death glare for leaving her here alone with Lewis. Just that taste of it made me understand how she broke the Texan. I feel bad, but she’s a real smart chic. She’ll find a way to shake him, or she can just stare through his soul and be done with it. In my mind, I’m daring him to tell Stevens that the clitoris doesn’t exist as I hike away.

I spent the next few hours puttering around the fire and cold-trailing it. Eventually, I ended up sitting in the cup trench I had built the night before, facing south west and watching the sky as the sunset began cascading shadows and varying shades of pink and red through the Salmon River corridor. This is the closest thing to a spiritual ritual I do. I sit in high places and I look at the sky, and maybe I feel a sliver of what people feel sitting in a church pew, or maybe I feel more out here. That’s something I don’t really know for sure. I never got anything from sitting in a church pew to be able to compare the two.

I stayed on the fire and walked it in its entirety again after nightfall, looking for embers or hot-spots we may have missed during the day. She had no secrets to share though, so I figured it was as good a time to call it out now. “Central Idaho Dispatch, Slaughterhouse IC, Windy Devil.”

“This is Central Idaho, go ahead Slaughterhouse IC,” a gruff, masculine baritone chimes back.

“I’m calling the Slaughterhouse Fire 100 percent contained and dead out at 2348. All personnel are off the fire for the evening. We’ll be ready for de-mob first thing in the morning.”

“Okay, have a good evening out there. We’ll arrange de-mob in the morning,” he states back a bit less gruff this time.

I put my head lamp on and switch the beam on for the first time tonight. It’s assaulting at first. I would honestly prefer to pick over this rock scree in darkness, but on this steep of a hill, that’s an idiot move and my eyes adjust fairly quickly. I head back to camp and when I’m within a good distance can see that Stevens has made her hooch up immediately next to the rock outcropping and Lewis’s is set up on the other side of it where I placed the bait. Fuck, I think to myself, we didn’t even mention the pack rat to them. They’re already bedded down for the night and I hope for everyone’s sake my acid butter bait either killed the thing or at least we scared it off the night before. Murray is also bedded down in his hooch a few feet away from my own. I try to get my gear off and get myself ready for the night with little need for the headlamp so I’m not waking him up if he was sleeping already.

“Heard you on the radio. She must still look good tonight, huh?” Murray mumbles out of his hooch.

“Yeah, she’s out. Sorry if I woke you up,” I say quietly.

“No worries. G’night,” he says rolling over.

“Night,” I say as I’m pulling out my contacts and placing them in their case.

I slept like the dead. I awoke to the sound of someone beating on a cup with a spork. As I pull the mummy sack off of my head and peer up, sunlight again assaults my eyes until they can adjust. I look at my watch worried I’d somehow slept in. 0630, I was fine. Someone is just an eager beaver this morning. I sit up and put my contacts in, and look out of my hooch to see that Lewis is the eager to rise this morning. Both he and Stevens are sitting around our makeshift campfire ring on the large slab of granite that serves as the base of this large outcropping. Murray is still buried in his sleeping bag. I think the both of us were catching up on what we lost the night before.

I dress again and head over to Lewis and Stevens at the fire. I tell them I called the fire out late last night and we’ll pack our stuff and demob out after we all eat. I end up eating a full mountain house spaghetti for breakfast. The pack-out shouldn’t be too arduous, but the radio was going off all day yesterday with more smoke reports and fires being staffed. 

There’s a high chance we may get back to base and sent right back on another, and if that’s the case, I want more fuel than granola is going to give me. As I think this, I’m watching Stevens pick through a bag of pine nuts, granola, and all sorts of other dehydrated bits she’s making into a meal. I have no idea how she sustains a strictly vegan diet in wildland fire. It’s commendable but not something I want to do or could replicate. Murray is up now and making his way to the fire to prepare his morning coffee. His face reads, “don’t fucking talk to me,” and Stevens and I read that without misinterpretation. Lewis does not.

“How was your hike last night? See anything cool up there?” he asks quizzically.

Murray shakes his head “no” and looks up with a sterner version of the don’t fucking talk to me before coffee face.

“Oh, well how’d ya sleep?”

Murray looks at me, looks at his cup, and then looks at me again as if to say, “watch this please.” I nod and Murray stands up and walks away from all the talking.

“Not a big morning conversationalist before his coffee,” I state to nobody, hoping Lewis doesn’t say anything more to him.

We sit and eat and Murray eventually comes for his coffee and eats in peace. After breakfast I check my watch. It’s still too early to know much from dispatch. We all start breaking our camps and packing our pack-out bags. Packing a pack out bag is, in my mind, a methodically sacred process. This is because I weigh less than this pack at some points, and I’ve learned the hard way that if it’s unbalanced, or mis-weighted, the load can feel intolerable. Yet if packed well, it can feel, well, bearable, or at least manageable. As we start packing up camp, I’m explaining to Lewis and Stevens that from the air, Murray and I saw a game trail at the bottom of this drainage that runs along probably a dry creek almost all the way to the guard station, and that the guard station is a good extraction point for us, so that will be the planned hike. Total in all, maybe two to three miles, which is a luxury walk in the woods in the Salmon-Challis.

With this being the plan, Murray and I decide to pack our saw box and fire box back up and basically glissade down the rock scree with them rather than carry that weight precariously down the scree. We will then return to camp, grab out line gear and rappel gear and make our way back to the bottom and pack our full pack out bags with everything at that point.

“But then you guys will make an extra trip up the hill,” chimes Lewis.

“Yeah, we know that Lewis, but going straight down this rock scree with that much weight on is an ankle-breaker waiting to happen,” answers Murray.

“I’d much rather hike uphill an extra time than carry that all in one trip,” I reiterate. Stevens seems to agree with Murray and me on this tactic, and she begins packing the fire box for its ski trip with her down the mountain. She also has an enormous bag of trash with her. Along with the crew vegan, she also happens to be the garbage collector, where most of us will burn our paper product trash in the fire, dump water, run fuel out, etc. to buy down our pack weights. Stevens is heroically principled in doing none of this, and I won’t even argue it because she’ll carry her own trash, fuel, and waste and anybody else’s.

“Well who’s splitting up this saw box stuff with me?” asks Lewis in a fairly desperate tone when he notices Stevens packing up the fire box.

“Well, Murray has our whole saw box. I’ve got our fire box, and Stevens has your fire box. I think you’ve got your safety saw all to yourself.” I state, trying to drive the point home that this predicament he

 now faces was a self-service of his own making.

“That’s not fair. The saw box has a ton of shit in

 it. This thing is heavy, and I have bad knees,” Lewis argues back.

“Well, when we get all the gear to the bottom of the scree and get it packed in our pack out bags, I can take some of it or we can split some of the load a little, but you’re carrying that saw I explicitly said we didn’t need.” 

“Fucking Christ” I think to myself as I’m easing my box down the rock scree. “This motherfucker is the largest guy on this fire at a clean six-feet tall and probably an easy 200 pounds, and it’s his first year here and he’s bitching about his bad knees and the “fairness” of his pack weight on easily the easiest pack-out of all time. Pack your fucking body weight in the river breaks for five seasons on pack-outs that average five to 10 miles in terrain, and then come talk to me about your knees, rookie,” I am aggressively berating him inside my mind for easily the next ten minutes.

By the time I’ve made it up the hill and gotten the rest of my gear down, Lewis is on his way back up the hill for his line gear and rappel gear all the while acting like a wounded dog.

“I still think we should have done this in one trip,” he says out of breath as we pass him on the way down. We ignore his bitching. It’s been a long season of his bitching, and we are over it. The three of us are down the mountain with our other gear and we’re done packing our pack-out bags before we see Lewis again. I begin my methodical packing routine as does Murray and Stevens. When all is said and done with our three boxes, I have all my gear and an entire firebox in my pack with room to spare, so I begin digging into the saw box Lewis has left at the bottom to see what I can fit in my bag. I grab the full fuel bag from his saw box and put it in my pack. I swap it with two empty sig bottles and also shove the saw chaps in the top of my pack-out bag. Enough to have a full bag and carry my weight, but I’ll be damned if I’m carrying this whole thing out for this dipshit.

Lewis arrives with his gear as the rest of us watch him begin packing his pack-out bag. This is where this guy’s level of shit show begins to really shine. I don’t know if I’ve ever watched someone crucify packing a pack out bag in this fashion. He is literally just haphazardly shoving things in the bag, wherever they go they go, no thought about weight or trying to pack things down to their smallest form. Eventually he gets to the saw box, and begins pulling items out of it to pack.

“What is this, are you guys adding stuff to my box for me to pack!” he nearly yells as he holds up the empty sig bottles.

“No, dipshit, I swapped out the two empty bottles, so that I could carry your chaps and your entire fuel bag on top of the box I’m already carrying,” I say back, exasperated with this guy’s bitching.

“This is so unfair. I’m carrying more than all the rest of you!” he continues protesting.

“Are you seriously bitching at a 120-pound chic for swapping your empty sig bottles for a full weight fuel bag right now and calling it unfair?” I fire back.

“Well, you’re adding shit to my box.”

“After I took shit out of your box, a box that wouldn’t even be on this fire if you hadn’t demanded it, and I put that shit in my pack. This conversation is over, pack your shit, put it on your back, and walk,” I say, ripping the two empty sig bottles out of his hands and throwing them back towards my bag.

I proceed to throw my pack-out bag on and start hiking down the drainage without waiting on Lewis any longer. Murray and Stevens proceed to do the same and follow me.

“You really pulled your punches there, Coop,” Murray says laughing after we make it out of earshot of Lewis.

“Dude, that guy is on my last nerve. Out here bitching about his knees and fairness of his pack weight. This is the easiest packout I’ve ever done. I’m not arguing with his dumbass or waiting on it any longer. Just get ourselves back to base.”

Stevens laughs from the back of the line. “Someone had to say it to him.”

From that point we hiked for about ten minutes before we stopped and waited on Lewis. I was pissed at the guy, but I still wasn’t going to leave him. He finally arrived, again looking like a wounded dog and complaining about his knees. We continued on and thankfully the hike was short, because Lewis was loose and his dialogue didn’t stop from the time he met up with the rest of the group. All the more motivation for me to hike as fast as possible to try and put as much distance between us.

We finally make it to the guard station, and I relay into dispatch that we’ve arrived. “Central Idaho Dispatch, Slaughterhouse IC, Windy Devil.”

“This is dispatch, go ahead Slaughterhouse.”

“Yeah, myself plus three have arrived at the guard station for our demob,” I reply

“Okay, sounds great. I actually have the line officer here who would like to talk to you about options to staff another fire.” The dispatcher responds.

“Yeah go ahead,” I say.

“Hey, Cooper. It’s Jenkins. Hey, we’ve got four other fires we still haven’t staffed from last night. I understand there’s yourself and another qualified IC out there with you. If we bring helicopter 409 to re-supply are all your folks good to go right back out to another incident, and we will split you up into two sticks of rappellers?”

I look at Murray with a “you good to go” look. He nods that he’s good to go. Before I respond back to dispatch, however, I look him dead in the eye and say: “I’ve got dibs on the vegan.”