Review: Young Men and Fire

When I was a resident of the Treasure State, I knew all about one of its most tragic chapters. One cannot live within a stone's throw of Helena, Montana, without knowing at least a few details about the Mann Gulch fire, a deadly 1949 inferno that spawned films, books, songs, and changes in how firefighters are trained. Even so, I did not read -- or, in this case, listen to -- the most famous account of the event until this month, shortly after its 70th anniversary.

In Young Men and Fire, winner of the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, Norman Maclean tells the story of 15 smokejumpers and a Forest Service ranger who battled a blaze in a rugged and remote ravine near the Missouri River. Published two years after the author's death, the detailed nonfiction account is a staple of Montana literature.

Maclean, a University of Chicago professor and the author of A River Runs Through It, approaches the fire as a scholar, a former firefighter, and a woodsman who was in the area when the fire broke out. Though he spends much of the book examining the scientific particulars of the fire and firefighting, he also offers touching portraits of the heroes and those directly affected by the tragic event.

Only three of the men walked away from the site, including 17-year-old Robert Sallee, the youngest member of the crew, and Wagner (Wag) Dodge, the oldest. Dodge, the 33-year-old foreman, survived by lighting a small grass fire, sitting in the embers, and waiting as the larger blaze passed around him. Sallee and Walter Rumsey, 21, escaped by beating the inferno to the lee side of a ridge.

Though Young Men and Fire does not have the depth or scope of The Big Burn, Timothy Egan's work on the Great Fire of 1910, or even similar books on natural disasters, it is nonetheless compelling, informative, and highly readable. Maclean offers both science and poetry in explaining a tragic event that still defies understanding.

I would recommend the book to general readers, fans of Montana literature, and those who love stories of heroism and sacrifice. Rating: 4/5. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Returning to the capital

To be sure, Washington, D.C. has changed in the last 35 years.

Construction fences and security barriers surround everything from the White House and the Washington Monument to various parks and tourist attractions. The traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, is heavier, and the subway system is more advanced. New museums and monuments, like the ones honoring Holocaust victims, African Americans, and veterans of the Korean War and World War II, have joined more established ones.

Even so, the nation's capital, in its 230th year, is much as I left it in the summer of 1984, when I interned for a congressman and got a close look at a city and a government at work.

I visited the area this past weekend while seeing my son, Matthew, who graduated from the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, and youngest daughter, Amy, who recently started a job in the city.

I found both the District of Columbia and northern Virginia, places brimming with reminders of our historical and cultural heritage, as interesting as I had the first time I saw them. Both will serve as backdrops for the first book in my next series. Set in late 1864 and early 1865, in the closing months of the Civil War, the novel will follow a modern American family as it begins a journey through time.

Though the series will have much in common with the Carson Chronicles series, it will differ in many ways. It will feature more history, adventure, and science fiction and follow a family that, for the most part, sticks together. Like my first three series, it will consist of five interrelated novels and feature multiple points of view.

I hope to start the new series in March. In the meantime, I will bring the Carson saga, a three-year labor of love, to a conclusion. I recently finished the first draft of Camp Lake. The fifth and final book of the Carson Chronicles series is still set for a January release.