Stacking sticks at Lemolo Lake in 1997 almost drove our fire crew insane. We were creating a fuel barrier around Lemolo Lake, home to various campgrounds and a nearly vacant lodge on OregonÕs Umpqua National Forest, fifteen miles west of Crater Lake. There were fistfights, insubordination suspensions, plenty of bee stings and one girl from New Jersey.

Nobody talked in the saw wagon that year. We all knew our destiny. We were pilers, not firefighters. Each morning we would soberly put on our rain jackets, hardhats, rip-stop chaps and bug goggles and wade into dense stands of lodgepole pine, thick with blowdown. If you were lucky, you were the cutter. Otherwise, you stacked sticks. The engine crews always arrived around lunchtime, much to the chagrin of the hand crew. If it was raining, we huddled over our lunches in the rig, half asleep, muttering sugar-induced prayers for drought and explosive fire.

Greg Parker was usually delegated the job of piler instead of cutter alongside the other rookies when we were stacking sticks. I alternated between cutting and stacking. Parker was smaller and older than the rest of us, he was more patient, he didn’t mind piling and damn, could he roll hose. Back then, his vision was hazy in his right eye but he could still use it for things like hot-spotting at nighttime and using the Probeye, an infrared tool that uses argon gas to detect hot spots in areas that have previously been burned. Parker never left on a fire that year; nobody did. Fire school was the nearest we came to the real thing until we burned the piles in the fall.

The fire triangle is a formula introduced and reiterated during the annual mandatory fire school. The points of the fire triangle are fuel, oxygen and heat. If you subtract one, they teach you in fire school, you can’t have fire. If you control one element of the fire triangle, you can control a fire, to a point, weather and fire behavior permitting. This is the formula fire science has provided us with.

We may understand this formula and are often able to apply it successfully, but the simple reality remains: fires are becoming hotter and more expensive to fight. Fire suppression cost federal agencies $1.6 billion in 2002. The 2002 wildfire season saw 6.9 million acres burn and twenty-three firefighters dead while on duty at incidents.

I began working at the Toketee Ranger Station, headquarters of the Diamond Lake Ranger District, as a teenager and finished my fourth season on the Diamond Lake fire crew in 1997. Fire school that year included a rigorous analysis of the communication breakdown that led to the death, in 1994, of fourteen firefighters on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. A young squad boss on our crew quietly mentioned later that season that a friend of his had been one of those who was “burned up” on the fire. The smokejumpers had violated all eighteen of the so-called watch-out situations that we had been trained to detect on the fire line. Watch-out situation number two, “in country not seen in daylight,” occurred often.

Nighttime on the fire line is many things: it is wondrous, surreal, hypnotizing, and it is dangerous. Fizzling coals and crackling firebrands, the buzz of distant chain saws, the muffled rumble of engines, the eerie dance of headlights through thick smoke and dust, the sting of a smashed finger and the delirious motion of coffee-cup-to-mouth keep firefighters alert and awake.

It was in these moments, late at night, that I often wondered if the risk was worth it. Was cutting hazard trees and digging line miles and miles away from any home or community entirely necessary? Fighting fire was exhilarating, certainly, but I wasn’t sure if fire was the real and palpable enemy that it is generally portrayed to be. A healthy forest needs fire. My love of firefighting was bumping squarely into the nagging sensation that 100 percent fire suppression is off course.

The feeling didn’t go away, and neither did the uneasiness I felt as we alternated between initial attack and stacking sticks at home on our ranger district. When smoke is detected on the forest, a crew, sometimes a hand crew, sometimes an engine crew, is dispatched immediately to assess the situation and put the fire out. I was putting fires outÑsuppressing themÑand I was stacking sticks to create a fuel barrier. Rainy year or drought, controlling a point on the fire triangle seemed like a desperate goal.

Jill Napper, the fuel technician on the Diamond Lake Ranger District said that if we are serious about thinning in order to reduce the threat of future catastrophic fires that could endanger life and property, we need to realize that these “fuel reduction treatments will need to be repeatedly administered, maybe every ten years.” She said thinning in stands of lodgepole pine can be as expensive as $1,000 an acre.

The work of James Agee, a forest ecology professor at the University of Washington, has been followed by foresters on the Umpqua in the planning stages of fuel reduction projects. Agee’s research reflects Napper’s experience. “Forests will continue to regenerate and, in the process, accumulate fuels, sometimes at high rates,” Agee said. “An effective national policy on forest fuels and fire management requires sustained long-term programs involving several treatments. In a stand with significant fuel accumulations, an initial prescribed burn will typically generate additional fuel.”

The fire crew was neither thrilled with the Lemolo project nor convinced that the fuelbreak we were creating would be effective in preventing a large fire from overrunning the small resort on the shores of Lemolo Lake. It could be helpful, but even a 100-foot buffer, like the one we were creating adjacent to a paved road, could be breached by a crown fire. Given the right conditions, crown fires can drop burning embers miles ahead of the flames. On both sides of the Lemolo buffer stood miles and miles of unburned fuel.

The Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Restoration Act is one proposed solution to hazardous fuel-loading on our national forests. The president’s plan touts commercial thinning as the chief fuel reduction activity that a healthy forest requires and a slumping Northwest forest economy is in desperate need of. The large-scale thinning projects proposed by the plan will, in theory, alleviate the threat of catastrophic fire, revitalize ecosystems in peril, rehabilitate and revive local logging communities snowed under by excessive bureaucratic obstacles and protect wildland-urban interface in peril.

The centerpiece of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act seeks to “remove needless administrative obstacles” by hastening the procedures that include appeals and lawsuits challenging restoration projects and fuel treatments. Public comment periods on these projects will also be shortened. Fuel reduction treatments can be expanded to encompass stewardship contracts, which permit logging companies to cut federal timber in exchange for thinning projects in unspecified areas of national forest.

Commercial thinning projects and timber sales do reduce fuel if the slash is promptly cleaned up. But often the slash is not dealt with for years after a unit is cut. When the slash is eventually piled, it’s burned. Hand piles, a fire crew downtime activity, and machine piles, managed by private companies, are covered with Visqueen (black plastic) and burned in the fall or the spring, when the fire danger is low.

Despite a General Accounting Office report to the contrary, Rick Abbot, a silviculturist at Diamond Lake Ranger District, argues that there have been plenty of appeals to fuel reduction projects. “It depends on your definition of fuel reduction,” he said. Abbot considers commercial timber sales legitimate fuel reduction projects.

Under the president’s plan, the decisions will fall in the hands of forest supervisors and district rangers. “We will have fires burning out of their natural range of variability for some time,” said James Caplin, the forest supervisor of the Umpqua National Forest. “The [plan] is not a cure for what we have now. It is a management strategy for the future.”

The future was close at hand as we burned our piles at the end of the season that year. There was justice in setting fire to our piles because we knew it was the end of a long, slow, dismal fire season. I knew it was the end of my short career as a wildland firefighter. We walked from pile to pile with drip torches, fusees and buckets of Alumagel (napalm mixed with diesel fuel) waiting in the back of the rig. With the flick of a lighter, our fuel reduction project was instantly transformed into a fire line. Pyromania is part of the off-the-record job description of a wildland firefighter. As agents of fire, we swept the forest clean of debris and burned our piles to the forest floor, gleefully.

I visited Toketee this fall. Parker was one of only two firefighters remaining from my final season at Toketee on the fire crew. Parker is entirely blind in his right eye now, but he still sees the allure of fighting fire. Parker had been appointed warehouseman of the new fire warehouse. He was unshaven, had orange earplugs draped around his neck and was, of course, wearing the signature yellow and green Nomex suit that firefighters are required to wear on all occasions.

Parker leaned on a table next to the wilderness packs outfitted with pulaskies and double-bit axes and told me about how they had used the chipper this year to disperse the brush they had cut around the perimeter of the compound. He led me out in back of the warehouse to a small, awkward hand pile crowned with a black piece of Visqueen. The pile was ready to burn, but the fuel reduction project was forced conversation. I was having flashbacks. This was a good year to be a firefighter at Toketee, said Parker. So was last year. Everyone saw a lot of fire. Parker and I swapped some old fire stories and then I said goodbye.

Saying goodbye to your crew was usually a relief, but it was also a little depressing. There is a certain camaraderie that grows through facing danger and surviving hardship. Battling fire was fulfilling, and new friendships cut from the fire line were founded on a common goalÑfighting fire. Stacking sticks did not produce the same results.

The final party at the fire management officer’s house in 1997 epitomized our soggy season. A friendly wrestling match, a typical fire crew pastime, quickly turned into a brawl. Only a couple of firefighters were injured, but the bitterness lingered on at the bunkhouses where we lived until we handed our radios in, signed our final time sheets, climbed into our cars and headed down out of the mountains for the valley. Alli Kassop, the only woman on our crew, left early in September to return to school for her final term at the University of Washington in Seattle. We left Seattle together that winter for Flagstaff, Arizona, where I began college.

The Lemolo project was designed to provide an anchor point in the advent of a large fire and structure protection around the lake. We were not stacking sticks and burning piles for the sake of forest ecology. That seemed imaginative at best, considering the scope of what we would have had to accomplish. It took a twenty-person fire crew more than two seasons to create a fuelbreak around one end of one lake, two miles long, 100 feet wide, at roughly a $1000 an acre.

We need to be able to suppress fire because there will always be uncertainty about when a small fire might grow into a catastrophic fire, endangering homes and fire crews. But we need to learn from our mistakes. All the smokes I snuffed out, sometimes high in the mountains, during those four seasons on the Diamond Lake fire crew, could have done the fuel reduction work of a hundred fire crews, for free.