Grinnell After Fire

It started to rain after midnight, cool drops on my scalp and my eyelids. I slid deeper into my sleeping bag, watching through the slit at the top as dark shapes moved around me, figures hauling ground pads and personal gear bags across the field to a long row of fire trucks. We were at a wildfire in southern Idaho, camped out on a farmer’s land, the nearby hills glowing in the dark. The Ridge Top Fire. This was our seventh day.

Car lights clicked on as people wrestled into backseats to escape the rain; others struggled with tent bags. Few of us bothered with tents when the sky looked clear. On the clock from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., tents — the daily operation of putting them up and then taking them down — cut into sleep time.

The tempo of the rain increased and, mumbling to myself, I sat up, stowed my boots in my gear bag, and gave the night sky one long look before rolling up, taco-style, in my ground tarp. It was hot like that, my days-without-a-shower smell suddenly intensified in the closed space, but I was betting the storm would pass. I was also strongly opposed to tents. Or trying to drag my sleeping setup across a field to do battle for our truck’s back seat. I was tired, and wakeup would come soon enough.

Last year, I spent nearly five months working as a federal wildland firefighter on the Kings Peak Module, a 10-person crew based out of the Ashley National Forest in northeastern Utah. It was a dry season, and we worked 123 days from June to mid-October on 15 fires, bringing me to just under 1,000 hours of overtime. During that time, I learned how to sharpen hand tools and fell fire-weakened trees with a chainsaw; I rolled hose lays and set up sprinklers around homes, bridges, barns, and lookout towers; I directed a helicopter via radio about where to drop supplies, hiked 9 miles with a 70-pound pack and, at the end of the season in Wyoming, camped for two weeks in 10-degree weather (yes, fires still burn in the cold!). 

Fire taught me about myself in a way that Grinnell never could. But the opposite is also true: Grinnell has taught me about myself in a way that fire never will. 

In the quick-moving world of firefighting, I found myself thinking more and more about the books piled on my dresser back at our guard station. I began a nightly ritual of listening to storytelling podcasts as I lay beneath great stretches of sky. I started jotting down scraps in Spanish when I found the time; I wrote long letters following my thoughts and poems about losing my face, that sensation that comes from living without mirrors. On my free days, whenever those came, I made a habit of driving the steep, curved road into Salt Lake City, where I would camp out in a bookstore for hours. 

It took Grinnell’s total absence for me to understand why it was important to me in the first place. Where fire tests my physical limits, Grinnell pushes me to learn and engage with new and sometimes startling ideas. Both things, doing and thinking, have definite payoffs; and as I learned this year, I shouldn’t take either for granted.

Back at Grinnell , I feel a much stronger ownership of my education. I feel lucky to spend such a large part of my life learning about myself and our intensely interesting world. In my environmental studies class this semester, I peer curiously at the charts my professor projects on the wall, his voice proclaiming them a magnificent artwork, statistics like thousands of dancing cranes. In my fiction seminar, I watch writing unfold itself; in my Spanish seminar, I pull at language, reordering my ideas into a new structure. I write, I read, I let my thoughts get mixed up with everybody else’s around the classroom table; I let my mind lead me around as though I’m a fish on a line, always curious to find out where it is we’re going. 

After these experiences, I understand that there’s a balance to strike between doing and thinking, a balance that is different for each of us. For me, the contrast between these two things is beautiful; after fire, I appreciate Grinnell as I never would have before. Now at Grinnell, I think excitedly about another fire season with the Kings Peak Module. Leaving, after all, is not such a bad thing, not when I know just how good it will feel to find myself back again.