Part 2 of my Toyota story:
I left off in the spring of 1996 when I had just arrived in my 1994 Toyota truck in Whiskeytown (near Redding), CA for work as the only female on a 9-person prescribed fire crew. I suppose it was time for me to find out what it was like to be the princess on a crew.
My housemates were two male crew members. I had my own bedroom with attached bathroom. They had to share the bathroom down the hall. We had kind of a cool house with a big deck. That summer we were hardly there to enjoy the deck. Seems to me once the season started rolling, we were on the road the entire summer. It was a good year for overtime $$ and we spent much of it on natural prescribed fires (i.e. lightning strikes in the wilderness) at Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. The rest of the time we spent in Marin County at Golden Gate National Recreation Area prescribed burning the oak woodlands to keep the fir trees from encroaching. I got to know San Francisco that summer.
During one break in the action I drove with a friend to Santa Barbara with the windows down because driving through the Central Valley in California in the summer is not a treat without air conditioning. I also had a friend in Ojai so drove down to see her. And my friend in Lompoc got married that summer. The Central Valley was becoming very familiar. I kinda wished I had air conditioning.
I don't remember much about being a princess on the fire crew that summer. I remember working hard, being very fit from walking up and down mountains with a pack and often a chainsaw. I remember sleeping in the dirt, having few showers, a meeting lots of people from other crews on fires. It was a really good summer and the summer I turned 30, although I don't recall being happy about that because I was still a temporary employee and lived in seasonal housing with two male roommates. Not what I imagined at age 30.
That fall the season ended in October with a prescribed fire at Lava Beds National Monument, a park in Tule Lake, CA. David had gotten a job up there earlier in the fall so it was nice to be only a few hours apart rather than a few time zones. He had found a house in the town of Tulelake and I moved in until I found another job. I definitely was not going back to Florida since David was now here and my former boss told me I couldn't have my job back (although his boss said I could come back if I wanted to — no thanks, I'd had enough fighting fire in swamp grass and pine flats).
I did a little volunteer work at Lava Beds then was hired on for the early season in February to begin prepping for an ambitious prescribed fire regime the fire boss had. Tule Lake is a neat place because it is pretty much due east of Mt. Shasta and between Tule Lake and Mt. Shasta are these massive volcanic fields made of obsidian in the Medicine Lake area. There's tons of recreation in that area including fishing, hunting, hiking, 4-wheeling, camping, skiing in winter if you can get up there with a snow mobile. I have a picture of me with a stringer of fish standing in front of my Toyota.
I loved my job at Lava Beds. I was in charge of the prescribed fire crew and David worked on an engine that was jointly shared by the Modoc National Forest. We had different schedules but we often were on the same fires, sometimes at different ends of them. One good example was the Huffer Fire at nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park. It started out as a single lightning strike in a log. My friend Rebecca from Crater Lake and I were called out to monitor it. So we hiked up there with our tents and gear, spent the first couple days mapping a fire that creeped along a single downed log. We mapped the vegetation around it, took weather measurements, and spent a lot of time gabbing.
Until one day when the temperature and wind both increased dramatically. I radioed back to the main office that they might want to order a helicopter because this fire was building and spreading quickly and we were getting out of there. The person in the office thought I was exaggerating. Until they saw the smoke column from the office. Rebecca and I marched down to a safe zone we had identified earlier. It was safe then, when the fire was small and not spreading quickly. It didn't feel safe anymore so we marched on to a second place, which still didn't feel safe. Finally we ended in the dark at the edge of a big lake on a sandy beach. That felt safe.
At daylight we packed up and hiked out back to the office. The fire had really grown and now the managers were ordering crews to build line to herd the fire into the old dead lava flows and cinder buttes. Rebecca and I were transformed from fire monitors to firefighters. I was enfolded into the Winema Hotshots and acted as the crew boss for a few days since I knew what was going on with the fire. We were out for at least a couple weeks and possibly the entire three weeks. By then the fire had been herded and had no where to go. It ended up being a long pencil shape because the wind had blown so strongly that first day.
Seems to me we had a fairly busy prescribed fire season that fall back at Lava Beds. And we got a new boss. It also seemed that my job was going to convert to a permanent position. I was really excited about that but jobs with the government aren't that simple. Based on the way it was classified, I wasn't qualified (on paper) for the work I had been doing all summer. The reviewers of the applications weren't in Tule Lake. They were in San Francisco and were definitely not firefighers. Yet they decided who was qualified and who would make the cut for the interviews.
I can't remember who got that job. I ended up with a permanent job (finally) with the Umpqua National Forest up in Oregon, which was at least 2 hours away from Tule Lake. I moved up to a duplex owned by a school teacher in Idlwyld Park, which is about 25 miles west of the crest of those part of the Cascade Mountain Range. David and I had different work schedules. I hated my job because even though I was permanent I was again/still the only female, and this time the oldest person on the crew. Oh dear, perhaps I should've made another career choice. I had been used to being in charge, making decisions and plans. Now I was relegated to common crew person. My bosses recognized my skills and would give me special assignments, including going out by myself to find fire scars on stumps in old clear cuts as part of a fire history project. That was fun.
What I remember most was driving the lonely road from the Diamond Lake Ranger district to Hwy 97 down to Tule Lake as often as I could. By then I didn't like anything. Even David, although it wasn't his fault. I just didn't know how to be happy in a miserable situation. Later that summer we had a lightning bust and an arsenist. So for a week the crew was hopping from fire to fire. We were busy and had finally bonded as a crew.
In the meantime I had applied for a promotion at Redwood National Park and got the job. I was moving back to California in a job that would challenge me. I was manic with joy. Everything I owned fit in the back of my Toyota. My Sister Cat sat in a crate in the front seat with me on the move down to McKinleyville, CA. She meowed the entire way. I wished there was room in the back for her so I wouldn't have to listen to her whining. She quieted down as soon as she was out
of that offending crate.
End of Part 2