Mary Emerick - Fire in the Heart: A Memoir of Friendship, Loss, and Wildfire

In Praise of Fire in the Heart

This is a story of love, friendship, wildfire, and death written in vivid prose fresh from the fire line. Mary Emerick was a little girl with spindly arms and legs who toughed it out to become a career wildland firefighter, hoping for the big one in the West and filling in the off-season as a panther babe on burns in Florida. Theres as much heart as fire in this book. It took a big one, the South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain, to bring home the deepest meanings of love, loss, and the bittersweet renewal of life that follows the flames.

John N. Maclean, author of Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire , and other books

Hour by hour, season by season, fire by fire, readers crisscross the country with Emerick as she rises to the challenges of this difficult life, even as she asks herself whether she can ever stop moving and find another kind of life, where staying might not mean entrapment, where freedom means home.

Bette Lynch Husted, author of Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land

Imagine facing a wildfire with nothing more than a pulaski and a drip torch. Now, imagine you are a young woman on a crew comprised mainly of athletic young men out to prove something to themselves and to each other. Youre carrying a forty-pound pack on your back and slung under the pack is a deployable fire shelter that you may or may not need for your survival. Should the fire jump the line. Should you not be able to reach your safety zone. It will depend on the wind, the relative humidity, and things intangible, like luck. Like fate. Like bravery. Fire in the Heart is Mary Emericks lyrical meditation on one womans search for identity. A mesmerizing and compelling story of fire and courage and love and transformation.

Pamela Royes, author of Temperance Creek: A Memoir

Mary Emericks journey back to nature is one in search of herself. After two decades of fighting wildfires, she came home with the kind of stories we all need to hear; stories that help us understand that at times, we can be brave, we can be strong, we can be fully human.

Murry A. Taylor, author of Jumping Fire: A Smokejumpers Memoir of Fighting Wildfire

Beautiful. Riveting. Satisfying. An honor to read.

Ellen Airgood, author of South of Superior

Emericks story unfolds much like a fire. There are quiet moments at dusk, staring off into the distance, mesmerized by the particular beauty of fire. How landscapes and people take hold of our lives and change us. How wildfire and fighting fire regenerate. And frantic moments of trying to stay one step ahead: of catastrophe, of personal transformation, of grief. To read Fire in the Heart is to become part of the link in the chain, to find your place on the fire line, to understand more deeply what it means to be a wildlands firefighter, and to keep one foot always in the black.

Cameron Keller Scott, author of The Book of Cold Mountain , winner of the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize

Masterful! A beautiful, gripping exploration of Mary Emericks twenty-five-year journey through the insular, dangerous, hyper-masculine world of wildfire. In riveting prose, Emerick writes of what she gave upand what she gainedby choosing a life as a wildland firefighter. Fire in the Heart is a thoughtful meditation on the impact of wildland fire suppression on the American landscape, and on one womans heart. I love this book!

Mary Pauline Lowry, author of Wildfire: A Novel

A tough and tender tale of human bonds forged through fire. Riveting.

Elizabeth Enslin, author of While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal

Also by Mary Emerick

The Geography of Water: A Novel

(University of Alaska Press, 2015)

Copyright 2017 by Mary Emerick

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Cover photo credit iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-843-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-847-7

Printed in the United States

Table of Contents

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Holding the Line

I had been fighting fire for so long that I was not even sure what day it was. In the last two weeks the days had blurred together in a constant waking dream of smoke and fatigue. Roll out of the sleeping bag, pull on stiff leather boots, grab my pack and tool, dig fireline for sixteen hours, fall into bed, clothes still on. Repeat.

The state of my flame-resistant Nomex shirt might be a clue. I must have been wearing it for at least five days for it to smell this bad. My Kevlar pants were worse, stiffly crusted with spilled saw fuel. I thought I remembered taking a shower two days ago, though my legs were permanently stained black from walking through knee-deep ash.

My long hair was knotted into dreadlocks under my sky-blue hard hat; my lips scabbed from sun and wind. I did not look or feel like a woman anymore. I was not anything substantial, just a constant motion. I only bent with the pulaski in a kind of endless dance. Scrape the duff down to mineral soil. Take another step. Ignore the sweat that trickled down my neck and between my breasts. Shove everything elsehunger, thirst, regret, feardeep beneath, in some other place.

The sound of deep fire coughs echoed down the line. We had all sucked in enough smoke to equal two packs today. There were no masks light enough to wear and still do this job. We did it half-assed instead, pulling bandannas over our noses and mouths. The smoke filtered in anyway. Weeks after I left here I knew that the tightness in my chest would linger.

The rest of the twenty-person fire crew were falling into the usual grooves, the kind that you ground into after a few days on the same fire. At first, everyone had kept their mouths shut and their tools flying, but after a few tough shifts, I could size up the crew pretty well. I knew who the slackers were, and the freelancers, and the good ones. There were those who could save your butt if things went south, and others who would fall apart, lose it, and get burned up.

I couldnt think about that tonight. Instead I kept an eye on the crew, because invariably they were doing something they should not. Look into the green! I yelled down the line. The rookies were making the typical mistake of staring, mesmerized, at the fire itself. It was an impressive sight as it jumped into the tops of black spruce and sizzled in the oven-dry needles. But where we really needed to be looking was in the green, unburnt section, our backs to the fire. This was where spot fires could blossom, caused by unseen sparks tossed across by wind. Firebrands, they were called, and the analysts in camp carefully concocted predictions of ignition in terms of percentages.