I said, “He must be as old as I am or older, so he can’t be very tough.”
But Laird said, “Just the same, better let me call him. I can tell him he owes it to the Forest Service to explain these documents, and you can’t make that argument.”
“Okay,” I said, “but first I’ll write him. And I’ll put it on the barrel-head to him. I’d rather be turned down in the open than sneak up on him with a smile on my face.”
A few weeks later, we made a little outline of what our strategy would be for our meeting with him. Even if he agreed to see us, he probably wouldn’t give us much time, so we decided to concentrate entirely on Jansson’s letter and its main charges—that Jansson had been persuaded to alter his testimony concerning the time of the tragedy and that evidence had been suppressed to make a likely time seem as if it were the only possible one. I told Laird, “I have to be most interested in finding out what happened. But if it turns out the charges are true, I’d be equally interested in the follow-up question, Why to some people was it so important that the deaths of the crew appeared to happen closer to 6:00 than to 5:30 that they were willing to hide evidence suggesting any other possibility?” I asked him, “You think about it, will you? Would the Forest Service have looked like a better firefighting outfit if its crew had died roughly twenty minutes after it actually did?”
“No,” he said, “I’ve already thought about it. It doesn’t make any sense, even if all they were trying to do was to get all their witnesses to agree, because all their witnesses don’t have to agree in a situation like this to make sense. Dodge, for instance, was at the head of the gulch closer than a hundred yards to the nearest of those who died. Jansson at the disputed time of the tragedy was probably returning from Mann Gulch in the Padbury boat. That’s a lot of difference in perspective and a built-in situation to allow difference of opinion.”
I told him, “Maybe our trouble is we think they thought the difference was important. Maybe we suffer from the belief that the game of cover-up is played only when there is something bad to cover up and only when big boys play it. But for a lot of guys besides Nixon it was a fun game, and all sizes, shapes, and sexes are eligible to play it.
“And don’t kid yourself,” I said by way of conclusion. “It is a game that can be played by woodsmen. There are plenty of big bastards who come out of the woods to become little administrators and little bastards—the woods provide no exception to original sin.”
Laird always tried to look as if he hadn’t heard any such remarks of mine, and I tried to look as if I hadn’t made them. He said, “We’ve waited long enough to hear from Flathead Lake. I’ll call his place this afternoon.”
Late that afternoon, I dropped in to see Laird again before driving back to my cabin at Seeley Lake. Laird announced, “It’s good and it’s not so good. He agreed to see us, but briefly, very briefly. What I especially don’t like is that he seemed old and not to understand very well what I had to say.” I didn’t like that either, so before I left his office we talked things over again and further shortened and simplified the questions we were going to ask him.
I met Laird at Arlee, agency of the Flathead Indian Reservation. He came up from Missoula on highway 93 and I came in a direct line from Seeley Lake on a dirt road that at its peril crosses the Mission Mountains high above the Jocko Lakes, where it almost falls into the lakes and the reflections of white glaciers still higher fall all day into the lakes. At the end of the lakes is a black canyon so buried in its steepness and shade that its gathering, unseen waters are present only as vapor rising to the tops of the cliffs where the vapor becomes visible as drops of sunshine. Then the unseen gathers noise and multiplies into a roar on its way to the Flathead Valley. Finally the roar comes into sight almost as a waterfall and, once seen, it continues as beauty.
From the mouth of the black canyon it looks as if the whole Flathead Valley had been washed out of it. It spreads like a delta of detritus, ever widening and lowering itself into golden farms.
If fertility counts as beauty, the Flathead Valley is one of the most beautiful agricultural mountain valleys in Montana, maybe anywhere. The fields, although by now all harvested, were still gold and rich enough to be used as pastureland. The cattle had been brought down from the summer grass and shade of the mountains and turned out on the harvested fields in numbers that would have overgrazed them except that the fields had been irrigated all summer from ditches starting at the edges of glaciers, so everywhere everything had followed the biblical precept to increase and multiply.
We saw little of Flathead Lake until we were almost at Cramer’s cottage, because the road on the west side of the lake only occasionally gets close to it. But what we saw wasn’t much like my memories of over half a century ago when my family was thinking of building a summer home there. In Montana, they say it’s the biggest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, and big it is. But even so, it’s hard to see because of the number of summer homes on its shoreline, and I was glad we hadn’t built on it. We had a hard time finding the Cramer cottage among all the mailboxes lining the side road, but Laird led the way, regarding Cramer as his man. Finally he selected one red cottage out of many red cottages that look much like the mailboxes, went in, and came out with Cramer half stumbling in the lead. Age had probably shriveled him a bit, but he was still big. And it was clear he intended to keep his promise and be brief. He threw himself into a porch chair next to mine and without any introduction said to me, suspecting I was the bloodhound on the trail, “I don’t know much of anything about the Mann Gulch fire. I was on another fire at the time, on a fire way up near Canada. You shouldn’t bother me—you should see my oldest son, Albert. He was a Smokejumper, and he knows a lot more than I do.”
Laird said, “I know your son Albert. He and I were on a couple of fires together.”
Cramer was glad to look away from me, and Laird talked with him about his son and tried to loosen him up. Cramer was the remnants of a powerful man and was very tense, sure he was threatened but no longer sure by what. He was relieved to be talking to Laird about his son, but only for a moment or two, when, out of nowhere in his conversation with the former foreman of the Smokejumpers, he let me know he was thinking of me all the time by saying to me from the back of his head, “I don’t know anything about the Mann Gulch fire. I was almost in Canada then.” That was supposed to sound a long way off, but in northern Montana it isn’t.
Having not turned around to say this, he went right on talking about Smokejumpers with Laird. I really hadn’t said a word yet, not wanting to seem to crowd him, so I let him tell me twice more without looking at me that he had been almost in Canada at the time of the Mann Gulch fire before I said to the back of his head, “We didn’t want to talk to you about the Mann Gulch fire; we wanted to talk to you about what happened afterwards.”
He had started with the assumption that, if he could prove he had not fought the Mann Gulch fire, he had proved he could not have done anything wrong about it.
When he lost touch with this assumption, he stopped talking to Laird. “I don’t know,” he said to neither of us. Then he added, “I don’t remember well anymore. I had an operation.”
In retrospect, I would say that he was afraid of both me and himself, found both of us obscure, and hoped his wife would come soon and save him from me. Knowing I had time to ask only a few questions, I asked him, “Do you remember two survivors of the Mann Gulch fire, Rumsey and Sallee?” His fright visibly increased, but he might not have known why. He said, “No, I don’t remember anybody like that.” I asked him, “Do you remember the foreman on the Mann Gulch fire, Wag Dodge?” Visibly he was more frightened. “No,” he said, “I don’t remember well.” I could not be sure his fright came from remembering these old names or from not remembering them and probably from not remembering a lot of other things. “Do you remember the ranger at Canyon Ferry, Bob Jansson, and staying at his ranger station until he agreed to change his original testimony about the time t
he tragedy happened at Mann Gulch?”
He looked at Laird, as if for help, and then back at me.
“Look,” he said, “this has to be brief. I don’t know anything about the Mann Gulch fire. I was on another fire near the Canada line at the time.”
There was such a long pause that it had to be taken as an injunction to leave. Then Mrs. Cramer, who had been shopping, drove up, got out of her car, and walked around to the front of my car to see its license plate. When she saw it was an Illinois license, she hurried up the steps of the porch, introduced herself, and sat down next to Laird, probably because I looked as if I could come from Illinois and Laird didn’t. She must have been deeply distressed to be caught away from home, leaving her husband unprotected from an out-of-state intruder. At first she just listened, probably trying to tell from the conversation whether we had induced her husband in her absence to say something harmful to himself. After she came to the conclusion that all the talk had been about Smoke-jumpers and a fire which was almost in Canada at the time of the Mann Gulch fire, she relaxed and chatted with Laird, only occasionally but skillfully protecting her husband. Her protective skill came from not making too big a thing of protecting him and from being open and matter-of-fact about things that were almost the things we wanted to know.
I heard her turn and say to Laird after she heard her husband give one of his “I-was-on-a-fire-near-Canada” speeches, “But he was an investigator of the Mann Gulch fire,” and she didn’t hasten to explain that admission away. She waited until another opportunity came harmlessly along to say to Laird, “He just doesn’t remember very well anymore.” She went on to tell Laird that her husband had had “brain trouble” and now was on medication and, as she said, didn’t remember very well. Laird saw that I had heard this, as I probably was supposed to, so we would both know that the time had come for us to leave.
A flight of Canadian geese circled and lit on the water right in front of the Cramer cottage. Undoubtedly they had come from the Nine-Pipe Reservoir, a wild-bird preserve not far from the lake. The geese alternated stateliness with foolishness, then combined the two. They were stately as they circled above and as they carved the water apart for a landing and even as they stood up in their waves and slapped the water out of their wings. Then they settled back in their troughs and, just when you would expect them to reestablish the serenity of aerial motion, they broke into an anvil chorus of nonsense sounds. All of them made nonsense noise all at the same time. They headed straight for the shore and the Cramer cottage, occasionally turning to impress us with their white, majestic rear ends and then turning straight for shore again and becoming louder and more nonsensical the closer they drew. Soon the nonsense became strident and demanding and directed personally at us. I must have shown my surprise by looking at Mrs. Cramer as if for some explanation, because she said in the only remark I can remember she made to me, “He feeds the geese regularly.”
“I can believe it,” I replied, and soon after that we left, having overstayed our welcome by a wide margin. Even the geese seemed relieved—anyway they quieted down as we left. Cramer had gone down to the shore and was feeding them. With them and him together, the near-hysteria drained out of the scene. Soon they were talking peacefully to each other in gobbledygook.
By the time we reached Arlee the evening had drained the burnish out of the farmland but not the gold. Night was coming fast into the valley.
I said to Laird, “Thanks for the day. It’s been a long time since I was in the Flathead Valley.”
Like one of those youngsters who wants everything good to happen to his older friend, Laird assumed it was his fault that we hadn’t found anything, but I was the one who had started us on this mission so I had to stop him from apologizing. “What are you talking about?” I asked him. “It was a good day.”
“What was good about it?” he asked, but added, “I’ll never forget the geese.”
“I won’t either,” I told him. “Scholarship doesn’t always end finding a wooden cross hidden in grass.”
Laird and I had prepared for the worst before we went to see Cramer. We had agreed, in fact in some detail, on what we would take to be the time of the Mann Gulch fire if Cramer was not helpful in resolving the differences about it, but it took us several days to recall the full particulars of our agreements and a lunch together to put the pieces in a new kind of order.
We had agreed first that, as far as we knew, Cramer was the last living witness who might throw new light on the credibility of the evidence regarding the time of the deaths of the crew. So if, for whatever reason, he had nothing to add, we would have to make a practical choice between the testimony of Jansson on the one hand and, on the other, the testimony of Dodge and the evidence of Harrison’s watch. Such a choice has to be in favor of the evidence closest to the scene of death, not of the witness who had retreated to the river and was probably on a boat going upriver during the disputed time. Moreover, Dodge’s testimony meshes much better than Jansson’s with times assigned by Rumsey and Sallee to events in the gulch.
The practical choice of 5:56 as the approximate time of the death of Harrison, however, does not set aside the charge that Jansson was persuaded under pressure to alter his original testimony about the time of the climax of the tragedy. It also does not pass over his implied charge that members of the Regional Office had tried to create the false impression with the public that the “established time” was based on the only watch found on any of the dead crew. It is unthinkable Jansson would make such a charge falsely. If he had, it is even more unthinkable that he would have finished his life in the Forest Service. Jansson and Dodge were both fine men and fine woodsmen. Remember, too, that the Forest Service is a bureaucracy, the largest in the Department of Agriculture. That certainly makes it more than large enough for little games.
So, actually before we started for Flathead Lake, we had completed the practical job of filling in the old-fashioned formula of distance divided by time equals miles per hour to get the average speed of the Smokejumpers in their race with fire. It was filled in as follows:
The distance of the race we had long ago determined as accurately as we could. It was a slant distance of 1,400 yards from Y, where the race started, to the representative cross G, which in these calculations has been taken to mark the tragic climax. As for the missing time, we did what you have to do when you finally admit that you can never be sure of the truth—you force your pride to view the spectacle of your doing the best you can, even though that doesn’t leave you looking very good to the geese or to yourself. The start of the race at Y, as best we know, was at 5:40. As best we know, the end was at 5:56. So for most of the crew the race was over in sixteen minutes, and, alas, that can be wrong by only a few minutes.
When 1,400 yards is divided by sixteen minutes and the result is changed from yards to miles, old-fashioned arithmetic says that the representative speed of the crew on its journey to the crosses was three miles per hour. The d divided by t and changed to miles says that Thol, whose cross is closest to the top and who traveled farthest and presumably the fastest of the crew, averaged 3.3 miles per hour—and that Sylvia, who by such calculations was among the slowest, averaged 2.5 miles per hour.
I had been somewhat surprised by these results, but Laird said he wasn’t—he said they were just about what he expected. “Every guy you add to a crew,” he said, “the slower you make it. After a while it scarcely moves, especially if they haven’t fought fire together before.” He stood there, looking back through years of smoke. Finally, in awe of the earth, he said, “A crew carrying thirty-five-pound packs in rough country will average about one mile an hour.”
We talked a little about differences in the personalities of Dodge and Jansson that might account for some of the differences between them concerning the time of the catastrophe and for Jansson’s charge that Dodge had changed the time seemingly agreed upon by the two of them while the fire was still burning. We were a little embarrassed by our own talk
and perhaps a little embarrassed by our embarrassment. We had never known Dodge or Jansson and were certainly embarrassed to be talking behind the backs of two members of the exclusive club of fine woodsmen who could not answer for themselves.
In any event, we knew after our trip to see Mr. Cramer that we had done our best, which means that we couldn’t think of anything else to do, straight ahead being a dead-end.
Trying to get another start, I circled back to general resolutions I had made to myself about getting old. I kept returning to my seventieth birthday, seventy seemingly being what man has been given as his biblical allotment on earth. I sat in my study making clear to myself, possibly even with gestures, my homespun anti-shuffleboard philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead. I wanted this possible extension of life to be hard as always, but also new, something not done before, like writing stories. That would be sure to be hard, and to make stories fresh I would have to find a new way of looking at things I had known nearly all my life, such as scholarship and the woods. If you think vividly enough about your general resolutions, sometimes your conscience will furnish the particulars to exemplify them, and I became conscious again of the strange fact that on my many trips to the Smokejumper base I hadn’t done much more than look inside the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, which is next door. I had dropped in several times to see the painting of Harry Gisborne hanging in the stairwell. He always gives me the feeling that he would take a chance on trying something new, even if it didn’t work, and that he is giving me the once over to see if I feel the same way. The only other thing I knew about the Fire Lab was that a project was going on there that used mathematical models of fuels to predict the danger of wildfires and the rate of their spread. The old-timers in the Forest Service I had talked to didn’t think much of this scientific project but didn’t know much about it and were a little nervous, so much so they certainly weren’t going to learn more than they already knew about what made them nervous. The young guys I knew in the Forest Service also didn’t know much about it but thought it was great. I said to myself, “You had better be your age and learn something about it.” I thought a fresh, new way of analyzing fire spread, among other things, might save me from feeding geese, and, knowing both Laird’s and my mathematical deficiencies, I was sure that at least it would be hard. And it was.