Firefighting Is Key Image Of The West

When you think of the West, various images come to mind.

Cowpunchers for one. Conestoga wagons for another.

But Mike Thoele believes that the ultimate Western symbol should be something that doesn’t ordinarily come to mind: It involves men and women valiantly fighting fire.

“By my calculation, it runs somewhere to about a million people in the West have done this,” Thoele says. “And that means that more people over the history of the West have fought fires than have ever punched cows or driven covered wagons. And yet we’ve never paid much attention to them as a group, as a subculture or as part of the Western experience.”

Thoele (pronounced Tay-Lee) is the author of “Fire Line: Summer Battles of the West” (Fulcrum Publishing, 170 pages, $34.95), an exhaustive look at the men and women who annually wage war on the wild fires that threaten the western states. He will read from his book during a slide show at 7 p.m. Friday at BookPeople in Moscow.

War comparisons are overused, of course. We talk of fighting traffic, of battling the taxman, of combatting garden pests. But in the case of firefighting, the comparison is apt.

For example, take how Thoele - formerly a 20-year roving reporter for the Register-Guard of Eugene, Ore. - got interested in wildlands firefighting in the first place.

It began in 1987, he explains, when southern Oregon and northern California were hit by huge fires. “And despite having been at the Guard all those years, I had never been to a really big forest fire.”

So while driving south on Interstate 5, he was amazed to see what amounted to an army moving into action. “There’s fire burning down to the edge of the freeway at Canyonville,” he says. “All of this equipment and manpower was moving down the freeway, bulldozers on lowboys and buses and trucks filled with firefighters. And it was just like you were driving deeper and deeper into a war zone.”

His first fire camp was even more intriguing, resembling, he says, “a combination Arab bazaar, D-Day beachhead and class reunion going on all at once. … It was just an incredible scene, and I came away so curious about it.”

After doing research and working out the details of how to publish his book, Thoele quit his day job when his publisher wouldn’t allow him longer than a three-month leave of absence. Funded by a grant from the World Forestry Center in Portland, Thoele became a full-time author.

Now at work on a second grantfunded book, a history of the Bohemia Mining Co., Thoele isn’t looking back. He’s just happy that he was able to tell the story of a group that he feels hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

“The literature of forest fire fills a very, very short shelf,” he says. “Most of the stuff written has been about one fire or one episode. No one has ever taken a peopleoriented look at this subculture, at this world.”

He does, telling the individual stories of the individuals who fight fires on the ground, from the air and everywhere in between. A seasoned journalist, Thoele writes with authority and passion - whether he’s telling the stories of a crew surviving despite having flames sweep over it or a pilot blowing through the top of a smokeshrouded pine tree and, with his windshield shattered, still pulling out of the power dive.

Of course, by now Thoele has a personal involvement. His daughter, Tiffan, 26, and son, Caleb, 23, are both seasonal firefighters. Tiffan, in fact, recently qualified as a smoke jumper, “which,” Thoele says, “fewer than 40 women in the history of the planet have ever done.”

He also knew four of the 14 firefighters who were killed last summer in Colorado. He’d interviewed three of them, and the fourth was his son’s college roommate.

All of which explains the emotions he brings to the subject.

“I like to call these people America’s version of the French Foreign Legion,” Thoele says. “What they do is largely anonymous, and they do it in faraway places. And we, the general public, mostly don’t pay attention except when 14 of them die on a mountain in Colorado or when a thousand homes go up in Malibu.

“If I have shed a little light on that subculture and given it some of the attention that it deserves,” he adds, “then I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo