Father recalls firefighting son killed in California
Scott Charlson, of Oregon, took job to help pay for his last term in college
GRANTS PASS, Ore. – After his first two weeks on the job as a wildland firefighter, Scott Charlson’s feet were covered with blisters, and he was about ready to look for another way to pay for his last term in college.
“Then he just grew up and decided, ‘I can do this. Other people can do this. I’m not a quitter,’ ” his father, Rick Charlson, said Friday. “So he stuck it out. I think now, towards the end, it’s just what you do. He was very responsible.”
Scott Charlson, 25, was one of nine people killed Tuesday when a helicopter crashed shortly after taking off with a load of firefighters heading back to camp in Northern California.
Seven of the dead, including Charlson, and three of the injured were firefighters with Grayback Forestry Inc. The crew was fighting a forest fire on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest outside Redding, Calif.
Grayback President Mike Wheelock returned to the crew’s White City headquarters Friday to talk to some of the more than 140 surviving firefighters with the company he founded in 1979 after getting injured as a smokejumper.
“I told them it’s OK … that we all go through these things differently, we handle them differently,” Wheelock said. “Some are angry. Some may be sad and break down. And some may not feel anything, may be numb, going through post-traumatic syndrome.
“Whatever they (do) it’s OK. It’s OK to talk. It’s OK to cry. It’s OK to be angry. But talk to somebody.”
Wheelock praised his crews as “brave, safe, hardworking and professional.”
“I’m proud of these firefighters,” he said.
Wheelock also identified the seventh of Grayback’s firefighters to die in the crash as Stephen Caleb Renno, 21, of Cave Junction, Ore., whose parents had been away and were just notified of his death.
Wheelock said it was painful to tell the survivors about the deaths of their fellow firefighters.
“You can see in their faces and demeanor they lost their family member, no different” he said. “These firefighters spend two weeks on assignments together. They sleep, they eat, they do everything together. They tell their stories. They laugh, they get mad together, they’re in harm’s way together. Just like people in the Army. They’re in a war out there.”
Scott Charlson had talked to his parents in Eugene the morning he climbed into a helicopter and flew out for what proved to be four days of hard work defending a fire line in the wilderness.
“We talked every night,” said Rick Charlson, a salesman for a fertilizer and irrigation store. “The morning he left he called at 7:05 or so in the morning. He said what was going to happen. He was excited. He’d never been in a helicopter before. So he was really looking forward too that.
“We said all our ‘I love you’s’ – that was the end of every conversation.
“He enjoyed being in the woods, looking at stuff that was growing, wildlife, panoramas,” the father said. “He didn’t talk very much about things like that. He was really very private.”