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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Female Hotshot firefighter brings California mega blazes to life in moving memoir
Fire changes whatever it encounters. Burns it, melts it, sometimes makes it stronger. Once fire tears through a place, nothing is left the same. Kelly Ramsey wasn't thinking of this when she joined the U.S. Forest Service firefighting crew known as the Rowdy River Hotshots — she just thought fighting fires would be a great job. But fire changed her too. In her memoir, 'Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West,' Ramsey takes us through two years of fighting wilderness fires in the mountains of Northern California. She wrote the book before January's deadly Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires, and what she encountered in the summers of 2020 and 2021 was mostly forests burning, not city neighborhoods. But at the time, the fires she and her fellow crewmen fought (and they were all men that first year) were the hottest, fastest, biggest fires California had ever experienced. 'My first real year in fire had been a doozy, not just for me but my beloved California: 4.2 million acres burned,' she writes, in the 'worst season the state had endured in over a hundred years.' That included the state's first gigafire — more than 1 million acres burned in Northern California. The job proved to be the hardest thing she'd ever done, but something about fire compelled her. 'At the sight of a smoke column, most people feel a healthy hitch in their breath and want to run the other way,' she writes. 'But all I wanted to do was run toward the fire.' Ramsey's memoir covers a lot of ground, skillfully. She learns that being in good shape isn't enough — she has to be in incredible shape. She learns how to work with a group of men who are younger, stronger and more experienced than she is, and she figures out how to find that line between never complaining and standing up for herself in the face of inappropriate behavior. She also writes about the changes in her own life during that time: coming to terms with her alcoholic, homeless father; pondering her lousy record for romantic relationships; searching for an independence and peace she had never known. 'It wasn't fire that was hard; it was ordinary life,' she concludes. Sometimes her struggles with ordinary life threaten to take over the narrative, but while they humanize her, they are not the most interesting part of this book. What resonates instead is fire and all that it entails — the burning forest and the hard, mind-numbing work of the Hotshots. They work 14 days on, two days off, all summer and fall, sometimes 24-hour shifts when things are bad. They sleep rough, dig ditches, build firebreaks, set controlled burns, take down dead trees and, in between, experience moments of terrifying danger. Readers of John Vaillant's harrowing 2023 book 'Fire Weather' — an account of the destruction of the Canadian forest town of Fort McMurray — might consider Ramsey's book a companion to the earlier book. 'Wildfire Days' is not as sweeping or scientific; it's more personal and entertaining. It's the other side of the story, the story of the people who fight the blaze. Ramsey's gender is an important part of this book; as a woman, she faces obstacles men do not. It's harder to find a discreet place to relieve herself; she must deal with monthly periods; and, at first, she is the weakest and slowest of the Hotshots. 'Thought you trained this winter,' one of the guys tells her after an arduous training hike leaves her gasping for breath. 'I did,' she said. 'Thinking you shoulda trained a little harder, huh,' he said. But over time she grows stronger, more capable, and more accepted. In the second year, when another woman joins the crew, Ramsey is torn between finally being 'one of the guys' and supporting, in solidarity, a woman — but a woman whose work is substandard and whose attitude is whiny. 'Was I only interested in 'diversity' on the crew if it looked like me?' she asks herself. 'Had I clawed out a place for myself, only to pull up the ladder behind me?' But competence is crucial in this dangerous job, and substandard work can mean deadly accidents. For centuries, natural wildfires burned dead trees and undergrowth in California, keeping huge fires in check. White settlers threw things out of whack. 'The Indigenous people of California were (and still are) expert fire keepers,' Ramsey writes. 'Native burning mimicked and augmented natural fire, keeping the land park like and open.' But in the 20th century, humans suppressed fires and forests became overgrown. 'Cut to today,' she writes. 'Dense forests are primed to burn hotter and faster than ever before.' Ramsey's descriptions of the work and the fires are the strongest parts of the book. 'We could hear the howl — like the roar of a thousand lions, like a fleet of jet engines passing overhead — the sound of fire devouring everything,' Ramsey writes. Later, she drives through a part of the forest that burned the year before to see 'mile upon mile of carbonized trees and denuded earth, a now-familiar scene of extinguished life.' But she also notes that the burned areas are already beginning to green up. 'New life tended to spring from bitterest ash,' she writes. 'The forest wouldn't grow back the same, but it wouldn't stop growing,' she observes earlier. There is a metaphor here. Ramsey's memoir is a moving, sometimes funny story about destruction, change and rebirth, told by a woman tempered by fire. Hertzel's second memoir, 'Ghosts of Fourth Street,' will be published in 2026. She teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia and lives in Minnesota.
Newsweek
4 days ago
- General
- Newsweek
As Fires Get Fiercer, This Firefighter Warns: 'Every Season Feels More Dangerous'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Over the last year, wildfires ravaged the state of California—burning tens of thousands of acres and leaving many residents homeless in the aftermath. To combat high-priority blazes, firefighters from the National Interagency Hotshot Crews are rapidly dispatched to put out the flames. In this Q&A, wildland firefighter and author of Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West (Scribner) Kelly Ramsey details why she wanted to become a firefighter, the challenges of being on a hotshot crew and her concerns about where the next major wildfires might be. Author Kelly Ramsey and book cover for Wildfire Days Author Kelly Ramsey and book cover for Wildfire Days Lindsey Shea Newsweek: What made you want to be a firefighter? Kellly Ramsey: I was working for the forest service as a wilderness ranger and all my roommates were female firefighters on various crews. They seemed just sort of like they came to life in this job. So I started to get curious, and when I went on my first tiny, tiny fire, I was like, "Oh, I get it. I want to try this." Did you come alive like they did? Absolutely. The job was so empowering and so exciting. It was really cool to see this natural occurrence of combustion happening. And to learn how to manipulate and use fire to fight fire. Fire beat me down in many ways, but also brought me to life. What do you like about it most? The intersection between brutal manual labor and the sense you have that you're doing something meaningful. That and the camaraderie. What's different about being on a hotshot crew? All wildland firefighters have an extremely challenging, grueling job, where you're out in the woods and the wilderness for 14 days at a time, doing very hard manual labor in heavy smoke, and sometimes right up against flames. But hotshot crews are assigned to the toughest parts of a fireline, and sometimes have to hike the farthest, or do the most grueling labor, tackle kind of the most dangerous assignment. What were some of the toughest challenges? Physically? Just the hiking. You hike up [gesturing] like a 45-or-more-degree the slope is right in your face. Hiking up something that steep, carrying anywhere from 45 to 70 pounds. I'm an average-sized woman, I would say, and I am not especially athletic, I'm just very stubborn. How did your male teammates respond to having a woman on the crew, and were there surprises? My problem at first was that I think they were afraid to do or say the wrong thing, so they kind of avoided me. I haven't felt that way since I was in 7th grade or something. You know, where you're just like, "Hey guys, I'm here too!" They didn't know quite how to navigate my presence there. How did you overcome it? Being really positive. Maybe almost excessively positive. I would just sort of volunteer to carry whatever was heavy, anything they asked. And just trying to engage them. Sometimes in a culture that's mostly men, there's a lot of, like, jokes and talking trash. But I would sort of be like, "So, what's your family like? Do you like to read?" But then I also [tried to] tell the jokes and talk the trash, and that took me a little while, because that's not a way that women are usually conditioned. One really positive surprise was that a number of the men on my crew were really good advocates. They would give me assignments and mentor me. And there were a number of times that something a little bit—like, harassment or exclusion or something just incredibly awkward—would happen with one guy, and my supervisor would say, "Hey, that's not cool." To have him, as somebody really respected, to draw that set the example for the other guys, and that changed the tenor of the entire experience. Sometime around September 1, 2020 on the W-5 Cold Springs Fire outside Eagleville, CA. And that's just half the crew, i.e., my buggy (B-mod, or Bravo). Sometime around September 1, 2020 on the W-5 Cold Springs Fire outside Eagleville, CA. And that's just half the crew, i.e., my buggy (B-mod, or Bravo). Christopher Cameron How has fire changed? What are its main drivers? Fire behavior is wilder, as everybody saw with what happened in Los Angeles this winter. Fires can now enter urban areas pretty easily, areas we wouldn't think would burn in a so-called wildfire. It's really like anything could happen at any time. I think there's quite a few drivers of that. Climate change is obviously one of the big ones. But there's also a history of mismanagement of our forests. We started suppressing wildfires about 100 years ago and putting out every fire that started. How can we fix that? One of the best ways to try to prevent catastrophic wildfire is with prescribed fire and Indigenous cultural burning. Essentially, you reduce the amount of vegetation so that when a wildfire does start, it won't burn as hot or as quickly. Do you think that's one of the reasons for the L.A. fire? Honestly, it's hard to pin down any one factor, but I would say the 100-mph winds are probably the factor. And what's so scary and disheartening is that you can't do anything about that. What is it like fighting a fire in those conditions? When you have a historic wind event, fighting fire becomes very different. Normally we would put ourselves out in front of the flames. But when you have really high winds, you don't have time. So you cannot get in front of the flames. You would literally just be throwing away your life. A lot of times, you have to just sort of back off from it, find a new perimeter and burn off that new perimeter as sort of a protective catcher's mitt for when the fire does come. Looking ahead, is there a particular region you're especially concerned about for the next major wildfire? I'm always concerned about California. But I lived in Texas for a long time, and I am concerned about central Texas, the Austin area. It's been identified in some recent study as the most likely urban area to be affected by wildfire after the cities in California. That really scares me. A fire hitting a place like Austin, which I love so much, we could see the same kind of devastation that we saw in Los Angeles, because this isn't a place that's really prepared for that kind of fire behavior. Now that you're no longer fighting fires, do you miss it? All the time. I never knew how much I would love that just brutal, grueling work. I miss that. And then I miss the guys.
