Did Norman Maclean’s ‘Young Men and Fire’ tell the wrong story?

[Correction: I mistakenly wrote that Schulz said the Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1905. She wrote that they kept a plane aloft for 39 minutes that year.–PR]

If you haven’t read Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, download it today.

Published posthumously in 1992, Young Men and Fire succeeds brilliantly at three things: It is one of the finest pieces of nature writing in American literature; it is a deeply sympathetic portrait of the young firefighters who parachute into forest fires–the smokejumpers; and it is an exemplary piece of investigative journalism.

But is it correct? Could Maclean have missed what was right in front of him?  In an article in New York magazine, Kathryn Schulz writes that Maclean “tragically…told the wrong story.”

It’s a serious charge against a great work of literature, and a heavy burden of proof rests on Schulz.

In his book, Maclean came as close as anyone to understanding and explaining exactly what happens in the seconds and fractions of a second when people facing a natural tragedy–in this case, a forest fire–decide to which way to run, or whether to run at all.

It is one of the books I’d want with me on a desert island, along with Maclean’s other, equally magnificent work, A River Runs Through It. (I can’t think of any other author who would make my desert-island cut with more than one book.) Maclean was an English professor at the University of Chicago where, he recounted, he would probe deeply into what he considered the greatest works of literature:

Shakespeare he must have known more about writing than anybody else ever did. Every year I said to myself, ‘You better teach this bastard so you don’t forget what great writing is like.’ I taught him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I’d spend the first day on just the line, “Who’s there?”

That career served him well when he retired in 1973 and turned to doing some writing of his own, producing River and leaving Young Men unfinished–but well enough along–when he died in 1990. As a young man, Maclean had worked in logging camps and for the U.S. Forest Service in Montana before turning to an academic career. Much of his inspiration comes from those days amid the big trees.

Young Men and Fire tells the story of the Mann Gulch fire, which burned in a remote part of Montana above the Missouri River in 1949, claiming the lives of 13 of the 15 smokejumpers who dropped in to fight it. How they died–and how two survived–was something of a mystery until Maclean began to investigate.

It’s hard to write about Maclean without feeling the pull of his prose, its precision and its beauty. I’m feeling it myself, even in this short post. It’s hard to read Maclean and then escape from his shadow; he wrote so well. Maybe Shakespeare knew more about writing than anybody else, but Maclean came damn close, and if he’d started earlier and continued longer he might have come even closer.

Here, after describing the preparations for a jump, he writes about the moment when the Smokejumpers leave the plane:

The attention the jumper has to pay to the elaborate and studied ritual of jumping helps to keep his fears manageable. He stands by the spotter lying on the left of the door, who holds the jumper by the left foot. The next signs are by touch and nob by word–the whole flight is made with the door open, unless it is going to be a very long one, so words can’t be trusted in the roar of the wind. Using the sill of the open door as a gunsight, the spotter waits for the landing area to appear in it and next allows for the wind drift. The spotter then says “Go,” or something like that, but the jumper doesn’t step into the sky until he feels the tap on the calf of his left leg, and in his dreams he remembers the tap…

 And when the Smokejumper jumps:

Nearly every jumper fears this moment. If he continues to miss sleep because of it, he doesn’t tell anybody but he quits the Smokejumpers and joins up with something like the crew that makes trails. Whatever he tries, it is something close to the ground, and he never tries jumping again because it makes him vomit.

It’s clear that Schulz, who reviews books for New York magazine, also feels Maclean’s pull as she writes. If you can’t write well, his work seems to say, don’t write anything at all.

Schulz does a respectable job in her piece, entitled “The Story That Tore Through the Trees.” She begins this way:

It is famous for fire, but you get there by water, six miles down a stretch of the Missouri that ran fast until it was dammed a hundred years back and 20 more miles downstream. Now it runs slow, and the limestone cliffs that line it double their height in its quiet surface. Wherever they offer a foothold, a fir or pine has found it. The sky is so clear it looks like a mind that has never once thought about clouds. Everywhere you turn, the world is blue, granite, and green, the national flag of the wilderness on good behavior.

That’s nice. But because we’re honoring Maclean here–whether or not Schulz makes the case that he got his story wrong–we should give that opening a close reading. I like the contrast between fire and the stilled river, the description of the cliffs and the determined trees that have seized every foothold. The sky looks like a mind? That doesn’t work for me. The rest of the paragraph uses vivid visual details. Limestone cliffs. Nearly still water. Reflections. Trees. Blue, granite, and green. But comparing the sky to a mind? That doesn’t give me an image.

“The world is stitched together along strange seams,” she writes, before noting that the Wright brothers “got a flying machine aloft and kept it there for 39 minutes” in 1905, the same year Teddy Roosevelt signed the law that created the U.S. Forest Service. I had to pause for a moment before I grasped the link–flight and fire–but I like the line.

She then goes on at considerable length to retell Maclean’s story, adding a bit of reporting of her own from her visit there. That marks the first third of her piece. With that out of the way, she pauses to tell us more about Maclean and the influence of his book, which, she writes, “burned a hole in the fire community.” Nice. “I call it a disturbance in the force,” one expert on forest fires tells here. (Schulz’s metaphor was far better.)

In the final third of the piece, she begins to make her case–that Maclean told the wrong story. “To start a fire, you need three things,” she writes–“oxygen, fuel, and enough heat to initiate a chemical reaction between them. On Earth, we have had sufficient oxygen in our atmosphere to sustain fire for about 420 million years.”

A planet that burns that long is “a planet of burn-adapted species. Today the Earth is rife with organisms that can survive wildfires, and organisms that need wildfires in order to survive.” She argues that Maclean’s story of heroic fire-fighting overlooks this idea: that fire plays a natural part in the growth and health of forests. If a forest is so remote that the only entry is by parachute, why, Schulz wonders, are we fighting the fire? It’s good for the forest, and it doesn’t threaten anything reachable by road.

The recognition that we shouldn’t suppress fire is an important observation, but one that will not come as much of a surprise to readers with an interest in ecology or the environment–or to anyone reading the news this week about wildfires in California and Oregon. For decades, officials struggled to prevent forest fires, only to discover what is now a rather obvious consequence: When fires are squelched, forests change, building up excessive amounts of fuel that eventually combust in wilder, hotter, bigger fires that can be exceedingly difficult to contain. 

Schulz recounts the history of fire fighting, going back to the 1880s and John Wesley Powell, who “contended that fires did not destroy forests but sustained them.” The Forest Service took a century to learn that lesson before changing its policies, she writes.

Not until the last column does she begin to circle back to Maclean, and not until the very last paragraph does she indict him:

Young Men and Fire is a true story, but it is also, in every sense, a myth. Its hero arrives from the sky, like a god, to master air and fire and earth. He pays a terrible toll but, through ingenuity, cheats death. It is a beautiful book, and I still love it very much. To love a book is to acknowledge the power of stories to move us; but we should also acknowledge that not every story moves us in the right direction. “At the end,” Maclean wrote at the end, “our point of view of the fire changes radically.” I hope it does. Otherwise, we will remain locked in a war that, as we now know, we lose even when we win.

That is a very nice conclusion to a very nice piece of writing. But Schulz fails to make her case. She worries that Maclean’s myth will undermine efforts to accept fire, not to suppress it. I don’t think so. If Maclean’s story pushes us anywhere, it pushes us toward reflection on our history.

Maclean was fully aware that he was writing mythology, not an indictment of the Forest Service. The story he wrote is about the mythology of the American west, brilliantly updated and supported by the story of 13 young men who died while living that American dream. Maclean does not argue for the suppression of fire, but instead tells us a story of the frontier that shaped America. Some young men still jump into forest fires, or walk in, and some young men face the smoke and fire of war thousands of miles away. Many of them comfort themselves with the idea that America is worth defending, and that the job will always fall to courageous young men–and increasingly to young women. Maclean’s myth-making has tenderly and beautifully preserved that ideal for all of us.

-Paul Raeburn