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Excerpt

The Armies of Summer
As he rushed to throw his own shelter down, Beisler stole a glance at the fire. He had watched the fire race across grassy hills faster than an antelope could run, and he had seen it thunder up the chaparral canyons of California, eating houses like popcorn. But he was seeing something different now. He looked into a firestorm, a panorama of flame. Down low, sheets of fire danced beyond the trees at the meadow’s edge. Farther up the ridge they whipped above the forest and licked the sky. The smoke column boiled ten thousand feet into the air. The embers and ash blew so fiercely that he lowered his head and squinted his eyes against them. Down the line to the south, a stand of trees was crowned in fire. To the north, like an image in a mirror, a second batch raged. Pillars of fire, to the right and left.

And then, in the second that Beisler watched, the pillars connected and became a wall. As if marinated in gasoline, the trees at meadow’s edge, the last barrier between the hotshots and fire, crowned out in an eighth-mile sheet of flame. Like it was driven by a bellows in a forge, the ground fire had simply lifted, vaulting to the canopy above. It matched nothing in Beisler’s experience. And it roared and seethed now, a giant red-orange picket fence, with flames spiking 150 feet above the treetops and bending before the wind, stretching toward the meadow. The dragon was at the door.

Beisler was in trouble. Along the line of shelters, elbows and knees poked and bumped behind the foil, hands reached out to pull in flaps and tuck down tight. The fire was close now, and waves of heat rolled over him. Near the spot Beisler had chosen for himself, Bates, the recruit from Colorado, stood alone, gloved hands fumbling with his still-folded shelter. Beisler ripped it away, shook it out in the rising wind and handed it back. “Get in! Get in!” he yelled.

Out of time now, Beisler spun to his spot, shaking out his shelter, falling to the ground. As he went down, pulling the shelter over his shoulders like a cape, a sheet of flame rolled out of the trees and swept horizontally over the meadow. The grass at his feet ignited. He pulled the shelter in around him, hurrying, hurrying. He stole a final look at the meadow and took into the tent with him a vision of surrealist hell. Before a backdrop of orange flame, giant maroon and purple balls of unburned gases rolled toward them. They coursed two feet above the meadow, like an armada of great, malevolent, sinuous, airborne steamrollers, seeking oxygen so they could explode into flame, while white vapor streamed off their tops like foam off an ocean curler.

And then the fire was on them.

Reviews

Fire Line is several books: a primer on the science of forest fire management, a history of wildfire combat in America, and an adrenaline-pumped narrative of life on the fire lines.

—Backpacker
 

Thoele has put together a masterful overview, skillfully organizing a vast array of information. Dramatic interludes enliven his facts and figures; thrilling color photographs show vividly in coffee-table splendor the ever-present anger.

—Grants Pass Daily Courier
 

Michael Thoele has written a superb book on the vast wildland firefighting game in the American West. … Fire Line is also a superb gallery of fire photos, both color and black-and-white, by more than fifty outstanding photographers. Many of the pictures are of museum quality.

—Starr Jenkins
Western American Literature

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