Tactics for Wildland Firefighting are Tactics for Living

Carrying 45 lbs and my father’s memory.

I look at my watch: 39 minutes and 58 seconds. My body shakes, but it isn’t the 1200 ft of elevation gain over the past .8 miles I’ve just climbed that grips my body after carrying over 50% of my body weight to reach the peak. It’s the recognition of the cumulative journey that brought me here, and the commemorative plaque in front of me bearing a stranger’s name that seems to speak with the ashes I have tucked in my pack.

My father died on July 30th 2019. His death made me feel like I lost my grounding. Then COVID hit, and the rest of the world lost its grounding too. Suddenly, the turmoil inside myself was matched by the turmoil of my surroundings, and I felt free. Free from the burden of pretending things were ordinary and free to realize my way of life without the limitations of pre-conception or societal institutions. I thought, “If I can’t be happy, at least I can make others happy…”

I vowed to tame this goliath of grief feeding on me into a source of power for my pursuits. I traded alcohol, fast food, and mindless scrolling for running, home-made meals, and mindful reflection. How can I continue living without my father? By living to honor the life that I still have, and by grounding in myself.

In 2021, I drove from Connecticut to Northern California. My destination was an unfamiliar town, and my purpose was to fight wildland fires. Looking back, I see now what a literal reaction this choice was to my processing of a major loss. I was fighting fires within myself after my father died, so fighting fires out west represented the ultimate opportunity to feel control, prove my strength, and practice being calm amidst chaos. Wildland fires were a physical representation of the fierce destruction that ripped through me after my father died. At least I could use my outward reality to right my inward reality, right? And yet, I was wrong. I thought I would learn to control, learn to be strong, learn to fight against unpredictability and conquer it. What I learned instead was that working with my reality instead of against it was the only way to truly restore my inner grounding. I learned to trade control for influence, I learned to trade overpowering strength for the strength of trust, and I learned to trade fighting for understanding.

In short, I learned to be a Hotshot, and in learning to be a Hotshot, I learned to be a human who could dig deeper.

I have spent the last four years working as a wildland firefighter, the last three of which on a Type 1 Interagency Hotshot Crew. Spending 3,000+ cumulative hours working on wildland fires, I have learned just as much about the human condition as I have about “fighting fire.” My first lesson? Don’t fight fire.

Suppression - both within wildfire management and within oneself - is only a temporary solution. When my grieving process started, I tried to take my sadness and reframe it, counter it with gratitude, or remind myself of the good. I was positive to a fault, believing I could conquer my negative emotions with a positive perspective. Starve negativity and it will die, right? Yet I found myself growing fatigued and feeling insincere. Suppressing the negative emotions within me only resulted in a constant hum of hunger cues from my starving trauma. Sometimes watching a little girl with her father isn’t an opportunity to be grateful for what I once had; sometimes it’s just a reminder of what I’ve lost; sometimes it’s an opportunity to feel angry, jealous and desperate for what I once had. Feeding that grief with awareness satisfied its hunger and took away its power over me. And how did I learn the value of feeding my grief? I learned to be a student of life, and I learned to harness my trauma.

Wildland firefighting tactics hinge on creating a fuel break. Remove vegetation that will burn, and the fire will have nowhere to burn. However, with modern fire intensities and severities, this simple tactic is not a catch all.

The 1935 Forest Service (FS) “10 AM Policy” required control of every wildfire before 10 AM the day following its onset. While no longer a FS policy, this suppression doctrine permeates wildfire response today. The resulting over accumulation of volatile fuels has created a “fire debt,” which when coupled with hotter and drier climate conditions creates a fire hungry landscape. Thus, modern “mega-fires.” So, what did I learn from becoming a Hotshot, a member of a team of highly trained individuals responding to “mega fires?” I learned to fight fire with fire, and to do so effectively, I learned to be a student of fire.

To help share what I learned these past four years as a wildland firefighter, I went through all the journals I have kept since 2020. Some excerpts are woven throughout my essay to help illustrate my lessons. While I talk about my personal perspective throughout the following examples, I cannot stress enough the important role my crew’s guidance and unconditional support had in my experiences these past three years.

Tactic 1: Be a student

One catch phrase of the wildland fire service is “Be a student of fire,” a phrase so common that when taken for granted its depth of meaning is compromised. But the wisdom of being a student should never be diminished.

Fire is a miraculous expression of solar heating, air pressure, angle of terrain, and forest stand history (to name a few) converging in a single moment to produce an effect. Each moment produces a unique output, and while you can generalize relationships between inputs and outputs, a true firefighter reads and responds to each moment with intuition. When firefighters observe a fire environment we can understand how to respond, adapting to how the fire responds in turn. These observations make up what firefighter’s call “slides”; the amalgamation of an entire career of experiencing – and paying attention within – diverse fire environments. In other words, firefighters feed on Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPD). And being a constant student of fire nurtures a rich bed of experiences to draw from.

Fire itself is outside of our control, but when we learn and listen to its lessons, we can control how to use our tactics in response to fire.

After my Dad died, I found myself in a foreign reality – one without my rock of familiarity, love and acceptance. His death upset my illusion of control. Our modern society promotes schedules, plans, tracking and quantifying, which often lull us into a false sense of security, an illusion of control. Grounding myself in a student/teacher approach to living strengthened my ability to handle things outside of my control. I learned to control my internal responses to an external teacher rather than deluding myself that I could control the external teacher. Do not try to control an externality, accept it, learn from it, and understand how to react. This student/teacher relationship with life demonstrates respect for, recognition of, and receptivity to the unpredictability of our realities.

I think that one of the reasons that wildland firefighting exposes the basic human truths I talk about is because it demonstrates extremes. Of course, we cannot fully explain the good and the bad of how fire acts; we can only understand how to respond to it. And when we become a student, whether of fire or whether of life, we are empowered to learn and respond to any experience, positive or negative.

August 16, 2022: Grateful to witness such extremes – pushing physical limits, maintaining a mental hold, proving ‘sense’ wrong – as in swamping brush 30 feet sidehill on an absurd slope and mule-ing hose hundreds of ft (miles!) down deep to go direct and put in a hose lay in terrain that’s seemingly untraversable by foot (not to mention foot supporting 100 lbs + then swinging tools and keeping a sound mind and a smile).

I think one of the most striking evolutions I experienced in my first year on a Hotshot crew was witnessing what we were capable of. My instinctual assumptions of my personal limits, our tactical limits, and the limits of the environment were obliterated. I learned to be not only a student of fire, but also a student of my physical self, my mental self, my soul, and those around me.

August 18, 2022: Been an interesting experience feeling my body adapt – redefining energy reserves, underlining the difference between tired and fatigue and proving mindset conquers all – when reserved to the circumstances and staying present to the moment. My skin was burning with sweat stoking the oak rash and my thighs and calves SPENT…thought ‘MOM DAD DYLAN MULLIGAN, one name to a step to take me uphill.

Once I released control over what I thought was possible, my possibilities were unlimited. So how to be a student of life? Presence and acceptance. In releasing the control and the limitations of our own assumptions, every moment becomes our teacher. The presence of 20+ other individuals made adopting this mindset possible. Instead of deciding whether to try, we let the result of our effort decide for us how to proceed.

August 17 2023: It was honestly comical. An entire crew putting in a saw cut, followed by an entire crew putting in the dig, followed by an entire crew lighting a backfire. We were running 6 saws and everyone else was swamping. The type of slope you fall down, timber slash that had been overgrown and neglected – the sawyers literally had to cut into the ground – swampers would fall in between jackstraw-ed limbs overgrown by shrubs. And everyone else balancing bundles of swamp back and forth. I started to laugh because I could hardly believe what we were doing as we were doing it. F***ing insane.

Presence, acceptance, and maybe a bit of foolhardy faith. Hotshot-ing taught me to be a student in response to jarring disruptions that exploit our human lack of control over reality. What’s honestly more remarkable is when I applied this student/teacher relationship to nurturing presence and acceptance within my every day experience – jarring or not. For example, running. I learned to listen to my body’s responses in each moment, so I learned how to adapt my pace to meet the nuances of my energy levels. Personal energy levels – like fire – are an instantaneous expression of multiple converging inputs (sleep, prior training, personal stress, food, to name a few). In the end, the more present I became to myself and to my surroundings within my every expression of life, the more I witnessed every moment as unique and miraculous – and became capable of the unique and miraculous.

August 06 2022: Eager to reconnect with my drivers – seeking that balance between presence to the moment and honoring personal desires…dancing with moments as they come and trading off leading – a waltz – between known wants and unknown discoveries.

Tactic 2: Fight fire with fire, or don’t fight it at all

With fire as my teacher, I have learned not to fight against it. The vegetative fuel debt plaguing America is a direct result of fighting fire. So, what if we chose to work with fire instead of against it?

August 19 2022: Post roll (Six Rivers Lighting Complex) was a hotshot two weeks – from IA to IMT, 14 days of hard, valuable, viable work that contributed to containing the least accessible and most problematic areas of the fire. I was present in a way I haven’t accessed since childhood…quelled anxiety yet charged awareness of self, emotions, environment and overall acceptance and peace with the NOW. Yet the product of the work...? I felt this forest wanted to burn more, beyond our containment lines. Should it have?August 29 2022: BACK AT SRF LIGHTNING COMPLEX! Swing shift till midnight…burning, chucking bombs, shooting pistol…wild to see/manipulate fire at night. Reminds me that sometimes when you’re experiencing a personal ‘flare up’ of sorts, sometimes encouraging and participating and fueling the fire works better than fighting/suppressing it.

Modern campaign fires compound so much energy that they create their own weather, have flame heights of 150 ft+, move up to 15 mph, and throw spot fires of up to 12 miles away from the main fire. This is not a force that can be suppressed. This is a force that must be honored and worked with. Suppressing such a force is not only futile, but also disrespectful to our teacher, the natural world. So, in the best case, crews respond with a backfiring operation. Too often, these operations get delayed or discarded, legacies from the 10 AM suppression strategy maintaining a hold on our tactical decisions. Yet when those making tactical decisions stare reality in the face, we can pre-plan burning operations that fight fire with fire.

Fighting fire with fire builds a fireline in favorable topographic conditions away from the main fire. We burn off this line, strategically painting fire on the landscape to create a lower intensity fire closest to the fireline that will be drawn towards the higher intensity energy of the main fire.

If I could add a new standard firefighting order it would be: let fire burn or make fire burn, having provided for safety first.

When my Hotshot crew does a burning operation, it’s usually on a landscape that had historically flourished from a naturally induced fire regime. Wildland fires that you see on the front page of the paper – campaign fires - are a direct result of suppressing what is natural. So, in fighting them, we can balance mission objectives to reduce harm to life and property with acknowledging a historic ecological process that is integral to forest health, and therefore integral to human health. By putting out the fire (standard suppression tactics), we are often indirectly fueling a future fire. Instead, we can manage fires, just as we can manage emotions: face, accept, and encourage when the conditions allow.

In the case of my grief, I had to let it burn. I had to recognize my grief and encourage its consumption through meeting it and feeling it. Emotions want to be felt, so we must periodically allow ourselves to feel them so that they don’t accumulate only to cause a “mega-fire.”

Don’t fight grief. Don’t fight fire. Don’t fight phenomena whose fuel must be consumed to become depleted. And when the fire has burned through, approach your emotional landscape with time and care.

July 20 2022: Hike in, then IN IN, then cold trail, dig, and hike out. Idea of the day: relate digging out a hotspot to acknowledging and unpacking your most trying experiences/emotions – finding underlying heat source (problem) and exposing it, giving it time so to see that it doesn’t become a bigger problem (patience). Mix in cold or wet dirt when needed (love, positivity), break the heat up (find the components of your problem), spread the heat out…or know when to ‘line’ it and instead allow it to burn itself out.

After the flaming front has passed, firefighters mitigate and monitor remaining vegetation as it burns. We learn to feel for heat – cold trail - and smell for burning, then we learn to dig out and expose the source of this heat. I know now that it is just as important for me to handle myself and my energies with care. After an emotional flare up, emotions are less volatile, but still linger, buried betwixt and between my mental and physical landscape. I learned not to be afraid to seek these out, most of their power has been exhausted. And, when visiting a memory, I learned how to handle it with care. I learned when to apply positivity, when to weaken the narrative by reducing it to its parts, and when to simply leave it alone with an awareness that I have done all in my power to ensure it is no longer a threat.

When I worked with the conditions of my reality instead of against them, mutual benefit arose. In fire, if a landscape wants to burn, we should encourage it to burn on our terms – and see the beauty that can result. See that fire, when allowed to burn as it naturally has, can produce manageable intensities and severities. See a burned landscape not as a loss, but as proof of potential for new life. Embrace your own nature and embrace earth’s nature. Fire will have an influence, and emotions will have an influence – accept them both and join in their expression.

Here I arrive at the most important part of this lesson. Fire yields life just as death yields life. Fire is common just as death is common. In choosing to work with death/fire instead of against death/fire, the riches of these raw natural phenomena will follow.

Eulogy For Dad, August 07, 2019: Just as a tree, the elements of my father will cycle. His nutrients - the parts of himself that he gave to everyone sitting here, will be repurposed in each of our own lives. His influence will continue.

When one embraces death, one becomes empowered to learn from its wisdom and share in its energy. When one embraces fire, one becomes empowered to learn from its wisdom and share in its energy.

May 07th 2024: Sometimes its just going to f***ing suck so you might as well learn to see destruction as an opportunity for growth.

And so, my journey as a student of fire and a student of life continues. I fight fire with fire, burn my energies for good, and embrace my humble role in understanding an inexplicable world. I carry on.

July 30th 2024: I look at my bee-stung, bruised arms accented with scabbed/torn skin, with BEAMING LOVE in knowing I have maintained a child’s curiosity and faith in trying.