On dual-career relationships as a woman in fire.

We firefighters seem to be compelled to share our tenure in the job when introducing ourselves, so I’ll start there. I recently completed my fourth season in the realm of wildland firefighting, but more importantly, just celebrated half a decade with my partner - who is also a wildland firefighter. He’s been at this for five seasons and we had only been together about six months when I followed him to Idaho on a wild hair. It was a grand leap of faith that has fortunately paid off (with dividends!). That first year was make-or-break for us–half of it we were long-distance while he was off fighting fires and I was living alone in a new city right out of college. There were a lot of times I didn’t think we would make it; coming from a tightly knit group of college friends to a new half of the country, and the only person I knew in the whole state lived three and a half hours away without reliable cell service. The loneliness of living in a new place without a support system and seeing my partner at most once a month almost spelled the end for us.

I considered calling it quits and moving back to the Midwest more than once.  

A defining moment came late in the summer when I filled in on a throw-together fire crew and decided then that firefighting seemed infinitely more interesting than setting up timber sales. I shotgunned out my applications that fall and was shocked to get a job offer at the same remote duty station my partner worked out of, but on a different crew. For the two seasons we spent there, it was about as ideal of a living situation as I could have dreamt up: we were neighbors in our government bunkhouses, the toss of a line away from the Salmon River, less than an hour’s drive from four different wilderness areas, on different crews but working in the same office. As an avid outdoorswoman in my early twenties, the word-class access to landscapes like that shaped my idea of what can be possible with two paid days off and a willingness to see how the squiggly dotted lines on a map can add up to an epic mid-week adventure.  

Eventually, we made a joint decision to jump ship from that Forest and I was faced with another inflection point of balancing my desires for my career with maintaining my relationship with my partner. At that time, I wanted to challenge myself in new ways, entertaining the idea of changing it up from life on an engine to proving myself on a handcrew. My partner had already secured a verbal job offer on a crew on a neighboring Forest, so my choice was to either put my career first and pursue a spot on a handcrew that could be hours away from him or put my relationship first and hope that one of the local engines on that Forest had an open spot so we could stay close together. In hindsight, I now know plenty of fire couples who have chosen the first option time and time again, spending their winters together and summers apart. Some of them have kept their relationships strong, some of their relationships have failed, some are somewhere in between. At the time, I didn’t know any other fire couples, let alone successful ones, so I again decided to put my relationship first. Lucky for me, I got a call with a job offer shortly after and ended up working with great people in a place I love but not without its drawbacks.  

Any seasonal worker in a recreation hub will moan about affordable housing, and even given government housing, this place is no different. Private rentals in rural Idaho are essentially non-existent and government housing would force us into barracks either twenty miles away from each other or living with thirteen other people, so it seemed the only viable option was to buy a camper and live at an RV park.  

So that’s what we did.

In the years leading up to this, social media had romanticized “van life,” and this didn’t seem so different. Except it was.

Nobody tells you that the refrigerator in a camper will quit working if it’s too hot in the summer and will also quit working if it’s too cold in the winter. They also don’t mention that if your A/C quits working on a 98 degree day, your camper will be 110 degrees inside when you get home from work. Or that your neighbor whose camper is six and a half feet away from yours will start his diesel truck at 5 am on your first day off in a month and let it run for 20 minutes before leaving for work. But you really couldn’t beat the cheap rent and free electricity. We made it a full calendar year in that thing before scraping together the money to buy a house, deeming the freedom we lost in having a mortgage payment worth it for having a secure and safe place to live.  

This brings me to present, where by many measures all the choices of the last few years have led to success. We’re getting married in a couple months, and I largely attribute that to the choices we’ve both made in setting our relationship as a priority over the last several years of volatile seasonal firefighting. As most firefighters will tell you, kindling a relationship can be a challenge in this job. The long hours and late nights, inconsistent schedules and possibility of being called away for weeks at a time at any given moment of the summer will put a strain on even well-established relationships. Add to that the uncertainty and communication issues that are common in new relationships and it’s a wonder any firefighters ever find success in their love lives. We had the benefit of establishing our relationship before either of us entered fire, forgoing the fraught early stages combined with the stresses this job puts on a home life - but not without our own set of challenges. Being in a dual-fire-career relationship has definite pros and cons, and for now they balance each other out just enough for us both to keep doing this job we love. Some day in the not-too-distant future, however, the scales will tip and we’ll have to face the reality that one or both of us will need to leave this profession if we ever want to even get a dog - let alone start a family together and build a life outside of our work.  

In a job that demands as much as wildland firefighting, it can be validating to have your closest person in life be someone who understands exactly all the intricacies and nuances of your occupation. In fact, in a lot of ways, it makes life easier. We usually have a pretty good understanding of the support the other needs when returning from a fire assignment, there’s always a good stock of frozen meals in the freezer, and there’s no need to explain industry-specific terms when talking about our day. Oh, and we get four months off together in the winter to ski and travel and get to know each other again. On a deeper level, sharing this profession has deepened our relationship through the mutual sacrifices we’ve had to make for this all to work.

Every minute we get to spend together during fire season is precious, which makes us all the more grateful.  

But to praise the silver linings without addressing the giant cloud in front of the sun would give an incomplete view of my story and the sacrifices - both professional and personal - I’ve had to make in order to pursue this career and have a successful relationship with my partner. The most pressing uncertainty in this job is pay. At my level, a paycheck could range from $1,400 to $4,000, depending on whether lightning decides to strike a rock and do nothing or a tree and set a mountainside ablaze. That includes the retention pay incentive scheduled to run out this year, and without a lasting pay reform for wildland firefighters those numbers could decrease by up to a third in the coming season.

The other uncertainty is time. Most summers, I can expect to have at least one stretch of six weeks when my partner and I don’t see each other. We tend to have overlapping fire assignments and it’s lucky to have more than two days off together between June and October. When either of us return from a fire assignment, there’s a need to mentally, emotionally, and physically decompress after being “on” for two weeks or more. The thing I want to do most when I get home is retreat into the woods by myself and run around on a trail all day or find somewhere I can relax and let my head be quiet. If I do have the luxury of my partner also being home on my days off, there’s a desire on both our parts to emotionally engage at a high level. After all, it could be the only time I spend with him all month. It takes a considerable amount of effort to maintain a stable relationship with that degree of separation.  

And, in truth, we are each other’s only stable relationship. The challenge of maintaining friendships outside of the coworkers we see everyday and each other is proving to be insurmountable. My best friend lives 500 miles and a time zone away, and this year I was only able to talk to her on the phone twice over the summer. Multiply that distance by four years and friendships that were once close become distant and strained without significant intervention. Local friends are hard to come by, too. I live in a town of around 500 people and have yet to make a friend here that I don’t also work with. Family comes to visit about once a year and I go back to the Midwest with the same frequency, so we collectively face a pretty severe lack of support system where we live. Add all that up and we can’t even afford the responsibility of having a cat.  

When I think about starting a family, it seems like an impossibility if we’re both doing this job. Given we both want kids, reality will set in a couple years down the road and one, if not both, of us will have to leave primary firefighting permanently to make that happen.

Can you imagine a pregnant lady digging fireline or driving a fire engine to a wildfire? Me neither.

While this profession has avenues for doing a different job in fire-support during medical episodes like injuries and pregnancy, you’re still doing a different job. Compound that with multiple pregnancies and the increased demands of caring for infants and I’m amazed there’s any women in fire with kids at all. Over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of having conversations with a handful of women in fire who have successfully navigated this complication in their career. A couple waited to have kids until they were in supervisory fire positions, a few took breaks from primary fire and spent a few years in either dispatch or fire prevention (both of which can still have very demanding schedules). Only one of those that I’ve met has a partner who is also a primary firefighter, and she waited until her late 30s and is in a fire management position. It’s a fairly small study group. I’ve had far more conversations with women in a similar place in their careers as I am, wondering how they’re going to design their lives and careers in fire around the family they want to have someday. It’s a question I still have myself, and still don’t have a clear answer. The closest I’ve come to an answer that fits the life I want for myself is moving into Fuels Management - a secondary fire position - which would allow me to take part in the fire program without the responsibility and unpredictability of wildfire response. It’s not the same job that I’ve come to love, but it’s the only path I can see forward for myself and the family I want to have someday. Even then, without the support network of family members that live nearby and with the astronomical costs of child care, I still might face severe challenges I can’t yet predict.

As a wildland firefighter, I both enjoy and thrive in my job. It simultaneously pushes me to my known limits and thrills me more than any job I’ve ever had. It’s important, hard work. I applaud all those who have made a career out of it and sacrificed so much for so long because they recognize the importance of it and likely can’t imagine their lives without it. I look to my own future in this profession with nervousness due to the unknown, but mostly excitement because I know someday I’ll be an example another young woman looks to when they’re imagining their own future as a firefighter.