A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West

“Wildfire Days: A Woman, a hotshot crew, and the Burning American West”

From pages 86-90

by: Kelly Ramsey

Day thirteen, a new moon, we drove out in the dark through a ranch with stubbled grass that was colorless under the black, starless sky. We passed a driveway with a gilt sign that read ARABIAN HORSES, and then we were in the fire scar, where the earth was white, the ash like deep snow.

A burned-over horse trailer stood among the shredded trees. I wondered if the owners felt that this was a personal disaster, or if they would see, as I saw, that these tragedies were happening everywhere at once. Nature wasn’t malicious. This was life with fire in California, or—as we joked—the “California Complex,” one fire in which the whole state was burning.

Past the trailer, where the black met green, we parked and geared up. Mac soon called and asked for someone to bump a fiver of burn mix up to his squad.

“I’ll go!” I said quickly.

“Oh ho,” Bao teased. “Little Miss Eager Volunteer.”

He got on the radio: “Mac, you’ll have Kelly coming at ya with that fuel.” (“Copy.”)

I got some vague directions and moved up the dusty road, my body shuffling behind the funnel of light my headlamp cast. I reached the buggies and grabbed the fiver from the fuel bin. Burn mix was blue in our color-coded system, and the plastic lid was painted blue, so I knew that what sloshed inside was the right proportion of diesel and gasoline, and I could smell that, too, the sharp odor almost an aphrodisiac.

I slid my tool through the fiver handle and slung it over my shoulder. Oh GOD was it heavy—not quite as bad as a couple months before, but it still wasn’t easy. The extra forty pounds on the forty-five-pound pack, plus tool, heavy boots—about ninety pounds. The weight pulled on my shoulders and tugged at my waist . . . it was great, just great. I grinned like, I love this! which was the new thing I did in front of the guys to show how easygoing and tough I was. Now I did it even when they weren’t around.

I took the first dozer line on the right, as instructed. The path snaked up the hill, and I climbed, breathing heavily but moving at a decent clip. In either direction I saw nothing but darkness and a veil of smoke. To my left, however, a chainsaw started up with a faint whine. Good lord it was far away. I adjusted the fiver over my shoulder and followed the dozer line, contouring the hill.

The line ended a hundred yards later. Now I was bushwhacking through a series of drainages in the dark: down into a hole, where a creek used to run through the gullet in wetter times, and then up the other side, pulling pitch to a ridge . . . only to find another drainage in front of me.

Great work, girl, I thought. Way to be out in the green in the dark without a radio pulling pitch cross-country when no one knows where you are. Nice job, genius.

Huffing up out of the third or fourth of these drainages, I spied a familiar glow ahead: our burn. The orange of the fire lit the sky from beneath like floodlights on a movie set. Smoke billowed up through the flickering light. The sound of the saws grew louder (was it bap bap baaaaap, or more like brum brrrrrrum, or maybe whop whop-whop whopppppp?). Soon I could hear voices, too.

I barreled into the hole, hit the bottom, and began to hoof up the other side. When I looked up, Benjy stood above me on the ridge, watching me come. Damn, he was a sneaky old goat—always popping out of the green unexpectedly. From below, he had that man-of-the-mountain look again, scraggly hair cascading out of his hard hat, dark eyes failing to conceal amusement.

“Where the fuck’re you comin’ from?”

I laughed. “Oh, you know”—I gasped for breath—“Down there somewhere.” I waved a hand toward the valley below us.

“’Bout fuckin’ time.” Benjy grinned. “How’s that fiver feel?”

“FINE,” I said. “It feels great.”

I covered the last few yards and slung the fiver to the ground.

“Easy.” I laughed. Sweat plastered my face, chest, and back. I breathed heavily.

Benjy laughed, but he cuffed my shoulder affectionately. “Nice work, dude.”

I asked who needed the fiver and loped off to find Mac, secretly beaming.

By the last week of August, we were working a fire called the Cold Springs in northeastern Lassen County, where a valley that had once been a lake gave way to peaks pointed like witches’ hats. The fire had burned about sixty-nine thousand acres of the middle of nowhere.

We went direct on a “little piece” of line that became a much bigger chunk than Fisher had thought. It peeled uphill, then hit a ridge and dropped off the other side, where it snaked and fingered and dove into the hole. Not a hot black edge, though, just creeping.

I had finally gotten the custom Nicks boots I’d ordered early in the season. Walnut rough-out leather, fourteen inches—fully to my knee, since I was shorter—and a double-stacked heel. I was thrilled with the beautiful deep-brown leather and how they hugged my feet, how thick knee-high wool socks slid into the footwell, hand and glove. But I’d made a mistake and checked the box “yes, I am a climber,” so my boots bore a lineman’s patch that covered the big toe knuckle.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” Trevan said when he saw the patch. Other guys pointed and cackled every time they glanced at my feet. I laughed with them, but I was embarrassed. My soles cramped and burned as I broke in the stiff new boots.

We returned to the small-town baseball field where the sprinklers came on in a different place each night. “Nobody better be shitting in that field where we’re sleeping,” Fisher warned as we pulled our PG bags from the overhead bins.

“I shit the other night, on the far side of the fence,” Bao said.

“You can’t do that! If you’re gonna, it had better be an emergency.”

“It was an emergency.”

You could never tell whether Bao was being serious.

Sleep was a perpetual concern and hard-won achievement. The simple bedroll of tarp, pad, and sleeping bag was necessary, because packing up in the morning was a race—we had five minutes from wake-up to be in the trucks fully dressed, boots laced (the most time-consuming part), and you were forbidden to walk around before wake-up time lest you cut short someone else’s rest. The urgency, and my fear of being seen in states of undress, made me so anxious that I always woke ten minutes early to change inside my sleeping bag, where nobody would see my boobs by mistake.

Some people snored (Scotty, Eddie) and some didn’t sleep at all (Luke). We all used sleep supplements: melatonin, or “mellies,” Benadryl, and true sleeping pills. The “bennies” were almost as profligate as Zyns, cans of Copenhagen, instant coffee packets, caffeine pills, and scoops.

“Who’s got bennies?”

“I got bennies and I got mellies, the threes.”

“No six millis?”

“Six, are you crazy?”

“Nah, dude, that’s what it takes. Two sixes.”

That’s what it took. We took what we needed to wake up, stay alert, remain focused on the line. Then we took what we needed to come down again. I popped a melatonin gummy and lay awake for half an hour waiting for it to kick in. We were spread out ten, twenty feet apart in a scatterplot on the field. The tossing and turning fell to grunts and snores, and the stars were faint above the small, smoky town, and at last I slept.

Kelly Ramsey was born in Frankfort, Kentucky. She studied poetry at the University of Virginia and fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She cofounded The Lighthouse Works, an artists’ residency program, and later moved to Northern California, where she worked for the US Forest Service as a trail maintenance worker, wilderness ranger, and wildland firefighter. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Sierra, Electric Literature, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger. She lives in Bishop, California, with her partner and their dog, Rookie.

Purchase Kelly’s book on Amazon here.

Excerpted from Wildfire Days by Kelly Ramsey. Copyright © 2025 by Kelly Ramsey. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.