Field Dispatch: Missouri Dept. of Conservation— Ozarks Region

Earlier in the month, our Outreach Coordinator JP joined a team for a project with the Missouri Department of Conservation focused on wildland fire in the Ozarks, as well as taking the Forest Service’s Work Capacity Test (“Pack Test”). Below are his daily field dispatches giving a snapshot of life on project.

ACSTL Member ignite on a stretch of the prescribed burn unit at Peck Ranch Conservation Area.

Monday

Grant with one of our drip torches.

My field week promises to be another memorable one: ten of us are embarking for four days in Eminence, a small Missouri Ozarks town and recent hotspot for fires both prescribed and wild. One of our team leads, Emily, can attest: her team fought no less than three wildfires when they were posted there last month. Still, fire season is winding down early this year due to unseasonable winter warmth, and this may be one of our last chances to burn.

Our double team assembles at HQ at 7am, reeling from daylight savings time springing us forward. Allen and Emily are leading us this week and brief us on the day ahead. Someone proposes closing us out with a cheer, but the best we can come up with is “Team Red on 3!” Al says we’ll workshop it this week. We head to a nearby Walmart for our week’s groceries and rejoice at our bountiful food budget: $5 per person per day, which luckily does add up on a team of ten. Dinners that would typically be $15 of ingredients are nearly doubled this week, giving the chefs latitude to buy some luxuries, like chicken. For us, it’s a splurge week.

The rest of the drive is a (literal) roller coaster ride. The two hours to Eminence are spent on windy Ozark roads with speed limits that make sense for rally cars— but not F250s with nearly 200k miles on them. Half the team steps out of the trucks at housing and stand motionless for a few minutes to let their stomachs settle. However, our contact expects us to join her shortly, so we hurriedly pack in and scarf down some snacks before donning our Nomex. Clad in green and yellow, we peel out toward a prescribed burn unit that a team had burned last week.

We’re greeted by Susan Farrington, the Natural History Biologist for MDC Ozarks and an ERT favorite. She tasks a few of us with heading into the unit and igniting some pockets of unburned fuel while the rest of us saw and burn some unscathed cedars. My teammate Curtis and I try in vain to get some cedar logs cooking, but they just puff steam after having sat in a weekend rain storm. 

We head back after a few hours and sort ourselves into the different bunks at housing. A determining factor for some (Allen) is whether the room is haunted— ERT lore says the back bedroom has a poltergeist, but the only supernatural event I’ve experienced in it is a teammate’s snoring sounding indistinguishable from a rocket launch. I take a bottom bunk and join the others for dinner. Nadya’s generous portions of fried rice soothe the body and mind, and once we’ve all cleaned our plates Emily and Allen brief us on tomorrow’s service. 

Tuesday

Mariana and the creepy Dora doll.

Today’s weather gives us a greenlight for fire, and the team is split in half to tackle two different large burns in the area. I join Allen, Nadya, Mariana, and Zane and ride to Peck Ranch Conservation Area, where we’ll be burning the Valley Rx Unit— 2677 acres. It’s the largest burn of the nine I’ve been on. We arrive and group up with about 20 Missouri Department of Conservation and The Nature Conservancy folks (and a large plastic Dora the Explorer doll also standing in the briefing circle, which no one acknowledges), a small crew for a huge unit. I’m surprised that we’ll be igniting by hand. The Forest Service burns I’ve crewed used helicopters with incendiary devices on burns as small as 1000 acres; with MDC we’ll basically be lighting off the whole unit on foot. It’ll be a big hiking day. We check radios and gear, cram ourselves into the bed of an MDC pickup with a mounted water pump, and are spirited away to our start point.

We disembark with our fire rakes and set up our drip torches, ignition devices that look like a big metal cylinder with a crazy loop straw sticking out. Unsurprisingly, our old torches leaked a bit and the truck bed smells like torch fuel— a mix of diesel and gasoline. We tidy up a bit and get a refill from an MDC employee, then walk over to Point B on the north side of the unit. The burn plan has us assisting the other squads in “blacking out” the top of the unit before heading down the east side and connecting with the other team on the south side. Easy enough. Our MDC squad boss assigns me to run the lead torch— a privilege on big fires.

Allen holding the line.

Radio chatter picks up as all squads reach their start points around 11:30. Susan, serving as burn boss on our side of the unit, gives us the go ahead. I stoop down over the leaf duff and start a small flame with my lighter, open a valve on the torch, and tip its nose over the fire to ignite the wick on its end. The top ignites and I lower it to the ground to drip the lit fuel into the duff. I begin the long march down the fireline leaving a line of flames behind me-– and hope that the leaks in the truck bed were from someone failing to properly close the top rather than a crack in the torch. Winds out of the north are supposed to carry the fire into the unit and down the slope into the unit’s eponymous valley, but the air is still. I end up weaving back multiple times to relight pockets of unspent fuel, keeping an eye on the tall dry grass on the other side of the fireline, lest we get some spillover. I’m chided over the radio (and by Susan, who is leading our side of the burn) for stepping too far into the unit to light, and start paying more attention to my fire placement. After 45 minutes and some help from Zane with a second torch, we’ve connected our fire with the west team and flames are carrying into the unit.

We’re scooped up by Susan and ferried down the line to join the MDC folks rounding the eastern top corner. The wind finally arrives, but it’s variable. Gusts start blowing smoke into our faces and raise the danger of the flames crossing the line. The team shuffles and Allen and I end up holding the line at the rear, watching for any spot fires that might pop across the road. The flames are moving slowly and our squad strings out thin to keep watch over more area. Smoke pours from the unit and soon I’m enveloped in the gray; I pull my bandana over my mouth and my goggles over my eyes for some relief from the acrid cloud. It can be an unnerving experience: isolated, scarcely able to see, yet responsible for extinguishing any embers that wind up outside the unit. I do my best to keep sight of Allen fifty yards ahead and the dry grass across the line. We hear radio callouts of spot fires down the way and witness Susan race down the road with her truck, hazard lights heralding her arrival through the smoke long before the rest of the vehicle appears.

We continue to bump down the line, following the topography toward the south end of the unit. Allen and I are sent into the woods to do some internal ignition on a particularly lackadaisical part of the fire. Being the good team lead that he is, he’s thus far allowed everyone else to use the drip torches but not lit himself. I offer him mine and he tries to turn it down, explaining that fire isn’t his favorite thing we do and he’s happy to just let everyone else have their day. I insist, hand him the torch, and evidently awaken the pyro within him. We stomp around for 30 minutes as Allen finds every possible patch of fuel to light off. I swear I see a twinkle in his eyes as he performs the most thorough interior ignition I’ve ever seen. 

We rejoin our squad at the bottom of the unit, just in time to see Mariana and Nadya dropping a line of flames at the base of the steep hills running parallel along the line. Fire races up the slopes and a curtain of smoke and flame soon covers the entire hillside. The air takes on an orangish tint from the billowing soot occluding the now low-hanging sun— an apocalyptic ambience. Our feet ache from the seven or so miles we’ve covered in full gear, but we still need to make our way down the rest of the south side and connect with the west team. Susan’s voice squawks from our radios as she laments the dwindling daylight and tells us to ready ourselves for another pick up. 

Her solution to speed things up? Leapfrogging us down the line with the other MDC squad. We alternate between piling into Susan’s truck bed and thundering down the road well ahead of the other torches, and disembarking to continue igniting at as brisk a march as we can manage. I take my last turn on the torch and haul myself westward, ignoring the jab of briars and the protests of my legs, hoping to glimpse the other team approaching. At last we connect with west torches, dropping our packs and peering back at the burning terrain behind us. We’ve walked almost nine miles in our seven hours on the line. 

Demonstrating ingenuity in the face of adversity.

When we arrive back at the Peck Ranch office where we had our briefing, the weird Dora doll is still standing exactly as it was this morning. We all agree that it’s probably cursed, with Allen especially emphatic. We debrief with the MDC folks and sort out which torches and rakes are ours; the latter are easy to find because they are almost always the most banged up. Our departure is further delayed when we find that the door on our truck bed topper has broken and won’t lock. Allen has encountered this before and he MacGyvers it shut with some ratchet straps in typical ERT fashion. We drive back to Eminence in the haze of the day’s smoke which still hangs in the air for miles. Fatigue, dusk, and quiet folk music sedate us as the truck winds back up the Ozark roads, headlights barely cutting through the murk. Someone has a moment of brilliance and suggests we stop at Dairy Shack, an Eminence fast food staple and ERT favorite. We get ice cream, fries, burgers, shakes. I devour a double cheeseburger and Oreo milkshake without pausing. Life is good.

Back at housing, the reunited team swaps stories around the dinner table. The other burn sounds just as eventful; our teammates got to bust out their saws and use the torches from the back of a moving truck. Allen and Emily pause the discussions to brief us on tomorrow. We’ll be split again, with my team heading back to the Valley unit for mop up and possibly more ignition on glades untouched by the burn. Dismissed from the table, I take off my smokey Nomex and fall into my bunk. I fall asleep in about 15 seconds.

Wednesday

I munch a bagel in the housing kitchen as Susan pulls up in her pickup truck outside. Allen and Emily head out to greet her and the three chat for a while. When our team leads return, Allen informs us that our team has been given Susan’s truck for the day— and the water pump installed in the bed. No one can say our contacts don’t trust us. Our squad from yesterday departs for Peck Ranch in Susan’s truck and an ERT truck. We pull up to the briefing area and find that the Dora doll has still not moved. Allen clearly has the heebeegeebees and a conspiracy forms among the rest of us: we have to take the doll home and scare him with it. I scoop up Dora and place her in the ERT truck cab while Al is checking radios. Hijinks aside, we do still have a burn unit to check.  

Smoke still lingers over the valley from patches of flame creeping through the terrain. Our patrol around the perimeter is broken up by stops to check smoldering snags (dead trees) and extinguish stumps burning near the line, a task made doubly fun by the pressurized water hose. We mark some spots on our maps to check on later and take a lunch break near a small pond just inside the unit. Birds have already reentered the trees and chirp softly as we snack on sandwiches and fruit. A breeze shakes the pine needles in the canopy where no flames reached. It is tranquil in spite of the calamity in the woods just 20 hours earlier. The quiet lunches among the trees are some of my favorite moments of AmeriCorps service. 

Mariana performing mop up.

We continue mopping up after lunch and finish our loop around the unit soon thereafter. Now comes the fun part: checking the interior. We take the trucks down two roads that slice through the middle of the unit. Our eyes scan the large swaths of ash and soot covering the valley, looking for the glades that Susan asked us to check on. Fire is an especially important force in these mixed hillside patches of grass and rock; without flames to temper sprouting saplings and woody stems, the unique flora and fauna that call them home are crowded out by encroaching woods. While searching for glades, we come upon a grass field that escaped the blaze surrounding it. With humidity dropping and winds due to pick up, we drop a few patches of flame on the dry grass to restart the burn. Fire activity is clearly picking up throughout the islands of unspent fuel and smoke begins to tint the sky again. We finally spot the craggy faces of the glades and verify that the fire passed through them. 

During our final survey of the fireline, we spot a hillside in the unit spared by a creek running parallel to it. We take a torch and hike a ways to its base. Zane gets the honor of laying a line tracing the bottom of the slope. Propelled by wind, the flames race up the face of the hill even faster than yesterday. We take a moment to admire our handiwork. It’s mesmerizing; a wall of flame climbing the leaf debris and shed branches, churning smoke into a sky growing darker by the minute from fire elsewhere in the unit.

At last we pull ourselves away from the view and head back to the exit. Our trucks pull back into the briefing parking lot, and Al notes the conspicuous absence of Dora. Everyone else laughs and tells him he’s paranoid. Nobody cracks. We head back to housing and I rally a few people to help me cook tonight’s dinner— after placing Dora in the corner of the basement. Thus far I’d been coy whenever someone asked me what I’d be making, answering, “I’m making yellow.” We sauteé yellow bell peppers and onions, roast chickpeas in the oven, fry plantains and pineapple slices, cook chicken thighs seasoned with curry, and finish with a large batch of turmeric rice. I set the table myself, arraying everything around a vase of yellow daffodils Nadya found on the fireline. Perfection.

I call everyone in for dinner and watch a torrent of emotions play across my teammates’ faces. Shock. Awe. Bewilderment. Amusement. Before them sits a yellow dinner. Just yellow. And from a speaker sitting on a window sill, a playlist of songs containing “yellow” in the title or chorus plays. Emily and Allen are over it; I did this to their teams last year too. Nonetheless, everyone builds bowls of their preferred yellow entrees and eats heartily— leftovers are minimal, the highest honor for ERT group dinners. Or maybe everyone was just starving.

 A few of us huddle after dinner and try to figure out how we haven’t spooked Allen yet. He’s already been down to the basement and back twice, each time as a group listened intently from the top of the stairs. Later in the night as I get ready for bed, Allen approaches me intently. I brace for some confrontation over the prank but he simply shakes my hand and says our earlier radio communications in the unit were top tier. The next day is a non-day. Susan sends us back early given an imminent rain storm, and we take an easy morning doing saw maintenance, debriefing, and cleaning out our housing. The rollercoaster ride out of the Ozarks is punctuated by sing-alongs in the truck and a stop at Casey’s for pizza. A solid wrap up for a solid week. 

 As we pack our gear out to our cars at HQ, I ask Allen if he was just smart enough not to react to Dora in the basement. His eyes widen. “She was down there with me?”

Friday

The last hurdle before our weekend comes Friday morning: the pack test. Officially called the work capacity test (WCT), ERT takes it annually to secure our Firefighter Type 2 certifications from the Forest Service, qualifying us for fire ops on Federal land. It’s a simple pass or fail test; walk three miles around a track with a 45 pound pack in under 45 minutes to succeed. The vast majority of Members who take the test pass it handily, but that doesn’t stop weeks of anxious conversations about it throughout the corps. Having passed it last year, I’ve echoed the same advice that team leads and staff give to nervous first years: it’s all mental.

We meet at HQ early on Friday for the drive to Rolla, MO where the test will be held. I didn’t grab enough breakfast at home and forage some granola bars from the pantry to fuel up a bit more, then join a few others outside to weigh our test packs. The temperature is below freezing and I’m grateful that I grabbed a beanie while I was dressing myself half-asleep. I dump my pack on the scale and it settles with a thud. It comes in at 46 pounds thanks to the inclosed 10 pound weights and single huge brick I found in our maintenance shop. Other peoples’ packs are likewise haphazardly filled with giant cans of beans, sacks of rice, and random heavy pieces of metal. However, upon arriving at the track an hour and a half later, we’re relieved to find that the Forest Service officials brought us weighted vests— a massive comfort improvement thanks to their better weight distribution. 

A Missouri University of Science and Technology football practice is in full swing as we take our final swigs of water and head to the start line. We spot an ambulance idling nearby. As we stretch our legs out, the Forest Service employee gestures toward the paramedics standing by it and reminds us that it's not worth destroying your body just to pass today. I join everyone else in donning headphones and loading up some hype music for the walk. My playlist for the day is a smorgasbord of genres ranging from Jay-Z to Led Zeppelin to the Spice Girls, alike only in their high BPM and lively melodies. At last, we gather up in front of the Forest Service employee holding a stopwatch and ready ourselves. I half expect a starter pistol but instead hear “Ok, get started.” A Kendrick song blares in my ears as I speed walk off the starting line with the rest of the crush.

I begin feeling the weight of the vest in my ankles after about a lap and a half, and the burn starts to intensify as we continue. Gradually, people filter forward and back from our initial blob and find their pace. I settle toward the back, bearing in mind that I pass whether I finish at 40 minutes or 44 minutes and 59 seconds. The test truly is a mental challenge: everyone here is fit enough to pass it from the months of hiking we’ve done on project, but the continuous ache in your legs certainly wears you down. I change up my gait continuously to give my ankles some relief, trying to tap in the rest of my muscles. I probably look ridiculous squatting down low as I trudge around another curve of the track. Luckily I’m in good company as others make their own attempts to get some relief. And so the procession continues— a seemingly endless parade of silly walks. 

I take my earbud out as I pass the start line for the fourth or fifth time. The official barks that I’m 50 seconds ahead of pace, and I give a sigh of relief. I continue chasing the guy in front of me and try to distract myself by mouthing the words to the Outkast song ringing in my ears. Ahead, the frontrunner of our group cruises a good 200m ahead, with chains of people following her every 30m or so. The pain in my ankles dulls and I instead start feeling the weight in my shoulders and my hamstrings. I keep waddling forward and watch the football team scrimmage for a while as I pass by them on the straightaways. It's been about 25 minutes.

A new but familiar sensation starts pinging from my feet. My sock has creased up around one of my toes and begins to rub it after each strike on the track. Try as I might, I can’t get any relief and resign myself to dealing with the blister afterwards. The little annoyances like blisters forming and cold headwind blowing in your face can grind you down as much as the fatigue, but all you can do during the test is put it out of mind and keep walking. I catch up to one of my friends and walk behind him for a while, leapfrogging with him as he adopts a “fast curves” strategy— taking it easier on the straight lines and plowing around the curves at a speedwalk pace. The walk is always easier with someone else nearby to keep pace with. My legs continue to scream at me but we press on. The football team attempts a field goal but comes up short. I nudge my friend and tell him I’m waiting for one of us walking the track to get nailed by a punt. He wheezes and I start wheezing too. Laughter makes a good painkiller.

I check my watch again after a few more laps. We’re coming up on 45 minutes, and our frontrunner laps me with a breathy “hello”. I remove my ear buds and catch “just two more!” from the Forest Service guy  at the start line. Relief pumps through my body and I ease my pace on the final two laps. I stomp forward to a Paramore song, pain dulling significantly as the end comes into sight. I stretch my legs a bit on the final straightaway and finish with 30 seconds to spare. My muscles are still functional, but I’m scared to check my feet for blisters. I toss the vest off and feel impossibly light for a moment, then look down the track to see if anyone will be cutting it close. I’m delighted to see the final pack of people finish with 10 seconds to spare. Everyone passed this year!

Relieved of the weight, some folks with more energy than me run a sprint around the full track as a victory lap. I continue stretching my legs and drink the chocolate milk I had stashed beside the bleachers. They’re stronger than me and I’m ok with that. And I have chocolate milk and they don’t. The Forest Service employee congratulates everyone and asks us to take our vests back to his truck. We pass by the ambulance and witness it try to drive out of the wet grass patch it’s resting on. The driver guns it too hard and it spins out in the mud, then does the same thing three more times as all of us watch. I know exactly what’s coming. Members coalesce around the back of the ambulance and begin trying to push it out, taking a few tries to synchronize with the driver’s lead foot, but eventually ease it out of the mud rut it’s created. Someone makes a “see the need, meet the need” quip. Sore and stumbly, we’re finally dismissed back to our vehicles and told to meet back at HQ after lunch. I emphatically convince my truck that we should stop at a local pie place. They agree, probably to shut me up, but no one seems to have any regrets as we’re stuffing our faces in the mom-and-pop shop.