Harrowing danger, back-breaking work and camaraderie

By Bill Varble

If jumping out of a perfectly good airplane into a forest fire is an extreme thing to do, doing it in your 50s has to be off the charts.

Murry Taylor, 59, started as a smokejumper in 1965 and just called it quits. Maybe the oldest man ever to ply his macho trade, Taylor lives in a log house east of Northern California’s remote Scott Valley on land he’s owned for 25 years.

In the summer of 1991, Taylor kept a journal of his day-to-day life for one season of fighting fires in the forests of Idaho and Alaska. The result is "Jumping Fire," (Harcourt, Inc., 448 pages, cloth, $26) an account of the daredevils who jump into the center of fires and defeat them from within.

Taylor plans a visit to Southern Oregon today for talk and a slide show at 7 p.m. at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland.

"I don’t call it a reading," he says in a telephone interview. "I talk for a few minutes and show slides. I like to get a dialogue going."

In contrast to Norman Maclean, who late in life wrote the classic "Young Men and Fire," the story of Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in which 13 smokejumpers died, Taylor is very much an actor in the sweep of his own book. Set in the shadow of Mount McKinley, above the Yukon River, "Jumping Fire" tells an insider’s story of harrowing danger, back-breaking work, camaraderie, death, machismo and heroism.

"The story just travels with the crew for the season," Taylor says. "Seventeen fires in 2,500 miles of Idaho and Alaska. It’s a good framework for the stories of the past."

Taylor made 375 jumps over the years, 205 of them fire jumps. He tore shoulder ligaments, broke a collar bone, got knocked out, had surgery on a knee.

"But I never had a major injury," he says.

He attributes his good luck in part to training very, very hard — lifting weights, running thousands of miles over the years. Even in training, smokejumpers scramble up miles of mountainous terrain lugging 80-plus-pound packs. Marine Corps veterans say boot camp is easier.

The work draws not only the fittest but the most self-sufficient. Jumpers can earn $35,000 in just a few months and take winters off.

"Smokejumpers fight the fire without a lot of people flying around and making calls from above," Taylor says. "We just work with each other. If it calls for us to work all night, we’ll do it."

Taylor jumped into fires in eight states, landing on "just about everything you can imagine," including the Umpqua before it was laced with clearcuts, when vast stands of 250-foot firs waited to snag parachutists. He says the smokejumper’s worst nightmare is a high, rocky ridge with strong wind, an active fire and lots of snags.

"There’s a fear element looking down," he says. "You put the fear aside and focus on the dangers and how you’re going to overcome them. When you’re doing something dangerous, you establish procedures."

Taylor worked eight or nine years on his book.

"It was a high learning curve," he says. "After five or six years I learned a lot from publishers and editors."

Like some other firefighters, he thought Norman Maclean’s book contained great writing but became a tad tedious.

"It was essentially an old man looking for cosmic justice about this terrible thing that happened," he says.

"Jumping Fire" is in part a tribute to Taylor’s buddies who didn’t make it due to fire or parachute malfunctions or even suicide, a problem he says runs surprisingly high.

"They push hard, they’re perfectionists, and many are single," he says. "They go off in the winter. Both of my buddies who died were away from the group."

Taylor was married once, had three long-term relationships. Smokejumping takes a toll on jumpers’ personal lives, he says.

It’s a way of life that sounds as foreign to most people’s everyday reality as war.

"The only thing better was war," a Vietnam vet buddy told Taylor. "And it was horrible."

Taylor says he wrote the book to share the life.

"It’s so hard to explain to your family and friends," he says. "It’s too huge of a gap. I wanted to build a bridge between the inside and readers."

At bottom, the reader gets the feeling that jumpers find an intense feeling of being alive.

"I see people have a certain self concept when they get into jumping," Taylor says. "After three or four or five years they come up against situations much more difficult than they could imagine. You have to dig deep. That act reveals an expanded sense of themselves. It’s a transforming experience.

"If you begin to succumb to the pressures to become smaller and frightened and more narrow, you become that. It takes courage to live."

Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us
Copyright © 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.