Woohoo! R&R!! I love R&R days. R&R stands for Rest and Recuperation but it's not your momma's days off. These are super days off. Our days off are Sunday and Monday but they're not guaranteed days off. We can get called in to work on days off, we can go to a fire on days off. On days off we have to be within 2 hours of the station and fit to drive to the station and respond to a fire. But not R&R days. Those are a whole 'nother animal. R&R days are given to us after a 14 day assignment and are completely ours. No one can call us in to work or call us to a fire. We can be as far from the station as we want and we can be as snockered as we want. The best R&R days are ones that don't fall on our regular days off, for several reasons. We have to take R&R immediately upon arrival home. If those days are on your regular days off, you just take 2 days off. If they fall on anything other than your days off, you get paid for them since we're required to get paid for 8 hours each day. So the fire we just came from pays our salary for 2 days. The other great thing about R&R days that don't fall on days off is that you also have the opportunity to have 4 days off that week, which is awesome. But then all the regular rules of days off apply: we can get called in to work and we can go to a fire.
The first part of our assignment was just prepositioning in Albuquerque, New Mexico because they were expecting some bad fire weather and needed crews there. Prepositioning is cool because we get to stay in hotels, hang out at the local station, do some project work, PT, eat at restaurants, etc. But as soon as we got in to Albuquerque, we got sent down to the Miller fire around the Silver City area. By the way, Silver City is not nearly as nice as it sounds. We had a 7 mile hike in to our spike camp over several dozen creek crossings. Spike camp is a camp set up near where we'll be working instead of way back at camp. Fire camp (or incident command post- ICP) was an hour drive and 3 hour hike away. A 4 hour commute to work is pretty inefficient, so they fly in our sleeping bags and some food and we camp out in the wilderness.
The fire was in the Gila Wilderness which is absolutely gorgeous. We worked along the Gila River everyday. There's a wilderness trail that runs for miles out there along the river. Unfortunately when we hike, we go mighty fast and I spent a lot of time looking at the feet in front of me trying to figure out where I'm going to slip on the rocks and fall into the river. One day I was put in charge of a small section of line that was threatening to cross over and we would lose it. My superintendent put a lot of work into holding the line and had me wait for the pack mule crew to pack in a small pump to secure the line better. The pack mule team arrived with the pump and got to work setting it up by the river. Meanwhile, I watched a huge burning tree throw embers over to the side we were trying to keep the fire from getting established. The pump had all kinds of problems going on, so I crossed over the river to help trouble-shoot. When I looked over again, the fire had gotten into a log on the other side of the line- meaning it was getting away. I ran towards where I thought I had crossed the river previously (and only gotten a little of my boots wet) and pulled my helmet off. As I entered the river, it occured to me that it was much deeper than it looked but I was fully committed. As I went in water just over my knees, I scooped water into my helmet and ran up the other side of the bank to dump it onto the log. The flame went out and I could feel water sloshing in my boots. Definately not good. About half an hour later we had water from the pump and secured the line.
After an hour or two of securing the line, I tried to air out my socks and boots but it wasn't very helpful. We hiked a few miles back to camp, me with wet boots. The next day we hiked several more miles and my ability to cross the river without falling in was dwindling. We had hiked over so many miles on beds of river rock, crossed the river hundreds of times and my feet and ankles were giving up on the idea of balance and coordination. My feet on day 3 were hurting much like they do usually on day 12. They were burning and painful and swollen. So my supervisors gathered around while I took off my boots that night. One captain said "Oh yeah, that's trench foot". The other said "Ooh, you gotta take care of that, no joke". My superintendent walked by and said "It's gangrene!" Trench foot (just google it and look at images) on day 3. I had 11 more days to go. And we hiked over 8 miles every single day... mostly with me falling in the river.
Days later we hiked out of spike camp (that had moved several miles up river) for 11 miles over 38 river crossings. After about 10 or so crossings, I gave up on trying to stay on the rocks and just trudged through the water. I could see snapping my ankle slipping off the rocks and didn't think it was worth trying to keep my feet dry. It was too windy to fly our gear out, so we hiked 6 miles and then met with the pack train and gave them our gear. Then we continued out the rest of the 5 miles to our vehicles. We got to tour the Gila Cliff Dwellings, which were pretty cool, then we went back to fire camp.
After a few more days of hiking out into the wilderness and hanging out by the river, we got taken off the fire and were going to stage at Camp Thunderbird (think summer camp) in case of more fires. On the first day of camp t-bird, we played horseshoes, basketball and baseball. I took a shower but apprently the girl's side of the building had no hot water. So it was a long freezing shower. Had to get all the shampoo out of my hair. On the second day, we went out to do some project work for the local forest. After a short day of cutting brush, we got called to a fire in Alpine, AZ- the Wallow Fire.
When we got to the Wallow fire, things were a mess. Absolutely no control over it and the management team was a cluster. We continued on the clock and went to work on the fire that night, turning it into a 24 hour shift. Then we slept under some pine trees off a dirt road and rolled into night shift. Night shift is burly. It's so hard to stay awake at night unless you're actively doing something (which sometimes we were, sometimes we weren't) and it's hard to sleep during the day. Thankfully I have sleep medication prescribed to me and that helped a bit. Another day we slept at a school. There was an option of sleeping with the rest of the world inside a dark gym, but sleeping around that many people usually doesn't work for me, so I picked a spot outside.
Picking a sleep spot requires a bit of skill. Especially during the day. In your mind you have to project where the sun will be at each hour and how you'll be shaded...without having to wake up and move every hour. Plus you need a spot without too many rocks and pine cones, one that's fairly quiet and one that's away from dangers such as moving vehicles, falling trees or limbs, wild animals and dogs and man eating bugs. Outside one of the classrooms, there were some awnings over the windows and about 2 feet from the building were bushes. So I found a spot where I could wedge myself between a bush and the building and be covered by the awning most of the day. After the sun went past the awning, there would be a period of time where I would get a little bit of sun before I was then shaded by the bush. The spot looked like something you'd find a bum sleeping in. So I rolled out my bag and went to sleep. I woke up every single hour on the hour before giving up and going to work.
Now we're home and the fire is anything but controlled. Someone up high decided we needed days off and that we couldn't take them in AZ (which is an option). So we'll probably get called back to the same fire and have to drive all the way out there again. The drive is especially long since I'm one of the drivers. Those that aren't qualified to drive our vehicles (big boxy buggies) get to sleep and read in the back. Not me. Plus our buggy kept overheating, so we drove through the mojave dessert with our heater on full blast while the guys in the back had their AC on.
Today I'm going to figure out what happened to my mail (maybe the post office held it?), figure out what's wrong with my roses, mow the lawn, dye my hair, shave my legs and do some laundry. Most importantly I am not going to wear any shoes except for sandals and I'm going to try to fix my feet. And I'm going to sit on my butt as much as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment