Greetings from Camp Whitsett
At my age, I have no business anywhere near the fire line swinging a McCloud or a Pulaski. That’s a job for much younger men and women. However, I can settle into the seat of my truck, load the bed with supplies, whether it be 1,000 feet of hose, gasoline water pumps, port-atanks for water storage, cases of Gatorade, boxes of sack lunches, or several cases of bottled of water, I become an important, supportive member of the “fire crew.” In my own way, I’m indeed fighting this fire.
Regardless of cold mornings, followed by hot afternoons, long hours of waiting around impatiently in Ground Support to be dispatched, showering in a “phone booth,” toileting in “the little blue room,” and eating our semi-warm meals from Styrofoam clamshells using flimsy plastic utensils, I still find the whole experience enjoyable and fulfilling. Sharon used to call it my, “paid summer vacation.” However, when I roll away from a drop-point, the firefighters who’ve helped me unload, tired, grubby and dirty from doing what I can’t, always yell a collective chorus of “thanks man.” Partly because I’m at least two, sometimes three times their age, it’s a great feeling to be able to support their effort.
I’m currently assigned to the Castle Fire, burning in the Sequoia National Forest. I was first directed to report to the campus of Kern Valley High in Lake Isabella, on Monday, September 7. By the time I’d gotten through the checkin procedure, then made the stop at Finance to turn in my contract, a decision had been made to send me up to the Ground Support unit at Camp Whitsett.
Twenty- seven miles north, up the Kern Canyon from the community of Kernville, lays an old Boy Scout camp, Camp Whitsett. The altimeter app on my phone tells me it’s at 4,670 feet above sea level, which certainly helps temper the heat. Of course, that makes the morning temperature different than it has been, even when I was on the River Fire near Monterey.
We remarked how cool it was at 6 a.m. when the morning fog rolled in and our thermometers showed 50 degrees. But when I rolled from my tent into the Ground Support area Thursday morning last week, my truck’s thermometer showed it was a chilly 40 degrees. Of course, as this is being written, it’s 3:45 p.m. on Thursday, and I’m sitting in my big chair, wearing only a T-shirt and my Nomex pants, and I’m quite comfortable.
By Saturday, the early morning temperature had plummeted. I didn’t notice it at 5:30 a.m. when I got up, but when I looked at 7:43 a.m., with the sun streaming weakly through the pine trees, I was a bit startled to see it hovering at 38. I suspect it was at least 36 when I got up.
One of the first questions I was asked at Whitsett was, “What’s your fourteenth day?” In other words, “You’re going to be here a while. Let’s start figuring now, on when you will be leaving for your mandatory two-days rest. The day I arrived on the fire, in this case Monday, September 7. didn’t count for a day of work on the fire. It’s your travel day. Thus, my f14th day will be Monday, September 21. That afternoon, I will probably be allowed to leave camp around 4 p.m. to return home for two days off. Usually, when you leave the camp for your mandatory days off, you also take all your belongings. This also involves pulling up stakes and loading your tent as well. If, during the time when you’re home, they decide you won’t need to return, you already have everything with you. Otherwise, you’d have to return to the fire to pick up your tent and all the stuff inside.
If I leave Whitsett on Monday afternoon, I’ll be home Monday and Tuesday night. But by late Wednesday afternoon or evening I will need to be back in camp before bedtime. That way I’ll be ready to start work at 6 a.m. Thursday morning.
In the two “rest days” at home, I need to wash, dry, fold, and repack two weeks of laundry, refill my meds and pick up or drop off anything necessary. There really isn’t a whole lot of resting or relaxation time.
Once I’m assigned to a fire, the reports on how the fire is progressing become difficult to obtain. This is exacerbated by the lack of cell coverage (at least for AT&T) at this particular spot in the mountains, however Verizon does have a little coverage here. This seems to be a common thing from my experiences on fires over the years. In past years, I’ve threatened to buy an inexpensive phone, put it on Verizon on a monthly plan only during Fire Season, then turn it off during the winter. This year, I finally gave in and did exactly that.
Last week, because of a lack of cell service, I was’ot able to get my column sent to the Recorder in time to get it published in the Wednesday edition. Now with the Verizon phone, I can create a hot-spot. This allows me to “tether” this computer, first to the phone, then to the internet. As soon as this column is finished, I will be able to email it to the Recorder.
My “office” is the front of my pickup, and my desk is the center divider on the front seat. When the battery runs down, I plug a small inverter into the cigarette lighter, plug in my regular 110V charger, and charge the laptop battery. Because of the two large batteries under the hood, it doesn’t seem to affect the truck batteries at all. In fact, keeping two phones, my GPS, this laptop computer, my ipad, the handheld radio I use out on the fireline to talk to the firefighters, as well as a couple of “charging bricks” that keep my phones working in the tent at night, I have quite an array of devices. Each one requires electrical energy, and since we don’t have much of that hanging around in the trees, it comes from my pickup batteries.
And now, 8:40 p.m. on Monday, I’m going to “tether” this laptop to my tiny cell phone, and will be able to email this column into the Recorder.