Fighting Fires

This past week a friend of mine posted a video on Facebook of a Samoan wildland firefighting crew singing together as they fought the wildfires blazing in California. (See: Samoan Firefighters) Their energy, their sound, their cohesion—even after ten hours of fighting fires in the rugged terrain of the mountains—was inspiring.

With closer inspection, I realized the video was originally posted in 2017—but that doesn’t take away from the beauty or the energy of those who were fighting these fires. And I’m sure similar sounds are arising from the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington today.

Hearing these sounds, and seeing the firefighters’ characteristic yellow shirts and green pants, brought me back to my days as an AmeriCorps volunteer over twenty years ago. As part of our work, the team I was a part of was trained in wildland firefighting. We even received our redcards—the official document that gives you the clearance to go out and fight wildfires.

We took part in two prescribed burns—one in Shenandoah National Park and another in Prince William National Forest Park, just south of Washington, DC. Both of these kind of fizzled and neither amounted to as much excitement as they sound like they might be. And I left the team before they were called out to help with real wildfires in Florida that year—so my brief career as a wildland firefighter never really amounted to much.

Can you figure out which one is me?

But here’s the thing about wildland firefighting: it’s one of the best examples of teamwork you will find anywhere. Wildland firefighting is not about going out into the woods and directly battling the blaze—you’re rarely face to face with the flames, and you’re not doing it alone. Rather, wildland firefighting is about getting out ahead of the flames and hopefully creating a “deadzone” or barrier line that is completely devoid of any flammable material, so that when the fire reaches the line you’ve created, there’s nothing there for the fire to burn and the fire dies out. You just pray that when the fire gets there, it isn’t strong enough or hot enough to jump over the line you created and keep going. That’s why they talk about containment—firefighters are trying to create a barrier line that surrounds the fire that the fire cannot jump.

These barrier lines, however, are not created by individuals. They’re created by teams—teams of 12-20 individuals together. And once you’re on a team, you stick with that team. And each time your team goes out to “slam” line, you pick a tool. It might be a saw or an axe or a shovel or a rake—but each tool has a different purpose and a different role and a different place in the row of workers. And the row of workers doesn’t sit in one place, each person working on their little area until the group decides it’s good enough to move on, but rather the row of workers is constantly moving. The workers in front have the saws and the axes, maybe there’s a rake or two. Their job is to clear everything above ground. Then come the shovels and some more rakes to clear out the roots and anything just under the surface.

Each person takes one or two swipes with their tool and then takes a step forward and does it again. Nobody works one area more than those one or two swipes. Just as the workers ahead of you in the line are counting on you, you need to trust that the workers coming after you will do the job they’re assigned to do. It doesn’t look like you yourself accomplish that much, but by the time twenty people have passed through, each with a specialized tool doing something critical that contributes to the whole, suddenly you have a makeshift road through the forest—a barren path with absolutely no flammable material that is several feet wide. It’s both difficult and beautiful work at the same time.

Oddly, every time I think about both the beauty and difficulty of wildland firefighting, I think of the church. Each of us has different gifts, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, but together we make up one body. “The hand cannot say to the eye, ‘I don’t need you!’ and the head cannot say to the foot, ‘I don’t need you!’” That is, we need each other. And we need to work together.

In my own experience as a wildland firefighter, using an axe always seemed more glorious than using a shovel. And yet both were indispensable. If the whole team only used axes, the barrier line we were trying to create would end up a complete failure. Everybody had a role, and everybody was needed to do their part. It was difficult to need one another, difficult to trust one another, difficult to rely on one another—but in the end, it was beautiful. The same is true of the church.