Drawn To The Flame -- The Smoke Jumper's Life Is Part Macho, Part Call Of The Wild

Winthrop, Okanogan County - The trouble with getting paid big bucks to jump out of airplanes into towering trees, flames licking at your boots, is that when it comes time to grow up what do you do to match it?

Mike Quinones, 33, is facing that.

There are older smoke jumpers at the North Cascades Smoke Jumpers Base between Winthrop and Twisp under the buffalo-rump hills that surround the Methow Valley. But most have families and winter jobs as teachers or full-time Forest Service workers. Quinones pays $1.75 a day to live for four months a year in a Quonset hut hammered together by smoke jumpers in the 1940s. And that's his luxury living.

Other nights, he's curled up by a tree, kept warm by smoldering coals or a disposable sleeping bag.

"Home" is two post-office boxes, one in the Methow Valley, another in Park City, Utah, where he lives each winter, breaking even guiding fat-cat tourists helicopter skiing.

Some summers he works more than 500 hours of overtime as a smoke jumper, making enough to allow him a month or more of travel in between jobs. (Smoke jumpers earn an average $9.45 an hour.)

"When I run into friends from high school, they say, `I'd quit my job in a minute to do what you do,' " said the broad-chested Quinones, who walks with a body builder's sway.

"I tell them, `I'd quit my job in a minute to do what you do,' " said Quinones.

But he's lying. Like the 26 other lions and one lioness at the smoke jumper's base, he couldn't sit behind a desk.

Even rain is a cage.

After a "gangbusters" spring of early, intense fires, the jumpers were left to hold pools from rainy June 28 to July 20 betting on when they'd get their next jump.

It didn't take many warm days in late July for the forest to become a tinder box and August and September, traditionally the biggest fire months, show signs of again going gangbusters.

The jumpers, who are considered the first line of defense in battling forest fires, rotate jumps, parachuting out by the planeful - eight at a time. But the jumping's been slow. Not many fires.

By the latter part of July, in fact, when there'd been only 22 fires and 84 jumps all season, Quinones was contemplating a lean winter.

"I'd rather see 122 fires and 384 jumps," said Quinones, who has made more than 200 jumps in nearly a decade.

Pay is minimal when the jumpers aren't on fires. (The real money comes from hazard pay and from working as long as 24 hours straight on the first day of a fire.)

When that happens, they spend their days using industrial sewing machines to make repairs to parachutes and other equipment, or they mow the base lawn, pack equipment or work in the woods on Forest Service projects.

Mundane stuff, at best.

Quinones doesn't have a house, doesn't have a family, doesn't have health insurance other than worker's compensation.

But he does have that 1 1/2 minutes of adrenalin rush after his shoulder is slapped to signal his leap, ending when his feet hammer to the ground - or, worse, when he finds himself jerked back skyward by a 150-foot tree that's grabbed a hold of his chute.

That, of course, is the part he likes.

"Around here it's `Yeah! There's a fire!' and then as soon as your feet touch the ground it's `when are we going to get out of this pig?' " Quinones said. "Anybody can fight fires; getting there is the fun part."

Fighting the fire means digging trench lines and sawing down trees with an old-fashioned "misery whip" or with a chain saw, if the fire's not in a wilderness area.

It can mean three days of exhausting work with almost no sleep, or it can mean "para-camp," the jumpers' nickname for time spent enjoying the woods around a fire that was sputtering out before they even landed.

"It's a roulette wheel, tssssssss-clicka-clicka-clicka," said Quinones. "It could be a good destination, a nice clear field by a pond with Bambi jumping through the forest. Or it could be a pig on a pile of rocks."

It takes six to seven minutes from the time the alarm sounds to when the next eight jumpers on the list are in the high-collared, fire-resistant jump suits that they make themselves.

They wear 10-inch boots and helmets with a mesh grill. In one thigh pocket is clean underwear, a T-shirt, a book.

In the other, a carefully coiled let-down rope, 150 feet for fires east of the mountains, 250 feet for the giants on the westside.

Once airborne in the twin-engine Otter, the jumpers sit on boxes that contain chainsaws, extra water or their primary supply caches that hold two sleeping bags, food for two jumpers for two days, 2 1/2 gallons of water, a first-aid kit, a break-down shovel and a grubbing ax called a Pulaski.

They've traveled that way as far as New Mexico, snoozing in all their gear when lulls allow.

The cardboard boxes, attached to miniature parachutes, will get tossed out of the plane behind the jumpers, who have to haul it all home, or at least to the nearest truck or mule team.

As the pilot goes over the fire, a spotter drops two crepe-paper streamers to check for wind shear and direction. The pilot circles and the spotter does it again.

The first two jumpers, hooked to the static line, get in position. The heavier one crouches on the bottom rung. A slap to the back and they're off.

Since the smoke jumpers bail out a mere 1,500 feet above the ground - by comparison sport jumpers start from about 3,200 feet and

may go from 10,000 feet - they have just five seconds to see if the main parachute has been deployed by the static line. Otherwise, they've got just five more seconds to pull the cord on the reserve chute, which no Winthrop jumper has had to do in 12 years.

"You can't act, you have to react," Quinones said. "It has to be instantaneous. It's 30 to 40 percent skill. The rest is just dead blind luck."

There've been just a couple of deaths in the region since smoke jumping had its national testing in Winthrop in 1939. Most recently, a Missoula jumper visiting here failed to pull the reserve cord.

"He was a squad leader with more than 250 jumps," said Doug Houston, Winthrop's base manager. "He just didn't pull the cord. No one knows why."

Broken ankles, backs or legs are more common, most often from the risky technique of letting down on ropes from trees, which requires 15 different steps to do it safely.

Bill Moody, longtime base manager at Winthrop who had more than 600 jumps when he retired, lost 1 1/2 inches in one leg after a bad break. No problem. He had the other leg broken and shortened to match.

When the fire's out, the tough work begins. Jumpers make a mental note of the topography from the plane and sometimes hike up to 20 miles over roots and logs, carting backpacks and chain saws.

Kasey Rose, a four-year veteran who is Winthrop's lone woman, said she's never seen anybody who can stand up to put on the 100- to 110-pound loads.

"We lay on the ground, roll over and get up on our knees," she said, adding that she's seen 120-pound women do it.

"It just goes to show you, it's all up here," said Rose, tapping her temple. "If you want to do it, you can do it."

Rose, 24, acquired mental toughness growing up on a dairy farm in Whatcom County and being on the University of Washington women's rowing team.

She loves the work and what's she learning about carpentry, sewing and mountain lore from men on the base and old-timers in the Methow Valley. She's so enamored of outside labor that she fears her zoology degree may never get used.

"I enjoy sweating and working hard and being hungry," she said. "I love getting back into the wilderness and the mountains."

Fitness is an obvious must. Recruits and veterans have to show they can run 1 1/2 miles in 11 minutes or less, do seven pullups, 25 pushups, 45 situps, and carry a 110-pound backpack for three miles. When at the base, part of the jumper's work shift is to work out with weights and run. In the afternoon, they add another fitness activity and in the evenings sometimes play volleyball or survival splatball games.

Personal trucks and jeeps in the parking lot are loaded with bicycles, kayaks, fishing poles and cowboy boots.

"There's a great camaraderie," said Quinones. "We're like a bunch of crazy kids."

Which was exactly the prediction before it all started.

Montana regional forester Evan Kelley wanted no part of the program when it was first discussed in the mid-1930s.

"All parachute jumpers are more or less crazy," Kelley wrote to Washington, D.C, "just a little bit unbalanced, otherwise they wouldn't be engaged in such a hazardous undertaking."

The statement is displayed like an award at the North Cascades base.

There's still some hazing that goes on with the rookies, says Quinones. It's been toned down to match a mellower world - certainly mellower than when the corps attracted a lot of fresh Vietnam veterans - but it's still important to force recruits to face their weaknesses or get out.

"You're judged and looked at as training goes on," said Quinones, adding that jumpers have to be able to count on each other no matter what the conditions. "You've got to keep that attitude around here. There's a lot of peer pressure."

The base loses one to two jumpers a year to attrition, and struggles to find replacements. Eighty extra jumpers were hired nationwide because of the expected high number of fires this year. Of the 387 regular jumpers in the U.S., six are women.

Winthrop has the reputation of being the most macho smoke-jumper base in the system, and there have been times when Rose felt isolated. But when she feels herself on the outside of conversations, she reminds herself that even as captain of the UW crew she never was a joiner.

She was heartened this year to hear that her comrades actively tried to recruit women from other bases, a sign that she's been accepted.

That "last male bastion" mystique is changing, says Quinones, especially with the growing number of family men.

"In the 1960s, when men dominated the world," he said without a hint of wistfulness, "it was tough. The dress of the day was jeans and white T-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled up in the sleeves.

They'd go into town and the women would come running, yelling, `The jumpers are back! The jumpers are back!'

"The jumpers have other things going on, now. They're not as gung ho."

Roger DeHart is one such family man. He teaches biochemistry and chemistry at Burlington High School and spends his off days driving over the North Cascades Highway to visit his wife and two children.

He's a "retread." He jumped in Oregon in the mid-1970s and came back this spring to see if he could get his 38-year-old body to pass muster.

"It was like the first time I jumped all over again," he said. "I've really enjoyed coming back. I wish it would last longer."

That's why it's so hard to give up.

Quinones is contemplating work as a city firefighter. Stability vs. the freedom to take off on a mountain bike in southern Utah. Bureaucratic protocol vs. "just me and the wind."

"It's a hard job to replace," he said. "I've been to places in the wilderness where no one's ever been. I've seen more in 10 years than most people see in a lifetime."