Female Hotshot firefighter brings California mega blazes to life in moving memoir
Fire changes whatever it encounters. Burns it, melts it, sometimes makes it stronger. Once fire tears through a place, nothing is left the same. Kelly Ramsey wasn't thinking of this when she joined the U.S. Forest Service firefighting crew known as the Rowdy River Hotshots — she just thought fighting fires would be a great job.
But fire changed her too.
In her memoir, 'Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West,' Ramsey takes us through two years of fighting wilderness fires in the mountains of Northern California. She wrote the book before January's deadly Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires, and what she encountered in the summers of 2020 and 2021 was mostly forests burning, not city neighborhoods. But at the time, the fires she and her fellow crewmen fought (and they were all men that first year) were the hottest, fastest, biggest fires California had ever experienced.
'My first real year in fire had been a doozy, not just for me but my beloved California: 4.2 million acres burned,' she writes, in the 'worst season the state had endured in over a hundred years.' That included the state's first gigafire — more than 1 million acres burned in Northern California.
The job proved to be the hardest thing she'd ever done, but something about fire compelled her. 'At the sight of a smoke column, most people feel a healthy hitch in their breath and want to run the other way,' she writes. 'But all I wanted to do was run toward the fire.'
Ramsey's memoir covers a lot of ground, skillfully. She learns that being in good shape isn't enough — she has to be in incredible shape. She learns how to work with a group of men who are younger, stronger and more experienced than she is, and she figures out how to find that line between never complaining and standing up for herself in the face of inappropriate behavior.
She also writes about the changes in her own life during that time: coming to terms with her alcoholic, homeless father; pondering her lousy record for romantic relationships; searching for an independence and peace she had never known.
'It wasn't fire that was hard; it was ordinary life,' she concludes.
Sometimes her struggles with ordinary life threaten to take over the narrative, but while they humanize her, they are not the most interesting part of this book. What resonates instead is fire and all that it entails — the burning forest and the hard, mind-numbing work of the Hotshots. They work 14 days on, two days off, all summer and fall, sometimes 24-hour shifts when things are bad. They sleep rough, dig ditches, build firebreaks, set controlled burns, take down dead trees and, in between, experience moments of terrifying danger.
Readers of John Vaillant's harrowing 2023 book 'Fire Weather' — an account of the destruction of the Canadian forest town of Fort McMurray — might consider Ramsey's book a companion to the earlier book. 'Wildfire Days' is not as sweeping or scientific; it's more personal and entertaining. It's the other side of the story, the story of the people who fight the blaze.
Ramsey's gender is an important part of this book; as a woman, she faces obstacles men do not. It's harder to find a discreet place to relieve herself; she must deal with monthly periods; and, at first, she is the weakest and slowest of the Hotshots. 'Thought you trained this winter,' one of the guys tells her after an arduous training hike leaves her gasping for breath. 'I did,' she said.
'Thinking you shoulda trained a little harder, huh,' he said.
But over time she grows stronger, more capable, and more accepted. In the second year, when another woman joins the crew, Ramsey is torn between finally being 'one of the guys' and supporting, in solidarity, a woman — but a woman whose work is substandard and whose attitude is whiny.
'Was I only interested in 'diversity' on the crew if it looked like me?' she asks herself. 'Had I clawed out a place for myself, only to pull up the ladder behind me?'
But competence is crucial in this dangerous job, and substandard work can mean deadly accidents.
For centuries, natural wildfires burned dead trees and undergrowth in California, keeping huge fires in check. White settlers threw things out of whack.
'The Indigenous people of California were (and still are) expert fire keepers,' Ramsey writes. 'Native burning mimicked and augmented natural fire, keeping the land park like and open.'
But in the 20th century, humans suppressed fires and forests became overgrown. 'Cut to today,' she writes. 'Dense forests are primed to burn hotter and faster than ever before.'
Ramsey's descriptions of the work and the fires are the strongest parts of the book.
'We could hear the howl — like the roar of a thousand lions, like a fleet of jet engines passing overhead — the sound of fire devouring everything,' Ramsey writes.
Later, she drives through a part of the forest that burned the year before to see 'mile upon mile of carbonized trees and denuded earth, a now-familiar scene of extinguished life.'
But she also notes that the burned areas are already beginning to green up. 'New life tended to spring from bitterest ash,' she writes.
'The forest wouldn't grow back the same, but it wouldn't stop growing,' she observes earlier.
There is a metaphor here. Ramsey's memoir is a moving, sometimes funny story about destruction, change and rebirth, told by a woman tempered by fire.
Hertzel's second memoir, 'Ghosts of Fourth Street,' will be published in 2026. She teaches in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the University of Georgia and lives in Minnesota.
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