FireGrrl

By Sharon Ryals Tamm

In 1974, in the shadow of the Olympics, Hoodsport Ranger District hires four women to their forest fire crew in an experiment few expect to succeed.

Susan is failing a college without grades and burdened by secrets she wishes she didn’t know. Asked to help find tough chicks for the fire crew, she’s determined to be one, spurred by the lure of fire, forest and man-sized pay. FireGrrl is her harrowing, funny, awkward and poetic account.
A serial killer targeting nice girls and a friend’s suicide attempt raise the stakes. Susan feels raw and out of control much like Pandora, a dog who hides in a box and makes a mess every time she comes out.

Susan must find her place amid the jostle of tribe and race, locals and outsiders, and prove that women can do the job. She struggles to keep up, master tools and fire science, and sort out spitting, peeing in the woods, and who buys the beer.

The dangers of wildfire demand cohesion but hostilities simmer and it’s hard to know who’ll cover Susan’s back and who’d just as soon stab it. With women kept apart as weak links in the chain, Susan forms an uneasy alliance with the one woman she most distrusts, an alliance that saves her when a thousand man fire camp reels from the presence of women. Finally, when a controlled burn explodes, it is Susan that must hold the line.

The narrative immerses readers in the deceptively simple language of the senses. The elements, trees and all manner of bees are characters in their own right and Susan is often more at ease with them than with people.

Not only a woman’s story, FireGrrl examines a workingman’s world and the forest industry’s impact on the communities that rely on it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sharon Ryals Tamm
• Release date: Oct 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301420575

Sharon Ryals Tamm

Sharon Ryals Tamm was one of the first women forest firefighters hired in Washington State in the 1970s. She cofounded support services for victims of sexual assault and has written on women in the labor movement. She lives with her husband in Berkeley, CA where she writes, is an environmental and community activist, Saquasohuh teacher and ceremonialist.

Book preview

Chapter 1

A ball of silent fire fell out of the sky. Susan stopped the bicycle in her race to beat the storm home and looked back. The ball of fire blazed across sun stark thunderheads and fell into the forest. It was as big as a basketball, a VW bug, the moon or Susan’s thumbnail. So big, it could set the woods on fire. Susan turned her bicycle and rode back towards the billowing clouds.

She dumped the bike in the ditch and scrambled up the clay bank into the woods. Slick earth gave way to duff lumpy as an old mattress. The scent was damp, alder and fir, hemlock and fern, earth, must, lichen. Not a trace of smoke or fire. Tightly laced limbs of second growth caught Susan’s arms. Roots and rotten logs brought her to her knees. She pushed on until lush green nettles bit her bare hands and brought her up short.

Whatever the fireball was, it had drowned in the perpetually wet northwest forest. Susan would never find it. Her clothes were soaked. She shook her stinging hands and shivered. Storm clouds closed in. The first pelt hit—not the usual insipid drizzle but hard orchestral rain complete with lightening and thunder.

Susan struggled out of the woods and skidded down the clay bank. Her housemate’s brown Datsun hugged the ditch near Susan’s bicycle. Dora launched her little terrier body out of the car. The rain slicked her fine blond hair.

What are you doing? Dora demanded.

Uh, looking for a fire, Susan said.

Don’t do shit like that! I thought you’d been kidnapped or—

Dora wouldn’t say. A fifth woman had been found, mutilated, raped and murdered. The terror had moved south from Seattle to Renton, Tacoma and now here in Olympia, a student at their own college in their own small town. Fear smoked the air. It was far worse than the fear Susan lived with every day, the one that was so familiar it didn’t register as anything more than vague irritation.

Susan. It’s pouring! Dora never yelled but this was close.

Susan stuffed the front end of her bike in Dora’s trunk. The rest of it dangled. They rode home in silence.

Finally Susan asked, Did you see a giant shooting star back there?

What are you talking about? Dora looked at Susan like she was even crazier now.

I thought I saw…I don’t know, something, hmm, no, nothing.

More lightning came in the evening. Sky ripping shards stabbed the spring earth and woke up the soil exactly the way Wild Bear had described. In spite of Susan’s aversion to TV news, she joined her housemates in the front room and waited for a report on the fireball falling from the sky.

The announcer began the evening’s top story. By all appearances, another nice girl…

Susan fled to the kitchen. She couldn’t stand it. They gloried in the gory details. It felt like war, the way they fed on it, the way it was both personal and faceless, the way they angled to make it the woman’s fault. None of these women fit what everyone believed a rape victim to be. They weren’t prostitutes, homeless or poor, loose or wanton. They were conservative, educated, middle class, white and nice. Susan had known one woman in high school, the lead soprano in the choir. She’d been as nice as apple pie.

…but was she really nice or, like the other victims, did her own loose behavior endanger her?

It didn’t matter that they were Young Republicans or churchgoers. One once went to happy hour after work; one drank a beer at a football game; and the girl from Olympia might have hitched a ride home from school, which somehow proved these women got what they deserved.

There was not one word about a ball of fire falling out of the sky.

When Wild Bear first stood in the well of the lecture hall below a steep wall of students and faculty, he’d looked small and far away. Susan had never seen anyone quite like him. He was a Tuscarawas spiritual elder invited to lecture by Dr. Marvin, the head of the Cultural Studies program. Wild Bear’s voice sounded as if it were propelled by the wind. As he spoke he seemed to become larger until the ground between them leveled and Susan saw him eye to eye.

Hemlock is a powerful messenger. When the earth is troubled hemlock bends its tip towards the ground. This is one of the ways my people see what is to come. Wild Bear spoke as if this was normal and easily known.

We pray for lightning in the spring. It wakes the ground and makes it strong for our crops to grow.

Wild Bear’s world shook the bones of common reality yet somehow Susan recognized it. It was like the world for which she had no words and had thought of as secret, crazy and hers alone.

There is a prophecy among tribes here about the Little Sister and the Grandfather, the sacred mountains you call St. Helens and Rainier. First, the Little Sister will explode to the sunrise. Soon after, Tahoma, the Great Grandfather will blow to the west and sweep away everything to the sea.

Now people shifted uneasily. Talking trees was one thing but prophesy that wiped out the city of Tacoma was another thing entirely. Susan heard smirks and chuckles from the upper reaches of the hall. Wild Bear stood taller. His voice carried into each corner, greater than just one man’s voice.

I tell you this because Creator gave me a vision that I must follow. There are those in my tribe who want me dead for speaking to you, but I teach you so that your people will stop destroying the earth.

The time came for questions. None were asked. Susan wondered if everyone was afraid or if they didn’t understand Wild Bear well enough to have questions. Susan’s professor, Dr. Corey, the head of the Man and Society program, opened his mouth and passed sentence. That he and his students were only invited guests didn’t deter him.

These aren’t even empirical observations. It’s all belief. None of your claims have been studied scientifically so what you say is totally useless and without value.

Students snickered allying themselves with what they perceived as the seat of power. Dr. Marvin, who had invited Dr. Corey’s program to attend, said nothing in defense of his speaker. Susan turned to Wild Bear. He looked right at her and answered calmly without engaging the insult as if his message had been strengthened, not diminished.

A few of you understand and know the truth that I speak. Others of you will never hear it. He finished as peacefully as he’d begun and left the hall.

Dr. Corey did not back down. That man is a primitive animist from a backwards culture which lacks the skills of critical thinking thereby suppressing any capacity for deeper understanding and development.

Susan felt glued to her culture like a fly on sticky yellow paper. Her entire education appeared to be built on assumptions she didn’t share. Maybe she was backwards too. Susan had never had words for what she experienced as real and true but Wild Bear had shown her such words could exist.

A billow of clouds piled against the bursting blue sky as Susan bicycled home. Her senses hummed an awakening song. The colors of the world brightened. The air tasted richer. Hemlock trees along the road drooped their tips toward the ground. Susan couldn’t remember a time when they had not drooped and wondered if this meant that the trouble in the earth was long lasting and not easily resolved.

Thunder drummed behind her. Susan stopped to look back and saw the ball of silent fire fall out of the sky.

Chapter 2

Susan pulled her bike out of Dora’s trunk and dumped it in the garage. She and Dora ran through the torrent to the front porch where Susan stepped cautiously over the rolled up evening newspaper. Dora picked it up.

It’s not going to bite, Dora said.

But it already had. Susan had glanced down and seen the headline. It bit like a rabid dog. Susan had wanted to stop taking the paper but her housemates had overruled her. The news was important. Susan wished she could distance herself but she’d lost that ability. The tunnel out the back of Susan’s head, where she’d always hidden until bad things went away, had fallen apart. This loss had not been a bad thing; crashing back into her senses had saved Susan’s life, but left her raw with no place to hide.

The front room was warm and their other housemates, Brogan and Molly were already home. Brogan curled her feet under her comfortably round body in an overstuffed chair. She read sci-fi and chewed on a tip of her shag cut curly brown hair. Brogan’s white cat, Cracker, expanded across the top of the single old gas heater and her high strung border collie, Pandora, leaped up to greet Susan, wriggled, whined, and peed on the floor.

Susan stroked Pandora’s chest to calm her. Shh. Shh. It’s okay. You’re a good girl. It’s okay.

Get in your crate, Pandora, Brogan said. It was an order but not unkind. Pandora scuttled into the crate, her safe place, turned and lay down with her long mournful nose pointing out. Susan sympathized. It was hard to be a good dog when you felt on the verge of losing it all the time.

Molly’s typewriter hummed through the open door of her bedroom. Molly was Dr. Corey’s star student and had sat high in the lecture hall where the snickering had begun but Molly was not one to snicker. If she thought something was funny, which she often did, an awe inspiring full throttled laugh exploded from her body.

Dora put Stevie Wonder on the stereo. Livin’ just enough for the ci-tay, ye-ah. She danced in the kitchen and heated a cast iron pan for tortillas. Susan changed into dry clothes and joined Dora. She began reading the last part of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and swung her hips as she read.

The Underground Man’s relentless whining abruptly stopped at a blank space on the page. When the words picked up again, a woman lay crumpled on the floor weeping. The woman was only a prostitute and the man had only done—what?—something the great writer preferred his readers imagine. It looked like rape but Dostoevsky wouldn’t say. Susan stopped dancing.

Dr. Corey’s seminar discussed the Underground Man’s critique of society and his psychological state. Susan said nothing. She felt feverish. Mouths opened and closed. Words tumbled out without meaning. The man had tricked a woman into friendship, done something terrible to her and then made certain she knew her life was worthless by throwing money at her.

Susan couldn’t understand how his ravings against society had merit when his actions matched the society he raved against. And why didn’t this seem to disturb anyone else? Did mental machinations mean more than actions? What was wrong with them? Or was something wrong with Susan? Trying to understand a dangerous man had nearly cost Susan her life. She was damned if she’d do it for a fictional character.

Susan could barely breathe. The room was too warm and too white. She’d always been a good student, followed directions, figured out what the teacher wanted, wrote it down, turned it in on time, asked good questions, carved it up and dished it back with the best. Now Susan was drowning in the blank space on Dostoyevsky’s page. Finally she raised her hand.

Dr. Corey cleared his throat. Susan?

Does anyone care what he did to that woman? Susan knew instantly that this was the wrong question, poorly worded, awkward, and personal.

The room fell silent as blank paper. Behind frozen faces, Susan saw her fellow students assess the risks of their possible responses. The men weighed theirs for shades of bigotry that might reduce their chances of getting laid. The women had to avoid being identified with Susan or the whore on the floor.

That…is not relevant to the discussion. Dr. Corey leaned back and made an aged smoker’s hack sound like a dignified ahem. As we were saying, the nature of his identity in relation to his suffering as he weighs his choices, leads us to surmise…

Everyone turned rapt attention to Dr. Corey. Susan had blown it. She tried to recover her docile intelligent facial expression but it was too late. She had said what was on her mind not what the teacher wanted. What mattered to Susan didn’t matter. She felt herself falling through the cracks, one of the left behind students she’d heard of but had never been.

Light broke through vague gray clouds and stunned Susan as she bicycled home. She felt giddy, cut loose from a weight she hadn’t known she carried. She turned down the road where a handsome boy she admired at ballroom dance club lived. Susan danced a Viennese waltz with him once, a quick three step followed by wide spinning turns around the room. The thrill of being in his arms had quickly turned to vertigo and Susan sat down before the dance ended. He’d returned to his favorite partner, Jeanette, a perfect petite beauty that spun in long Indian print skirts with her bronze horsetail hair flying and never missed a step.

Maybe he’d be out in his yard today and Susan would wave. He’d think she was something special on her bicycle not just a wimp who couldn’t waltz. Instead, perfect Jeanette stood on his front porch and brushed her blazing bronze hair in the sunlight. Susan’s bike slid on the gravel shoulder. She caught herself, hoped neither Jeanette nor the dancing boy had seen her and raced home crazy ass mortified.

Susan knew her crush had no root in reality, but then crushes never did. No one had treated her like romance material in a couple of years. Maybe she was awkward but she wasn’t unattractive. She was lanky with long auburn hair, good cheekbones, dark blue eyes, nice lips and flawless light olive skin. Maybe men found her intimidating, but Susan doubted that. More trouble than she was worth came to mind.

The closest thing she’d had to a sex was getting a Dalcon shield, a tick shaped IUD, installed. Why Susan had bothered she didn’t know. Life was uncertain and it had seemed like a good idea. Besides, it was a free part of student health care. She’d had a strange reaction to something being shoved into her uterus. When Susan sat up afterwards her face flushed, jaw dropped and eyes went droopy.

Did that hurt? the hairy doctor asked.

I don’t know, Susan mumbled.

You look—beautiful, he said.

That is an inappropriate thing to say, the nurse practitioner said.

The professionals bickered over the proper way to address a female patient while Susan fell off the table.

The IUD had continued to be so irritating that sex was the last thing Susan wanted, which made it a very effective birth control method.

Susan hit the women’s restroom before their next seminar. Molly joined Susan in front of the mirror and, side by side, they brushed out their long hair. Molly had pale skin, shiny almost black hair, big boobs and long legs. Her dark eyes sparkled through black frame glasses above her perky nose. Susan finished brushing and put on a new suede hat, something an Aussie cowboy might wear.

I don’t have the balls to wear something like that. Molly said.

Susan hesitated a moment, then said. I didn’t know that’s what it took.

Molly guffawed. You should. You’re the one who yelled ‘Kick her in the balls!’ when Dora and I were wrestling the other day.

I did? Susan was surprised.

Molly laughed again and shook her head. Where do you think we got the name for our wall in the kitchen? You’re funny and you don’t even know it.

Out in the hall, their classmate, Ed, stopped Susan. If Susan hadn’t known better she might have thought Ed was waiting for her.

Nice hat, Ed said. His teeth were big and white surrounded by a thick black curly beard and mutton chops.

Susan knew Ed. He’d dogged her ever since she’d asked that question about the blank space on Dostoevsky’s page. Ed didn’t care about the hat. He cared about getting laid and they both knew she wasn’t Ed’s type, so why he was bothering with her, Susan didn’t know.

What do you want, Ed?

Chapter 3

Ed lowered his voice. I need your help with—uh—finding women.

You can’t find them yourself? Susan asked in astonishment.

No. I mean, yes! I don’t need your help with that, Ed said. I need you to find me some tough chicks to hire for the Forest Service—the kind of women you know.

Susan wondered momentarily why Ed thought she knew tough chicks, but it was the Forest Service that grabbed her attention. What kind of job?

Fighting forest fire. The feds want to hire four women to the fire crew. It’s just an experiment, but I have to recruit them.

I want to fight forest fires. Hire me.

Uh—no. I can’t.

Why not?

Frankly? Because you’re a wuss.

But, I’ve always wanted to be a firefighter.

Oh. Right.

Really. Come on. Just let me apply.

You won’t get hired. Can’t you think of anyone else?

Susan thought a moment. What about Jeanette, that really good dancer? I bet she’s tough.

Ooh, yeah. She’s…mmm. Ed licked his lips. That’s good.

She probably won’t want to leave her boyfriend though. Where is this job anyway?

What? Ed jerked out of his fantasy. Oh. Hoodsport Canal, Olympic National Forest, no place you know.

I went to Girl Scout camp up there.

Oh. Wow. Girl Scout camp? Ed was not impressed. Don’t you have any other ideas?

Hmm, no, not at the moment. Let me have an application.

I told you, you’re not the right kind of woman for this job.

Don’t worry, Ed. I promise I’ll give it to some tough chick.

Ed reluctantly handed one over.

You can always hire me if you get desperate.

I won’t ever get that desperate.

Susan smiled and tucked the application into her backpack.

A crisp week of sunshine spun with migrating songbirds then succumbed to stormy March. Susan picked out her only professional looking clothes, a pair of khaki slacks, a white button down shirt and a brown corduroy shirt that could pass for a lady’s jacket. She brushed her hair smooth and put on a pair of earrings.

The previous fall, Susan, Brogan and a handful of other women had co-founded support services for victims of rape. It was the first of its kind, so they had to make it up as they went along. Even then, it was already better than the only alternative, the Salvation Army, who treated victims as fallen women in need of moral reform and salvation.

Now, they had been invited to speak to the Lions Club. Susan didn’t know how to prepare to talk to an all male club that collected eyeglasses. She cast the I Ching. The hexagram was Inner Truth, the image of pigs and fishes, the most difficult creatures to influence. Susan recalled how her dad had said that the name of their organization, Rape Relief, reminded him of a joke. This was the problem—how to unhook rape from a joke everyone thought they already knew. If she could make a dent in these guys maybe there was hope. At least Eleanor Goldberg would be speaking too. Eleanor was a silver fox who was neither harsh nor prone to pity with two decades of counseling at Planned Parenthood to back her.

Luncheon wound down as Susan and Eleanor arrived. The ladies hadn’t been invited to eat, which was just as well. Gray men in suits sat at linen covered tables alongside a few younger men in sport coats with hair closer to the color of their youth. Not old enough to be Susan’s father, nor young enough to be peers, they fell into another kind of gray area. Waiters in short black jackets choreographed the clatter of silverware, setting of desert plates and shush of coffee.

Eleanor began with what they’d gleaned in their first few months. It wasn’t much, but it was still more than anyone else knew. It appears that very few rapes ever get reported so police statistics grossly underestimate both the numbers and the nature of the crime. Women from all backgrounds are raped, all races, all ages, every socioeconomic level.

Susan watched the expressions of surprise and furrowed brows of skepticism.

Contrary to popular belief, rape is not an uncontrollable desire for sex. Rape is the desire to dominate, control and injure another person.

These words were new, hard to say and difficult to understand. It was so different from what everyone wanted to believe. Isn’t rape just overly enthusiastic sex? Every movie showed it that way — women begging for it.

It also looks like rapists are rarely strangers in dark alleys. He may be someone the woman knows, someone in a position of trust, even a family friend, or a relative.

The men shifted uncomfortably. Throats cleared. The smell of the room sharpened.

They don’t want to believe this, Susan thought. They don’t want rapists on the same continuum as ordinary men. Or, they think, if the woman knows the rapist, she must really have been asking for it.

The room lost depth. Men flattened to cutout characters. The spotlight on the platform was nauseatingly warm. Now, it was Susan’s turn to speak. The varnished edge of the podium slipped in her damp grasp. Susan used the term ‘they’ to make it easier.

Victims of rape are in shock and denial. They don’t know where to turn for help. They’re afraid that their family, friends, the doctors and police will treat them as if it’s their fault.

Heads dipped, whether in agreement, or with private doubts, or even into post lunch naps, Susan didn’t know.

Women remain silent fearing further injury to themselves or to people they care about. Those who do tell aren’t believed and aren’t supported and often, they wish they’d remained silent.

Susan felt like she was speaking underwater. It wasn’t enough. Her words didn’t carry.

The talk ended with polite applause and thanks from the club chairman who said, he was sure that the ladies provided a vital service to the community. Men shook hands with each other and avoided the ladies. Eleanor ducked into the restroom. The last two Lions finished their conversation. One left and the other came over to Susan. He shook Susan’s hand but didn’t introduce himself. Susan wished Eleanor were there.

I…uh…when my daughter was a teenager, the Lion said. She was raped by my business associate. I didn’t do anything about it.

Susan reeled but held her ground.

It would have ruined me, ruined my business, my position! He pushed his hands through his thinning hair.

Oh, I didn’t let him get near her again, but I didn’t do what I should have. I still regret it. His face was mottled as if he were very drunk. I still do business with the man. He was in this room today.

Susan couldn’t speak. She recalled an elderly woman with a silky white bun that had come to their first support group. A pale whispery rose, the woman had been coddled as damaged goods her whole life. She’d never left home, never fallen in love, had no friends, and had never really lived. That was the first layer of secrets — old women who’d told and paid the price and old women who’d never told and paid another price. Here was the next layer—men, fathers, who’d knowingly reneged.

Susan had assumed letting people talk would help. But, what help was it to listen to secrets they could do nothing about? Still, it was all they had; sit in a circle; let the stories be told. No one knew the truth. The only way to find out was to make it safe to speak, to tell. Susan sensed a coming storm of secrets. It was too late to stop it. The box had been opened. She wanted to get out of the way, but couldn’t move. Eleanor returned. The Lion had disappeared. In Eleanor’s car, Susan told her what the man had said. Eleanor didn’t respond. Susan noticed the new smell of the car and how gray it was.

At home, Susan stepped over the rabid newspaper on the porch. Stevie Wonder poured from the stereo. Dora danced in the kitchen. Molly’s Smith Corona hummed. Brogan’s feet were tucked under her in