Akhil Sharma Has Arrived.

DATE July 20, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Filler: By policy of WHYY, this information is restricted and has
been omitted from this transcript

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Interview: Murray Taylor talks about his experiences jumping fires
TERRY GROSS, host:

Murray Taylor is a smoke jumper. He fights wildfires in remote regions by
parachuting into the periphery of the fire. He's been at it since the
mid-'60s, and now at the age of 59, is the oldest practicing smoke jumper.
He's jumped fires in seven western states, Canada and Alaska, where he's based
during the fire season. He has a new memoir based on his experiences called
"Jumping Fire." This has been a bad fire season, but his season got off to a
slow start. In late April, the Bureau of Land Management placed a moratorium
on smoke jumping, while it investigated the accidental death of smoke jumper
caused by a faulty parachute. The moratorium was lifted July 10th. I asked
Murray Taylor to describe what he's looking for, when he's looking down on a
fire from the air.

Mr. MURRAY TAYLOR (Smoke Jumper): A fire usually is headed in some
direction. Due to the topography, it's burning uphill, or due to the wind,
it's burning into the West, or whatever. And we look at the fire in four
different parts. There's the tail, back at the back end of the fire, and then
there's the head, up in the end where the wind is blowing it. And then--so
looking from the tail is the left flank and the right flank. And we always
discuss fires in terms of what we see on the left flank, the right flank, what
the head looked like it was doing and how cool it was back at the tail.

We typically begin to search for--in the air, as we fly around--some opening,
some clearing, some little bit of a meadow. Maybe a kind of a brush patch in
the timber, where near the tail, preferably downhill from it, so that the fire
couldn't have a tree fall down below us and the fire come up from below us.
And the spotter will come back after he's discussed that with the pilot, and
we'll select that spot. And then we'll jump down there near the tail
somewhere.

GROSS: Do you feel the heat of the fire when you're parachuting down?

Mr. TAYLOR: Sometimes. I know one time, I did something spontaneously and I
think if anybody could've seen it from my perspective, they would've judged it
to be completely foolish, if not outright crazy. I was coming in on a landing
at a certain angle, looking at sort of a rocky slope on a steep ridge, and I
was going to shoot high. The way the wind was buffeting around, I was going
to overshoot the spot and maybe clear the ridge and then drift right on down
the other side. And the only thing I could do, I just turned really hard to
the right and made an S-turn right out over the forest. And the part that I
flew out over, I was probably about 300 feet above it, but there were flame
lengths down in the forest that were completely as tall as the canopy, and the
trees were 100 feet tall. And so for just maybe 10 or 15 seconds, I was
directly out above a totally involved, completely catastrophic burning forest.
And I depended on the drive of that parachute to be able to drive back off of
that and get back in at a better angle and come in on the jump spot, right?
And it worked out just fine.

GROSS: Is that the closest you've ever come to landing in a fire?

Mr. TAYLOR: No. I've actually landed in fires, but they've been sort of
cool, you know, by the time--every now and then, you'll get buffeted over and
maybe pushed into an area where it's not really life-threatening, but it maybe
put some burn holes in your canopy and it's an embarrassment that you landed
in the fire and really uncomfortable. But I don't--smoke jumpers have never
landed in a fire where they were burned from the jump.

GROSS: Do you think of fires as being alive?

Mr. TAYLOR: I notice that they seem to act like they're alive. And I've
heard other jumpers say it's like an animal or a living creature, but I know
they're not alive; I know they're mindless. I know they would turn and come
after you with no more hesitation, you know, than it takes to burn up a bush,
they would burn a whole crew. So what fire has is a predictable behavior.
You can--and experienced firemens look at their fire, they know it
immediately; what to do. Because they look at it, they look at the stage of
development that it's in. They know what it'll probably do next, if the wind
comes up, if the temperature goes up, or if the smoke breaks through an
inversion, or if it burns around in a south hill slot side, which is warmer
and dryer. So experienced firemen recognize and are quite familiar with the
behavior of fire, as it builds from just as big around as a campfire until it
builds into a blow-up condition. And so because of that, you can sort of
interpret what it's doing. In most cases, you can sort of anticipate what
it's doing. But it does have this awesome, powerful allure to it. It's
beautiful, and it's one of nature's great wonders at work. And we enjoy being
close to something that beautiful and that powerful.

GROSS: Did you ever have a fire come after you? You know, like the wind
shifts its direction in your direction, and suddenly, the territory that you
were on, which had been safe, is no longer safe?

Mr. TAYLOR: Yes, I have. That's happened a half dozen times in my 35 years
of firefighting. Surprisingly, the last two closest calls I've had have
happened in the last three years. I had a close call in 1997, where that very
thing happened and the situation deteriorated so rapidly that the crew was
right on the verge of collapsing all form of organization. I think they were
going to run for it on their own, which is sort of a desperate condition to be
in because a quarter of a mile of fireline just stood up and suddenly burned
across our line, burned our hose and cut off our route to our safety zone.
And then it happened again just south of Delta last summer. It was the most
radical fire behavior that many of us had ever seen in Alaska. It was a
combination of strange--two events happened simultaneously. The fire was
about 40 acres; it suddenly blew up on the head, because it was in that time
of the afternoon where the heat was maximized and it had preheated a lot of
fuel. And suddenly, it stood up with a big wall of flame about 80 feet tall
out on the head, pushed a huge giant smoke column way up into the sky. And
then the typical wind pattern there around Delta is that this wind blows north
through Isabell Pass every afternoon. And suddenly, we had a 30- to
35-mile-an-hour wind hit the fire. And when that did, it bent the smoke
column over. You could see the smoke column laying over, and on both sides,
there were these weird-looking braided columns of smoke kind of looping up the
side.

And then suddenly, that wind pushing against that column spun two kind of
rotating vortexes. And so suddenly, we had this terrible roar out inside in
the fire. We couldn't see it and we were yelling, `What's that roar? What's
that roar?' And we started evacuating back down the line, and the crew on the
far side, on the west side, they had to abandon--well, they had to run back up
up this Cat land, where this tractor was working, and then they ran into the
burn. and the vortex over there actually hit one of the guys and burned him
fairly badly.

On our side, this terrible roar was in the burn, and you could see this huge
cloud of brown and grey ash just swirling out in the middle about 100 feet in
diameter. And then you saw this snakey kind of a grey snake going up into the
sky, and the roar suddenly increased. And the vortex came out of the block,
into the green, and then the ash was gone. And it revealed a cylinder about
30 feet in diameter that was kind of pink and orange. And it was a tornado of
fire. And we've seen fire devils before, and everybody's seen those in
regular fires and they usually aren't that big. They're smaller. I mean,
they can pick up logs that are 10 feet long and a foot in diameter and just
spin 'em up into the air and even carry them away. But this thing was
something more. I don't know. The velocity at the edge of it had to be in
excess of 150 miles an hour.

GROSS: How did you get out of it?

Mr. TAYLOR: Well, I got out of it. You know, I was the closest to it when
it came out of there. It kept coming closer to me, and the way the rest of us
were, the other guys ran for this creek and I happened to be just the the
closest and the darn thing was dancing around like they do those kind of weave
around one way and another. And it seemed like every direction I went, that
was the way it was coming. And when it got within about 30 feet of where I
was, then I turned and started to run. I knew I had to run some more and this
thing was throwing sparks out in all parts around the perimeter, and the
second those sparks hit, they just became running fire.

And so that quickly, I was surrounded and running in fire, and I was looking
for a waterhole to dive in. And the first one I saw was just a mud hole
because it was really dry last summer. And then I had that terrible moment of
recognition that firefighters think about once in a while where what you're
seeing is sort of a nightmare and it's your worst fear come true. Now you're
surrounded by fire, and you think that maybe this is the time. Maybe you
stayed one season too long and maybe one fire too long and maybe, in fact,
your career is going to end by being burned to death.

And I remember feeling that terrible recognition, but just like that and I was
running, and then that fire devil thing kind of whipped back away from me and
sucked back the other way into the burn again. The main smoke column must've
pulled it back. And so then it kind of danced back to the north and then it
just whipped across the ground and just tore right out to the north, just
streamed across a road and blew out past our gear and sucked a bunch of the
parachutes up into the air, and just like that, 20 acres were on fire. And so
like that--then when the thing was going around me, those little fires just
kind of petered out, and I ran over to the road. And we all started
high-fiving and jumping around on each other, and talking about what we had
just seen for a moment. The winds were, like, 50 miles an hour.

So that was lucky. You know, you have to say that that was luck. I've talked
to the young smoke jumpers before and we've talked about dangerous parts of
the job, and I told them, `You know, in smoke jumping, there's luck and
there's skill, and if I had to choose between either one, I'd take luck every
time.'

GROSS: Right. There's only a certain amount that's in your control.

Mr. TAYLOR: Yeah.

GROSS: So after narrowly escaping this tornado-like fire and after
high-fiving it with your fellow smoke jumpers once you realized you'd
survived, then did you get right back to work?

Mr. TAYLOR: Well, we went over to our gear pile that was kind of in a
clearing and we got around there. The fire was going in all directions at
that time, and we'd heard that Jay had been burned. And so when Jay got
there, we were shook up when we saw how Jay was. So we got a helicopter in
there and got Jay out. But once we got Jay out and had a bite to eat and then
the fire boss, the state person that was sort of running that fire got us on
the radio, sent a helicopter and picked us up, yeah, we just backed off to a
new place. Some of us went across a creek where there had been a spot fire
across that creek we worked out that night. Yeah, we fought that fire for the
next three days, actually, to no avail. We had a half a dozen Cat tractors
cut 40 miles of land, and we lost the fire everyday.

GROSS: You lost everyday?

Mr. TAYLOR: Yeah. We worked hard. That Friday was when the incident
happened when people almost got burned, and then we worked Saturday and we
lost the fire after that whole day of effort. Saturday, it just blew up
across our Cat lines, and then we lost it Sunday. And then we lost it Monday.
So by Monday, it was 18,000 acres and burned by Pump Station 9 across the
Richardson Highway, and was headed toward Fort Greely.

GROSS: Did you finally control it?

Mr. TAYLOR: Yeah, you might say that. One of the things about forest fires,
once they get up big and rolling, you know, you got to have Mother Nature's
help to control them. If we don't catch them initially and stop them once
they get rollin' big, you kind of have to have a change in the weather. And
we finally got a change of weather in about a week and then got crews out and
got around it. But we had to have Mother Nature's help at that point.

GROSS: Well, at the age of 59, you're now the oldest smoke jumper in the
60-year history of smoke jumping. And I'm wondering if being older has
changed your attitude about risk and your own mortality?

Mr. TAYLOR: No, not really. I think as I've gotten older and seen all the
different--you know, there's been losses; there's been sacrifices over time.
I think it's made even more firm in my mind the notion that a life fully lived
is worth dying for. If you want to experience life, if you're prone to
experience life in a real intense way on the edge, as some people are, I think
part of the bargain is--and this might be a self-serving sort of a
rationalization, I don't know--but, you know, we believe sort of in fate. I
think people that do risky things sort of do. But the overall benefit of
being a smoke jumper and working with such a wonderful group of people and
experiencing so many magnificent places in the wilderness and parts of the
country and the fabulous characters that you get to meet and be part of, yeah,
there's a price to pay. And every now and then, you know, we offer somebody
up on that sacrificial altar, and it's tragic. But for me, if I live to be
200 years old, I'd jump 150 years. It's been wonderful, it's been empowering,
it's transformed me. I've watched it do that to other people. They come in
to the experience and feeling one way about theirselves, and after a few
seasons as a jumper, they got more bounce in their step and they've got a new
expanded sense of what they are.

GROSS: I wish you good luck, and I want to thank you so much for talking with
us.

Mr. TAYLOR: Well, thank you, Terry. It was great to talk with you.

GROSS: Murray Taylor's new memoir is called, "Jumping Fire." This will be
his last season as a smoke jumper. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews the
new novel "The Obedient Father." This is FRESH AIR.

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Profile: Maureen Corrigan reviews the book "An Obedient Father"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Short story writer Akhil Sharma recently won the Village Voice literary
supplement's Year 2000 Writer's On The Verge award. Book critic Maureen
Corrigan says forget about The Verge; Sharma has arrived. Here's a review of
his debut novel, "An Obedient Father."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN (Book Critic):

Even those of us who like to think of ourselves as semi-sophisticated readers
can still be completely emotionally conned by a deft, unreliable narrator. I
should've known better after the first few pages of reading "An Obedient
Father," a first novel by Indian-born writer Akhil Sharma. The narrator here
is named Ram Karan, he's a government official in the Delhi school system and
a good-natured bribe-taker. That fact alone should've put me on the alert,
but how can you not like a guy who describes his performance at work like
this: `My general incompetence and laziness had been apparent for so long. I
am the type of person who does not make sure that a file includes all the
pages it must have, or that the pages are in the right order. I refuse to
accept even properly placed blame, lying outright that somebody else had
misplaced the completed forms or spilled tea on them, even though the soggy
pages are still on my desk.'

All this is common for a certain type of civil servant who knows that he is
viewed with disdain by his superiors and that he cannot lose his job. Ram is
a lovable rogue, or so I thought, a kind of modern Indian offshoot of Dickens'
Micawber. And that amiable impression of Ram never completely disappears,
even as it's crowded aside by another nastier picture.

One evening, when Ram returns from his office to the cramped, slum apartment
he shares with his widowed daughter, Anita, and his 8-year-old granddaughter
Asha, he calls Asha to his bedside and casually, lovingly, begins brushing
himself against her. That scene, which Sharma renders in a short paragraph,
is so astonishing, I must've read it about three times. Afterwards, I knew
that not only had I been played for a fool by Ram, but up to that point by the
novel, too, because "An Obedient Father" first presents itself as a comic romp
through corrupt Indian politics and the lunacies of everyday life in his
teeming city. But after awhile, it also simultaneously begins to read like a
tale of escalating psychological terror. Towards the end, I even kept
thinking of Henry James' "Turn of the Screw," where characters in isolated
circumstances also drive themselves mad. And the fact that Sharma can keep
these two wildly disparate moods in motion within the same novel testifies to
what a fine and ruthless writer he is. A lesser novelist would've weakened
and redeemed his main character, Ram, somehow. Instead, in Ram, Sharma
creates a morally baffling anti-hero, who's a testament to the off-times
geniality of evil.

Back to that crucial scene, Ram's abuse of Asha is thwarted by his daughter
Anita, who walks past his room at a critical moment. Shortly thereafter, we
learn in stomach-turning detail that Ram repeatedly raped Anita when she was
just about Asha's age. But she's stuck living with him now because in the
harsh reality of impoverished Indian society, who else is going to take in a
widow and child? As their present-day relationship deteriorates into a
one-on-one grapple to the death, the world around Ram also crumbles. When
Prime Minister Elect Rajiv Ghandi is assassinated, Ram's political patrons
scramble for power, involving him in a series of dirty deals and ultimately
leaving him out front and vulnerable.

In the dizzying climax of "An Obedient Father," armed thugs raid Ram's
apartment. Anita, like the ancient mariner, walks from the houses of her
relatives to those of Ram's bosses, telling them of his horrible sexual
crimes. And still, I found myself half rooting for this monster. Why?
Because he sometimes made me laugh; because he stepped into a mob and saved a
family of Sikhs from being slaughtered; because he knew how to make himself
seductively pitiful. So by the end of reading "An Obedient Father," there I
was, conned again.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "An Obedient Father," by Akhil Sharma.

(Credits given)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

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