For the People on the Edge of the Night*

I had my first panic attack while speeding south on I-75 in Tennessee in 2010.  I was heading back home to Asheville after visiting my mom in Northern Indiana, and it was an effort to safely pull over on the shoulder.  I sat there in my Subaru, heart racing, sweating, hyper-ventilating, crying, wondering what was going on with me. I didn’t think I was having a heart attack (although it felt like I thought a heart attack would feel like), I was pretty sure it was a panic attack.  It had been a rough few years, but this was the first clue, that I couldn’t ignore anyway, that I was a bit fucked up.  And it would be a very rough few more years ahead of me as I eventually tried to get myself to a good place. I would do risky, reckless things, hurt people I loved, and make some really stupid decisions along the way.  But I would also make some good decisions – like seeking help from professionals who did, in fact, help me a lot.  One continues to help me.  I’m still a work in progress, a flawed human.  But now I’m doing better mentally and physically than I probably ever have.

Last week I asked my therapist if anyone has done a study on whether people who experienced trauma in their childhood are attracted to jobs as first responders.  Growing up amid chaos, do we seek careers where we can overcome chaos?  Bring order to chaos.  We say that a lot in our profession of wildland firefighting.  That we are good at bringing order to chaos (and we are).  Are many of us striving to finally do as adults what we couldn’t do as kids — exert some control over our often violent and frightening and uncertain and tumultuous childhoods? She didn’t know, but she said it made a lot of sense, so there’s likely something to it.  Those of us who grew up in those situations adopt a lot of coping mechanisms that helped us survive.  And while those mechanisms are critical in self-protection, self-preservation, when we’re kids, they don’t always serve us well as adults.  They mostly do not.

##

In the summer of 1994, I was on my first Western fire assignment on a type 2 initial attack fire crew.  I was working for the FS on the Allegheny National Forest (ALF) in Pennsylvania, and the Western fire season was so bad they starting flying crews in from back East.  We ended up in WA state not long after the South Canyon Fire tragedy where 14 firefighters died on Storm King Mountain in CO.  My crew quickly gained a good reputation, and so we got moved around a lot to emerging fires.  For an Eastern T2IA crew, hell for any T2IA crew, we got a lot of cool assignments – fireline construction (even a little bit of hotline), firing, holding.

After about a week total on two different fires on the Colville National Forest, we ended up on a fire called the Tyee on the Wenatchee National Forest.  We got there in the early afternoon.  Fire camp was set up at a fish hatchery, and we were told to drop our gear in the gravel next to the empty fish runs.  I remember looking at a bunch of tents set up in a lovely shady area where the grass was bright green and looked soft as a pile of old quilts.  “Why can’t we set up over there?” I asked.  My Squad Boss, Randy, laughed.  “That’s for overhead. They always take the best spots.”  We dumped our gear, and, surprisingly, they sent us right out to the fire.  The bus dropped us off, the Crew Boss and Assistant got their briefing, passed it on to the Squad Bosses, and the 20 of us walked up a paved road behind a row of houses.  Randy lined us out and told us to watch for spot fires.  We were so spread out we couldn’t even see the other two squads.  But we could see the fire up on a ridge in the distance.  The wind was blowing, the sky orange.  We hadn’t been there long at all before we noticed the fire pushing downhill towards us.  Fast.  Randy shouted above the wind “Let’s go, time to GO!” motioning with his arms to follow. The sky got darker and the fire got louder.  I followed the person in front of me, eyes on his or her back, tucked in close, as we cut through someone’s back yard.  We popped out onto a state highway and waited for the rest of our crew.  The residents who hadn’t yet evacuated were jumping into their packed vehicles and tearing out of their driveways and up the highway.  The two other squads showed up along with the Crew Boss and Assistant.  We formed into our line and began hauling ass up the highway.

And then the noise.  The nearly deafening noise of a freight train that everyone talked about.  I remember thinking “Wow, a fire blowing up really does sound like that.”  Vehicles streamed past us – evacuees, overhead in their trucks, agency engines.  And then the big structural fire engines, the pavement queens, pulling out of driveways, speeding past us, red lights reflecting off the windows of the homes.  The sky darkened, our pace quickened, the fire got closer.  Leaves, pine cones, small twigs swirled around us.  A pickup truck stopped “Get in!” someone yelled. “There’s 20 of us, go on!” someone from the crew yelled back.  I just kept my eyes on the person in front of me.  Suddenly someone at the head of the crew stopped.  A blond woman in shorts and a t-shirt was screaming at us from her driveway across the road “HELP US!  Please, help us save our house!”  A rookie started across the road toward her and someone off the crew stopped her.  “You need to leave! We can’t help you, you need to go NOW!” the Assistant Crew Boss shouted at the woman.  And then we started jogging.  I remember catching up with other crews or maybe it was just one crew. It was dark like night, the streetlights were on.  I was now next to my friend Diane who was on my squad.  She had way more fire experience than I had.  She had worked on an engine on the Angeles NF in southern CA and taught me a lot.  I knew I’d be okay if I just stuck next to her. Suddenly a large black bear was running from the fire with us and then past us. Diane and I looked at each other, wide-eyed but silent, and just kept going.  So did the bear.  And there were deer running with us as well.  At least we were all going in the same direction.  Eventually the sky ahead of us began to lighten, the roar of the fire abated behind us, we slowed to a walk and pushed on to a staging area where other resources were now gathering.  I looked at my watch, surprised it was only about 1600.  The fire-darkened sky had fooled me into thinking it was nighttime.  “Take a break but stay together,” the Crew Boss said as he and the assistant went to tie in with overhead.  The immediate danger over, we drank water, we high fived each other and laughed and smiled.  “Holy shit, did you guys see that bear?”  “Wow, I didn’t think we were gonna get out of there!” “Did you hear the noise of that thing?”  “I saw a giant pine cone fly through the air!”  “I wonder how many houses burned?” We were high on adrenaline and being alive.  What a rush.

Back at fire camp that night we were told to not set up any of our tents but to sleep in our Nomex clothes on top of or inside our sleeping bags with our shelters next to us.  There were concerns the fire would get close enough for us to have to evacuate camp.  The night was warm, and I unbuttoned my Nomex shirt that was over a cotton t-shirt and untucked it from my pants.  I had taken my boots off, and I’d snugged my fire shelter up against my hip.  I gazed up at the mountain; the fire had laid down for the night, but the hillside was dotted with flames and embers still burning in tree tops and stumps and downed logs. I fell asleep thinking it was lovely and frightening at the same time.

The next day we headed out to the fire in our bus.  We ended up driving up the highway we’d run down the day before.  We were all silent as we drove past the burned homes.  Well, what was left of them.  There were a few still standing, but many had burned down to foundations, their brick chimneys naked amidst the rubble, shells of vehicles in their driveways.

Later that summer, on the Boise National Forest in Idaho, after a burnout gone bad, my crew had to prepare a shelter deployment site.  My Crew Boss, Steve, had seen it coming, tried to talk the Division Supe out of lighting it off.  They lit it off anyway and it was immediately gone, cutting off the escape route to our safety zone.  Our bus was parked to head us out and down the way we came in, and that route, and the bus turnaround, were now cut off as well.  Our bus driver, Burt, was a retired Pan Am pilot who flew jumbo jets to Europe.  Worried our bus was going to catch fire, the Strike Team Leader and our Crew Boss sent our Assistant Crew Boss to have Burt back the bus up the windy, single-lane forest road as far as he could.  We hadn’t been up that way, didn’t know if there was a safe place for Burt, Jim and the bus, but they decided to give it a shot.  The rest of the crew’s attention was focused on scraping down to bare soil in a small opening and caching our saws, fuels, and fusees away from this location.  I was fucking scared.  I remember my legs shaking while I was bent over digging down to dirt.  Steve gathered us all up.  Man, he was calm and cool.  “Okay, here’s how it’s going to go.  We’re going to sit here and hopefully not have to use our shelters.  But if we do, I’ll say when, and I want everyone to deploy with their squads and I want you packed in together like sardines.  Remember, feet towards the fire.”  He glanced up and across a small draw where the Park Service crew was doing the same.  “And someone go tell that crew to take the fusees out of their packs.”  In those days the training was to keep your pack on when you went into your shelter, and a fusee stowed in your pack could ignite from the fire’s heat.

We didn’t have to deploy that day.  The fire blew around us, and we had to sit there for hours late into the night until it was safe enough to leave.  We listened to the trees crashing around us, loosened rocks and boulders rolling down the slopes.  When he felt it was safe enough, Steve called Jim on the radio to come down with the bus and get us.  I was so happy to see our yellow school bus and Burt and Jim.  As we got on the bus, we all high-fived Burt.  I sat close to the front and heard Jim telling Steve about Burt backing the bus up.  Jim said there were quite a few switch backs and drop-offs and that Burt backed that bus up like it was nothing.  He said they probably backed a couple miles up the road and Burt never broke a sweat or acted like it was any big deal.  Compared to a 747 that bus was practically like driving a sports car.  Someone wondered aloud if we could request that all our bus drivers were retired jumbo jet pilots.

And I loved it.  All of it.  Everything.

##

Those experiences weren’t uncommon just to us.  Everyone who does this has stories like mine.  Some even more harrowing.  It is the job.  It is wildland fire.

I would go on to work a season on a hotshot crew, then on engines, and do a little bit of helitack.  I moved into fuels, and then got the Chief 2 job on the Klamath NF in Northern CA.  During my three plus years on the Klamath we had two non-line of duty deaths from our fire ranks.  Woody missed a curve and drove his vehicle off the road and into the Scott River during the winter when he was laid off.  A couple years later Mike missed a curve driving his motorcycle home from work.  In 2006 and 2007 we had helicopter crashes that killed all three pilots.  In 2008 first we had two people from a caterer hired to feed folks on one of our big fires drown in the Klamath River while swimming on their day off.  Shortly after that we had a burn-over fatality on one of our Type 3 fires.  In 2009 one of our hotshot crews had a buggy rollover after being clipped by a semi, the truck driver having fallen asleep.  Later that summer a forestry technician off our other hotshot crew was run over by a water tender in fire camp as she slept in her sleeping bag.

I tell people those three years on the Klamath were the best and worst years of my career.  I found my favorite wolf pack, my best boss ever, while learning so much.  But after three years of demanding fire seasons, a lot of death, serious injuries, and loss I was Fucked Up.  Capital letters.  I had gotten sideways with my boss on the Klamath, and back in Indiana my mom’s health continued to decline.  When the Forest FMO job opened up on the National Forests in North Carolina (NFsNC) I applied and was hired.  I’ve moved around a lot, and moving on is always bittersweet, but leaving the Klamath NF was the most difficult departure from a job I’ve ever made.  After everything many of us had been through together, I felt like I was abandoning my best friends.

I was hoping the pace and grind of the job in NC would be slower, easier than on the Klamath.  It was different, but it wasn’t slower or easier.  The job had been vacant for over a year, and a lot of stuff had fallen through the cracks. One of the largest fire programs in the Southeast, the NFsNC consisted of four national forests, eight ranger districts, stretching from the TN border east all the way to the coast.  We had 11 engines, a hotshot crew, three tractor plows, and three dozers.  The mountains of the SE US enjoy a split fire season – spring and fall.   When we weren’t fighting our own fires and prescribed burning, we were supporting the Western Fire season.  Hardly a break at all.  And there were some pretty big gaps in the program – lack of adherence to important policies, out of date SOPs, major inconsistencies across the districts. I was frustrated that several managers on the forest weren’t interested in improving the program.  I felt like Sisyphus on a daily basis.  I found myself angry much of the time.  What I didn’t know then, but I’ve since learned, is that constant anger is common expression of grief.  I didn’t know what to do with it, so I took it out on a lot of the people around me.

So.  Panic attack on I-75.  I remember lying in bed with my husband that night, breaking down crying, telling him about my panic attack.  And out it came.  Why won’t they listen to me about what they need to do here?  Why is everything a fucking fight?  What if someone dies again on my watch?  After 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots died on the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013, a good friend of mine who was on the fire told me that when he went home he just could not deal with the day to day petty bullshit at work.  He was incredulous.  He’d just been a part of 19 firefighters dying, and people at work were bitching about who didn’t wash out a fucking coffee cup in the break room.  Of course, they had no idea what he’d been through.  They were just going about their normal lives, yet he was profoundly changed by what he’d been through.  Looking back, that was what was going on with me.  In NC I didn’t talk about what I’d been through in CA.  Only my close friends knew, and they didn’t know the details, and didn’t know how much I was struggling.  So, of course, no one could know how desperate I was that none of the folks under me would go through anything bad.  I wanted them to just take my word for things, to respect my experience and knowledge.  I didn’t want to play the Klamath card, and I really didn’t.  But I also didn’t want to escort another body home or face the wife of another dead firefighter.  I wanted to spare everyone that, but I didn’t want to tell them what I’d been through because I was afraid they would think me risk averse at best, not up to the job at worst.  For a while I lived in constant dread of the “next bad thing” happening.  In the meantime, my mom died suddenly, and five beloved pets crossed the Rainbow Bridge.  More loss, more sorrow.

I felt desperate and crazy.  But what finally drove me to find a therapist wasn’t panic attacks, nightmares, my anger, or my reckless actions.  What finally got me to make the call was I couldn’t pass the damn pack test (wildland firefighter fitness test).  I’d wrecked my knee really bad when I crashed my little Yamaha in my driveway at the end of summer 2008.  It was a long two-year recovery, and when it was time to take the pack test I kept getting hurt.  I jacked up my Achilles tendon.  Then I broke a bone in my foot taking it.  Just walking with the pack.  I had to surgery to have a permanent screw inserted.  In 2014 I started to have severe pain in my legs and back.  I couldn’t walk more than 50 yards without having to stop, my lower legs so tight they felt like concrete.  A friend said, “Maybe your body is trying to tell you you’re done fighting fire.”  I was actually worried it was my mind telling me that.  And that my mind was recruiting my body to make sure.  I went from doctor to doctor.  I tried acupuncture, medical massage therapy, stretching.  I had a cardiac stress test and ultrasound to rule-out blockage in my femoral arteries.  I was despondent to think this was all “in my head.”  That my mind had roped my body into betraying me.  I would try to take the pack test, and not even get a quarter mile in when I’d have to stop. I was embarrassed.  And scared.  What if this was it?  What if I couldn’t fight fire anymore?  Sure, I was an FMO, but I was also a firefighter.  I wasn’t ready to leave the fireline.

I did what any 21st century human being would do and started Googling.  I came across Somatic Sensing, which is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders.  It talked about how unresolved trauma is often manifested into physical ailments, but that Somatic Sensing could also use the body to heal trauma.  Sounded right up my alley, and there was a therapist who specialized in it in the same building as my primary doctor.  Well, it wasn’t.  Up my alley, I mean.  It did not work for me.  I tried it several times, I wanted it to work, I was desperate for it to work.  But it was not my jam.  Meanwhile I continued to do stupid shit, mostly in my personal life.

It was the back doctor who finally figured it out.  He thought I may have spinal stenosis, which is not a good thing to have, and sent me to get an MRI.  When he told me I didn’t have it, I broke down crying.  I should’ve been elated I didn’t have spinal stenosis, but I thought I was still without answers.  This man was so kind, so compassionate.  And then he said, “I think you might have compartment syndrome in your legs.”  Wait.  What?  “Rhabdo?” I said.   “No, they’re often both called that, but I think you have the chronic kind, not the critical kind.  It’s pretty unusual.  We have a doctor on staff who specializes in it.  I’m going to get you an appointment with him.  In the meantime, go home and look it up.”  Huh, a doctor actually telling me to GTS (Google that shit).  “What about my back pain?”  “Well, you do have arthritis in your L4 and L5, which is causing some of your pain, but I think the problems with your legs is affecting your back by throwing off your gait.”

I did exactly what he told me to do, and I went home and looked it up.   Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome wasn’t even on WebMD.  I found it on the Mayo Clinic website.  While not classified as rare, it is an uncommon condition, and one that typically strikes people in their 20s and 30s (score one for the old chick).  They didn’t know what caused it.  The only sure cure was surgery.  The website said try to find a doctor who performed 2-3 surgeries a year.  That’s how unusual.   And it sounded like that’s exactly what I had.  The test was to do physical activity and then have the doc insert a probe into the calf muscle to measure the pressure. Ouch.  When I went for my appointment the doctor asked me about all my symptoms, what brought it on, what it felt like, etc.  And then he said, “I don’t need to give you the test, you have it.”  Whew.  I was elated.  I nearly wept with relief.  Finally, I knew what was physically wrong with me.  “Surgery is the only cure for you.  I’ll have to slice open the fascia in both legs.”  “At the same time?” I asked  “Yes.”  “How many of these do you do?”  “Oh, two to three a year.”  Bingo!  Hired.  I had surgery in December of 2014, over eight months into the ordeal.  It was a success, and I was back working out in no time.

##

Now I had to try to work on my mental demons again.  *sigh*  I’d had two more panic attacks, but I didn’t tell anyone, not even my husband.  I actually drove myself to the hospital late one night when he was out of town, because I began to wonder maybe I really was having a heart attack.  Nope, the ticker was fine.

I decided to once again try to find a therapist.  I wanted to find one who worked with first responders, but I came up empty.  I was fortunate that I was living in Asheville, NC, a decent sized city with numerous therapists from which to choose.  I wanted a woman, a PhD, and someone who specialized in trauma.  I looked through several profiles on the Psychology Today website over the course of many days and kept going back to the same one.  I looked at her web page and liked what she had on it, and I was happy to see she took my insurance.  I felt a good vibe. I took the leap and emailed her.   And found myself back in therapy.  And this time it clicked.

A PTSD diagnosis that I reluctantly accepted.  You see, I hadn’t thought I’d earned it.  I wasn’t under the helicopters when they crashed.  I wasn’t one of the employees who found Mike’s body the day after he went missing.  I wasn’t on the fire when the firefighter died inside his shelter.  I didn’t witness the hotshot buggy rollover.  I wasn’t on the ground when one of our LEOs and his K-9 Officer were murdered during a manhunt on the forest in NC.  It looked like many of my fellow co-workers weren’t struggling like I was.  Maybe they were and were just good at hiding it.  And maybe they weren’t.  One of my best friends was with her team in Washington DC after 9/11 and it messed her up.  She finally sought help and just needed a session or two to put her back on track.  Dr. B was able to explain to me that it doesn’t always have to be a big, “Capital T” trauma to mess us up.  She said a lot of little traumas could cumulatively build up, overwhelming our abilities to process and handle these events. Chronic or complex trauma.  And she said I needed to stop comparing myself to others, we all have our own journeys. I’d had some pretty big Capital T traumas as a child.  And then over the course of my career, like so many of us, endured numerous smaller, yet not insignificant, traumas.  Not saying that the fatalities and accidents on the Klamath were necessarily little “ts.”  They were not.  Dr B and I did talk therapy, and she also guided me through Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which I’d heard about from some of my friends who’d found relief with it.  It all helped a lot.  I started to feel more myself, less angry, less afraid of the next bad thing happening.  More in control.  Less self-destructive.  Don’t get me wrong, EMDR and talk therapy were not a quick fix nor a miracle cure.  It took a lot of hard work.  Therapy was uncomfortable and difficult.  Dr B often gave me homework to do.  There were days I didn’t want to go to my appointment.  But I always went, because the discomfort, the raw emotions, the terrible memories were worth it.  Worth me getting myself back.

That summer, 2015, I passed the pack test for the first time in years.  Between my leg surgery and therapy, I finally got into shape and stopped sabotaging myself.  I had to start over as a Division Supervisor Trainee because my qual had lapsed, but I made it out to Idaho and got signed off.  Again. And I was prouder of that than the first time.

Therapy couldn’t save my marriage.  And as Dr B said, her job wasn’t to “save” marriages but to help couples figure out what they wanted to do, and then help them through that.  Out of respect to my ex I won’t go into details here, but the best thing for me was to leave my marriage.  It will always be the greatest sadness of my life.

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I am certainly not one to judge, but there are a lot of fucked up people in our profession — many of my close friends belong in this group. Some are doing better, some are not. Some have gotten help, some have not.  As I asked my current therapist recently, are those of us who experienced childhood trauma drawn to this profession, already bringing the little “t” event with us?  Who knows?  And you know what?  It doesn’t really matter.  The job is a meat grinder and can wear you all the way down even if you had the perfect Brady Bunch childhood.

You don’t have to be exposed to trauma to struggle in this profession.  As I referenced in a previous essay, the demands are extremely challenging.  I have several dear friends and colleagues who struggle with depression.  The Black Dog visits them periodically.  EVERYONE struggles at some point, and there should be no shame in that.  No shame in reaching out, asking for help.  I think it takes great strength to do so.  My message here is if you’re struggling, then try really hard to get yourself some help.  Self-diagnosing yourself with PTSD without seeking professional help won’t heal you.  Crawling into a bottle every night won’t permanently keep your demons at bay.  Asking your friend to hold onto your firearm until the Black Dog leaves is only a band-aid.  You can’t wait for the agency to help you, either.  Look, I know it’s fucking hard; not just the work you have to do in therapy but finding a therapist.  I’ve lived in small, rural towns where there weren’t a lot, if any, options.  The EAP doesn’t have a lot of clinicians on the rolls, especially in small towns., but give it a try.  And sometimes you have to go through a couple to find the right one for you.  If the EAP doesn’t work for you, and you have health insurance, find someone who takes your provider.  Many therapists will work on a sliding scale.  ASK.

Damn, this essay is LONG.  And writing it was not easy.  I’m an extremely private person.  And while I’m not ashamed or embarrassed to talk about it, it’s highly personal.  I just don’t talk about these things.  In my younger days, especially as a woman in fire who had to constantly prove I’d earned my spot, I would’ve been afraid to talk about this.  Afraid it would show me as weak, not tough enough for the work.  But my proving days are over, and now I’m on a quest to normalize talking about mental health and well-being.  And if I can’t share my own experiences then it’s just lip-service.  I need to walk the talk.  One of my favorite bosses, who himself just went through some pretty tough stuff at work, recently said that leaders need to talk about their own struggles in the hope that it makes it okay for others to also do so.  To ask for help.  To seek getting better.  To heal.

Too long after I moved to OR I realized I still needed to put in some work, so I found myself a new therapist.  I worked with her regularly for a full year and then didn’t need sessions as often.  Just an occasional “tune up” as I call them.  Then during the fire activity after the big wind event — when I was neck deep in evacuations, when there were moments I had to sit in my truck and cry, when I couldn’t sleep — she checked in on me via email.  She’s over an hour away, but I take sick leave for my visits.  She doesn’t take my insurance, but she adjusted her fee for me.  I turn in the expenses to my Health Savings Account and pay the rest out of pocket, which I’m able to afford at my GS level.  And it’s worth it.  I am worth it.  YOU ARE WORTH IT.

Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can’t we give love that one more chance?
Why can’t we give love, give love, give love, give love,
Give love, give love, give love, give love, give love.
‘Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word,
and love dares you to care for the people on the
edge of the night, and love dares you to
change our way of caring about ourselves.
This is our last dance.
This is ourselves. This is ourselves.

 *From “Under Pressure” by David Bowie and Queen