By Michael Miner
What Rhoades actually said, according to the report of his official debriefing, was this: “We’re going to have to resurrect Norman Maclean to tell this story.” Norman Maclean was the author of the classic Young Men and Fire, and he was the father of John Maclean.
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Death came in 1990 when Norman Maclean was 87. His son divided the manuscript into chapters and added three brief transitions, and Young Men and Fire was published to enormous acclaim in 1992.
John Maclean understands what his father went through technically as well as spiritually. “He was having trouble organizing the narrative, and it showed,” he says, speaking of the first draft. “It was very difficult to read. He then worked on it ten years, and instead of telling the story of the fire he told his own story. Young Men and Fire is the story of my father’s investigation of a life he might have lived, of a death he might have died, of a fire he might have fought.
“Would you like to take on Young Men and Fire on your first book out, and know that no matter how good your book was it was going to be compared to the mythic qualities of Young Men and Fire, and if it wasn’t good you were going to have to live with the reality of not having matched up with your father?”
The blowup had found Mackey at the top of a ridge, a place of relative safety, but he’d headed back downhill to lead other firefighters out. A few minutes later the inferno overwhelmed his cluster scrambling up the gulch’s west face, and Mackey somehow got to his feet and turned back again, toward Bonnie Holtby, the woman firefighter last in line.
Unlike his father, who teased his tale from memory and inference and placed himself necessarily at its center, John Maclean could interview dozens of witnesses and read thousands of pages of reports. “When I sat down to write the book,” he says, “my father was–meaning no disrespect to him–sort of a negative. Because he’d taken such a particular narrative line I couldn’t follow it. I had to sort out my own story, and I had a more complicated story than he did to sort out. I had 49 people on Storm King Mountain when the fire blew up, not 16 in Mann Gulch. The fire had been burning three or four days when that happened, not for half a day as it had in Mann Gulch. There were people on the mountain who’d never seen each other and never did see each other. So how do you deal with this thing–people not connected with each other but who share a fire? I kind of uncoupled myself from Young Men and Fire and went my own way.
