In the chow line at fire camp, Big Mike brooks no wait, walks past 120 hungry firefighters.
The cook slaps a bloody steak as thick as an arm onto his tray.
Big Mike tips his head, the closest he ever comes to thanks. Servers plop piles of gravied mashed potatoes on his plate, a half-gallon of chocolate milk from an ice chest.
Big Mike always sits near the soft-serve machine; today someone’s in his seat. He looms. The interloper fidgets, moves, forgets his dessert. A rare smile blooms across Big Mike’s face.
Everyone’s afraid of Big Mike. Everyone wants him on their crew. He’s 6’8” and tough as nails. He benches 435 pounds, runs a 7-minute mile uphill in 95-degree heat.
Relentless is the only pace he knows. On the fire line he wields a chainsaw in each hand. It takes seven swampers to keep up—five clear the brush, one wipes his sweat, and one sees he’s fed and watered. That’s me.
Every shift he downs two dozen Gatorades (Cool Breeze), scores of Cliff bars (sea salt), movie-size boxes of M&Ms (peanut), handfuls of dried fruit (pineapple and mango), scores of Slim Jims. He loves his Slim Jims (original).
At the top of the ridgeline, the smoke briefly clears to a view of a snow-covered peak.
“I was born up there,” Big Mike says, catching me off guard. He rarely speaks.
“In Coppertown?”
“On the summit,” he says. “My mother was strong, like the mountain. She’s still up there.”
He says no more.
The radio crackles, relays a 9-1-1 call. A woman, pregnant, pleads for help, surrounded by fire in her Jeep on River Road, a steep mile below us.
Big Mike veers off the line, into the wind-driven flames.
“Big Mike, no!” the boss yells.
He refuses to hear, looks at me with those amazing blue eyes, fells an impenetrable tangle of trees between us, disappears into smoke thick as cotton.
Night. Fire camp is subdued, the table by the soft-serve empty save for a lonely steak and a half-gallon of chocolate milk.
My dreams are fevered.
A frightened woman. A chainsaw-wielding giant clears a path. Hardhat lost, long hair aflame. He wraps the woman in an enormous silver fire shelter, pushes the truck from the ditch, shouts “GO!”
I wake. My phone buzzes with stories of a miracle baby being born.
Author: Tom Walsh writes these days from Cambridge, MA. His stories can be found in Emerge, Hobart Pulp, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Bending Genres, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. Say hi @tom1walsh.bsky.social.