Yarnell 34.22° N, 112.74° W

"If you came this way, 
Taking any route, starting from anywhere, 
At any time or at any season, 
It would always be the same: you would have to put off 
Sense and notion."

You parked the car well off the road to avoid drawing attention. Now you hike north and east, winding through scrub oak and spherical granite boulders which are slowly spalling themselves through freeze and thaw into quartz dust; the sky is a cerulean blue with white cirrus feathers trailing off to the east. In other words, another beautiful October Arizona afternoon.

You stop, breathing hard, and take a long drink of warm, flat tasting water; a handful of trailmix, another slug of water. The USGS sectional map and compass say you are not too far from your destination, but you know that it is on private land, and you will not trespass. Looking up, you see the blackened scar of ridgeline; that is on federal land, and is accessible. At least for now.

"Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. 
Dust in the air suspended 
Marks the place where a story ended. 
Dust inbreathed was a house- 
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse . . ."

The terrain is changing from tan grasses and green oak to singed foliage and black ash. Fire was here--intense, volcanic heat that has baked the ground to a ceramic glaze. You have walked through the forest crematoriums before, boots scuffing up little puffs of floury powder, the deconstructed components of trees, animals, homes and people. You saw the same ash puff under your feet when you walked across an apartment building patio in The Battery in November of 2001. Dust in the air suspended marks a place where the story ended.

Grumbling, you struggle up the last pitch of the trail which grows exponentially steeper in the final one hundred feet. Getting too old for this. Then you break the ridge and the panorama spreads out at your feet, luminous in the golden light of late afternoon. Across the landscape of a thousand square miles, the burn scar lies black, thick and dead across the rolling land. You see the box canyon. That is where the Granite Mountain Hotshots were trapped and overrun by a forty foot tall wall of flame driven by the howling gusts of a dying monsoon thunderstorm. You sit on a round boulder and dig your heels into the sand skirt. And you watch. And you pray.

"The parched eviscerate soil 
 Gapes at the vanity of toil."

The investigations are ongoing; but you know these men died due to incompetence and neglect. You try not to linger on the manner of their deaths, but you have worked in burn units; you have seen the victims of fire, dead and alive, come through emergency room doors. When the hotshot bodies were found, some were still in their fire shelters; most were out, charred in positions of escape like artifacts of a new, awful Pompeii.

Some sad comrade had covered the bodies of the dead with American flags. You understand the sentiment, but everything that surrounded this horrible event soon came giftwrapped, like a box of Whitman's Candy, in American flags. Memorials and fundraisers were held, even the Vice President was wheeled in to mumble inanities about sacrifice and first responders. Then the stew of the media: blow dried and gelled up quasi journalists posturing in front of a cyclone fence adorned with teddy bears, flags and sympathy cards. Some wives were numb with grief, others captivated by the fifteen minutes of fame on teevee and the inevitable fundraisers. Americans assuage their collective guilt by pelting the victims of disaster with gold and manna. You observed the free for all with a growing sense of cynicism.

But this is here and this is now. You watch the shadows lengthen across the box canyon, barren and
desolate except for one lonely flagpole at the end, bravely wearing the Stars and Stripes and the Arizona state flag. Swirling gently in the evening breeze, they are the last things to be lost in the blackness that sweeps up the canyon and across the land. There is no sound here; no birds, no rustles in brush; it is dead and it is quiet. Unlike that last day, where the 911 tapes disclosed a dispatcher hushing the screaming men because she was trying to get some work done and they were distracting her. It was a hell on earth. Like everyone you talk to, you hope that the end was quick, that the pain was transient, and the souls of the men were swept to heaven on those winds laced with flame.

"Who then devised the torment? 
Love. Love is the unfamiliar 
Name Behind the hands that wove 
The intolerable shirt of flame 
Which human power cannot remove. 
We only live, only suspire 
Consumed by either fire or fire."

There are tears in your eyes, but you must do this. The sun is an oblate blob of golden fire on the edge of the turning world. You kneel in the ash and the dirt; lay down the eagle feather given to you for this purpose; the crucifix; a saint's medallion; a matchbox toy car; the totems of this and other ages. You secure these to the earth with a lovely piece of rose quartz; and then, rising to your feet one last time, you look into that well of darkness. It is a void so black and so deep and so far out of time.

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living, 
They can tell you, being dead: the communication 
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

The prayers said, you shrug the pack over your shoulders and don the headlamp in the ebbing twilight. The stars begin to flicker over your head, one after another, and the crescent moon lies lazily on her back in the clear blue of the western sky. The boulders cast long shadows in the fading light. It's a tricky descent, but between a mixture of hopping, glissading and stumbling, you make your way back to the car.

All quotes were from "Little Gidding" by T. S. Eliot.