Bill Morris had a great idea for a novel: the story of a fledgling wildfire fighter who learns his brutal business the hard way.
But Morris also had a sense that basing the tale on what he’d learned in a comfortable college classroom probably wasn’t good enough. “To really get it right, I’d need to get in there and do it myself,” he said.
That was in 1996. Morris, an environmental science major and Forest Service intern who’d always been an aspiring novelist, followed through on his dream and spent three seasons fighting wildfires in the West. The last of these was with the elite Arrowhead Hotshots group, whose job is to attack large, dangerous wildfires head-on, Morris said.
“I really liked the job,” he said. “I guess I had the physical stamina.”
Stamina of a different sort is what Morris tested once he figured he’d learned the business. Even as he went back to school to get a graduate degree in American history — which he now teaches at Clark College — he also spent five years writing something like 20 drafts of his novel. It took that much work to render it “readable and strong, but not quite publishable,” he said.
So he put it away. “It was a dream that just went to sleep,” he said. Until it got awakened again by a couple of friends — one an editor — who read it and “really liked it,” he said. Morris decided the book deserved one more revision. That took another year and a half.
Now, “Inside the Fire” has been self-published and is available via Amazon. The story is fiction but based on real elements and experiences Morris had or knew about, he said.
It follows a young botanist who’s assigned to an understaffed Hotshots crew that he’s really not prepared for physically or emotionally. “He gets left behind and finds himself in the midst of a wildfire,” Morris said, where he has to join forces with an unlikely and maybe untrustworthy partner.
Early online reviewers — including some by experienced firefighters — are singing the book’s praises because of its well-drawn characters and its honest look at firefighting culture as well as some hard-earned technical information about fighting wildfires that your typical evening newscast tends to skate past.
“Firefighting has a lot of hardships and a lot of rewards. For one thing, the 14-, 16-, 18-hour days, the physical work — it creates a real emotional roller coaster. There are a lot of extreme highs and lows,” he said.
“There’s a bond you form with your crew that can’t be found anywhere else. It becomes your clan, your family. You live and eat and sleep with these people. When you are in dangerous situations you tend to get close to people,” he said.
Those daily dangers, he added, aren’t only the flames themselves. “They’re the snags, the rocks, the rattlesnakes. There’s a plethora of hazards. You rely on your crewmates to be your eyes and ears.”
All of which is what Morris has been experiencing again this summer, at age 43 — “an old guy to be doing this,” he said — since he got talked into rejoining the much-needed effort. He’s been fighting the Stickpin Fire, part of the Kettle Complex in Ferry County, north-central Washington, where he’s a little nervous about one similarity to his novel: His crew of “mostly rookies” has been assigned to some truly hazardous work because the whole situation is so dire this year.
“I think there’s a sense that things are really spooky out there,” he said. “There’ve been several fatalities. The fuel is so dry, you’re seeing really extreme fire behavior. We’ve been working really hard and I am proud of my crew.”
Learn more at www.insidethefire.net.
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