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Striking in MMA–an old article

By Sam on March 26, 2010

This is an old article that is still pretty relevant….

“The Shovel and the Epee” : Striking in Boxing and MMA

As MMA skyrockets in popularity, the resistance of mainstream media outlets (Sports Illustrated and ESPN) is probably due to a fear of pro-wrestling combined with old-school boxing writers lack of understanding. Boxing writers love boxing; and they often feel, correctly, that MMA fighters usually aren’t the best boxers. They may not realize that the guy in there who is boxing so badly is an Olympic wrestler and submission expert—but strict boxing fans mentally “turn-off” the moment the fight hits the ground, and so are unable to appreciate the skill and art of ground-fighting. Admittedly, ground-and-pound is a rough art. But MMA fans who “get” the ground game will take as much joy from a ground war as they will a stand-up one.
There is more to the debate, however—MMA striking is fundamentally different than boxing, for a variety of reasons. I kept noticing pro boxers making the switch to MMA and getting ‘out-struck.’ When Jens Pulver fought Takanori Gomi in 2004 in Pride, Jens had been winning pro boxing fights and knocking people out; I thought there was no way in hell Gomi could stand with him. Jens was outgunned by a bigger man. Yosuke Nishijima, a former NABO Cruiserweight Champion with a pro boxing record of 24-2-1 went 0-4 in Pride. He went into the clinch with Evangelista “Cyborg” Santos and was throwing body shots while Cyborg threw knees—much heavier. More recently, Drew Mcfedries with 5 MMA fights out-struck Alessio Sakara, who had won professional and amateur boxing titles in Italy. Drew is explosive and iron-chinned, but it was still an interesting result.
I recently had a long internet discussion with Carlo Rotella, a professor at Boston College who wrote “Cut Time,” a terrific book in which he established himself as one of the great thinkers and writers on boxing—I avidly pursued him with the intention of picking his brain. He isn’t an MMA fan, although he may be starting to come around. I tried to explain some of the differences that I noticed, and some of the reasons that pro boxers might get out-struck in MMA. The “stand-up” part of MMA isn’t boxing, or kick-boxing or Muay Thai—it’s its own thing.
First, the gloves: the 4 ounce gloves cut very easily, and they give a lot more guys “a puncher’s chance.” Almost everyone is heavy-handed with those on, flash knock-downs happen all the time. Just ask George St. Pierre—I doubt anyone had warned him about the devastatingly heavy-hands of Matt Serra. In boxing, a guy is a “puncher” or he’s not—but in MMA, almost everybody’s a “puncher.”
In boxing, defensive stylists like Winky Wright can catch punches on their gloves, but that won’t fly in MMA, not with the little gloves. Likewise James Toney’s defensive masterpieces, the shoulder roll and catching shots on the top of his head, won’t work. Another friend, a boxer, had said that “boxers learn to roll with punches” which is true, and can mitigate a lot of the power when you get caught clean—but with the little gloves, I think rolling with punches is minimally effective. There’s not much to roll with.
The more important difference between MMA and boxing is range, and the biggest modifier to range is the take-down. The biggest, most decisive single attack in MMA, the take-down and defending it are HUGELY important. You can’t stand in the pocket and shoulder-roll and bob and weave, because your opponent will drop (“change levels”) and take you down; and he’ll end up on top, a hugely advantageous position. To avoid being taken down, you have to keep your distance and be ready to “sprawl” out, to keep your legs away from an opponent’s grasping hands. Beautiful, flowing, fluid combination punching leaves you in range to be taken down. You can’t take a wide stance, or plant your feet without increasing the danger of your legs getting snatched out from under you. In fact, without boxing’s strict rules about the clinch, combination punching might never have evolved to the point it is at today.
Of course, kicking and kneeing also changes the range, and punching in MMA becomes a little more like jousting—you’ve got to come in with straight punches and get out. Chuck Liddell’s striking is pretty much unquestionably the best in MMA at 205 pounds, and boxers look at him and think he looks terrible. Floyd Mayweather recently commented in a phone interview that “UFC ain’t nothing but a fucking fad. Anybody can go out there and street fight. If they think Chuck Liddell is so good, we should take Chuck Liddell, take a good heavyweight under Mayweather promotions….” And he even offered a million dollars of his own money. All the diatribe does is reveal Mayweather’s ignorance, because Chuck is emphatically not boxing.
I won’t pretend to understand Chuck’s striking, but some factors are an understanding of power and leverage, finding angles on his punches, taking excellent angles with his feet and body, and most importantly perhaps his accuracy and “pop.” He throws his winging shots, his looping punches, as hard as he can; and he’s a sniper. He’s got a set of whiskers, he’s impossible to take down, and he comes with a barrage of hard accurate punches the moment he gets an opening. His form is loose and open because MMA striking is an open game.
Chuck is a good striker for MMA—he’s not the best striker in the world. But put Vitali Klitschko in there with a decent MMA heavyweight and see if he goes two minutes before he’s on his back being submitted. Chuck’s a great striker, but he’s still an MMA fighter; put him in there with Floyd’s heavyweight and if he’s losing the stand-up he’ll take the boxer down and pound him out, or even (Heaven forbid) submit him.
There sometimes can be slowness to MMA striking match—the third Tim Sylvia vs. Andre Arlovski fight comes to mind, which was a very technical and interesting fight, despite the booing. First of all, you’ve got two heavyweights who have knocked each other out, so they’ve got to be careful. In ‘old-time’ bare-fisted prize-fighting, fighters would throw 2-3 punches a minute, something that the modern 3-minute round system and gloves (in boxing) has completely changed . MMA, with the longer 5-minute round and the tiny gloves, has taken us a step back on that road. The gloves are closer to bare-fisted, and cut much more readily. Mario Sperry, a legendary Brazilian fighter who trained under Carlson Gracie and founded Brazilian Top Team, reminisced to me about the old Vale Tudo (“anything goes” in Portuguese) fights without gloves, that they were “bloodbaths.” Sylvia and Arlovski played a very technical little game of range and motion, a game of fractions of an inch, for 5 five-minute rounds.
I’ve heard some trainers say that too much pure boxing is actually bad for MMA fighting—you get used to the close range, you get into the mentality that you can “take one to give one.”
When I raised these points with Professor Rotella, he responded, “that the gloves allow for a level of sophistication and development in striking–in both quantity of punches thrown and quality of the complexity of technique–that far exceeds the more direct and sometimes more lethal striking in MMA.
“It’s sort of like a genius of the epee [a thin fencing sword] getting his clock cleaned by a guy with a shovel. The epee’s great in a swordfight, but in a different kind of fight the shovel might be just the thing. Doesn’t make the epee any less beautiful, nor does it make high-level fencing any less sophisticated, and a guy with a shovel isn’t going to last long in a straight swordfight, but the fact that the lovely epee and all the richness of technique that has grown up around it might be the wrong tool for the job in certain circumstances is a testament to the variety of leverage, distance, and decisiveness in different fighting styles.”
I think this is very true (and well-written), boxing striking is more beautiful and elegant. It may have something to do with “use,” those boxers spend their whole lives working in that small arena, essentially toe-to-toe, trying to hit without getting hit. They become masterful at it, and move into the realm of “poetry-in-motion.” Carlo’s comments reveal some of the old bias (c’mon, an epee versus a shovel?) but there are some interesting truths behind it. He talks about using the right tool for the job, and in MMA the right tool is quite different than the boxing tool. Because of the distance, MMA needs the big overhand right, the wide hook, which in boxing (with its closer range and quicker combinations) are too slow. Boxers see that big overhand right working in an MMA fight, and think “those guys can’t punch” when really the range is entirely different. And in MMA you’ll never see a tight boxing hook land, if someone’s that close they’ll throw an elbow, or clinch and look for knees.
What makes MMA so compelling right now is the pace it’s evolving at: both on the ground (Nick Diaz and Shinya Aoki using the rubber guard ) and in striking (Anderson Silva against whomever you like). The Tyson Griffin-Frank Edgar fight at the UFC 67 was one of the best I’d seen in a while, and Frank Edgar was staying in the pocket and counterpunching as well as anyone I’d seen attempt it in MMA. MMA is a sport moving out of its infancy and through its adolescence, and the maturation is fascinating to chart. I think this is in fact the “secret ingredient” that makes MMA so compelling, this constant growth and evolution. It’s like boxing was in the 20’s, when suddenly guys would come on the scene that could do totally new things, like bob-and-weave, or fight going backwards. MMA has vast uncharted depths where new fighters will take us; and we’re seeing a sport, a real and legitimate sport, being made in front of our eyes. Or re-made, if you’re a deep student of history—pankration was one of the first Olympic sports.

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Here’s a synopsis of The Fighter’s Mind

By Sam on February 10, 2010

“Fighting is fifty percent mental.” Through the ages, grizzled fighters and veteran trainers have said words of that nature to eager young fighters, to reporters, to anyone who would listen. Even for the ancient Samurai and sword masters of feudal Japan, where life and death were on the line every duel, after mastery the game was hugely mental, as the writings of Musashi and his contemporaries can attest.

But what does it mean, “mental?” Fighting is two guys in a ring, or cage, or on the street; smashing each other. It’s the ultimate physical endeavor, meat on meat. How could something so physical be more ‘mental’ than ‘physical?’

Boxing and Mixed-Martial-Arts (MMA) are called sports; but in sports, the real world is nominally held at bay, locked outside stadium doors for the viewer. No one is starving in football, there is no genocide in baseball, no terrorism coverage on ESPN. We watch a game to escape from the news, from politics. The rules are clear, there’s a winner and a loser, and everything is as fair as we can make it. Of course, sports are about everything in life, too, barely beneath the surface. Sports are about race and religion, class and poverty. Outside life squeezes in through the edges of field and climbs in under the ropes. Terrorism and genocide show up, like smoke drifting in through the cracks.

Prize-fighting is something more again. We create a life-and-death struggle on demand. And while watching my football team lose is one thing, it can’t compare with the empty lurch in my stomach when I see a friend, or a hero, losing a fight.

A fight, a prize-fight, has some elements of that sporting fairness, there is a winner and a loser. Rules, weight classes, referees and judges; we try to make a fair fight, as fair as human ingenuity can make it.

But we invite the real world in—we ask for damage. There is a savage price to be paid. Prize-fighting operates in a grey area, on the dark fringes of the sporting world. To watch men fight is like watching a bull-fight or a dog-fight, on some level, you stop judging and thinking and instead feel in your bones, and connect to an older, primordial sense of spectacle. Fighting is much greater than a sum of its parts, it is more than a sport, more than any other form of competition in modern society. It is about truth.

Fighting for money requires an understanding of identity—you have to know and exploit who you are. As Randy Couture, a multiple UFC Champion said, “No lies get told in [the cage]”. If your opponent is stronger than you, we’ll find out. If you’re not prepared, we’ll find out. And more than that—you have to know who you are, what kind of fighter you are, what are your strengths and weaknesses. They’ve been stuffed down your throat since the day you started training to fight. If you’re tall, fight tall. If you’re a big puncher, don’t screw around on the outside—get in and hurt him. If you’re a wizard at ground-fighting, don’t stand in front of the kick-boxer. Honest appraisal of your own abilities—that’s a big part of the mental game. But it goes much deeper.

Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy and martial artist, wrote a book called The Art of Learning, and in it he describes the different types of kids he was teaching to play chess. He discusses at length “entity” versus “incremental” forms of learning, so classified by developmental psychologists. “Entity” kids think their chess skill is born of natural and innate ability, a pure talent; while “incremental” kids think they learned chess incrementally, step-by-step, and that hard work pays off.

Josh would give his students impossible problems, well beyond their level—that no one in the class could solve. So all the kids would fail that problem. But then, when he gave them other, manageable problems afterwards, the “entity” kids would struggle; they had broken mentally, and were unsure of themselves. The “incremental” kids would just go back to work, slogging away. “Entity” kids were “brittle;” when they lost, their faith in their talent was shaken. They struggled with accepting defeat. The “incremental” kids, who believed the power of labor, would keep digging in the trenches, even faced with insurmountable problems.

One of the old boxing truisms is “Frustrate a puncher and he’ll fall apart.” A ‘puncher’ is a fighter who hits really hard, with a big punch. It’s a natural gift that coaching can help—but you can’t teach power. The puncher relies on his big punching. He hits guys, and they go down. As he works his way up through the boxing ranks, this is the law of the land—he hits them and they disappear. Now, he gets to his first title fight, his first big fight, and he hits his opponent—boom—and the guy is still there. This guy can handle his punch, and keeps coming. So the puncher hits him again, but the other guy is still there. Now comes the crucible for the puncher—does he go to pieces? Or does he buckle down and keep fighting? Can he find another way to win? Mike Tyson, one of the greatest punchers of all time, rarely fought past six rounds. If he hit you and you were still there, he’d mentally break. He’d bite your ear off, foul himself out of the fight, or not answer the bell.

Good trainers know to take raw talent and season it, teach it to handle frustration. Fighters and trainers walk the line between understanding defeat and immersive self-belief. Successful fighters have things that work for them, and work incredibly well—but the great champions are those that can accept, internalize, and understand defeat. Waitzkin’s Tai Chi teacher, the renowned William C.C. Chen (whom I studied with briefly) called this “investing in loss,” and it means to study your defeat without ego, to let defeats happen in practice without reverting to your old habits, and to grow from it. It’s an essential skill, for even during a fight the fighter needs to be able to understand—and accept—when he is losing, and change his game plan. In order to win.

Ricardo Liborio, one of the great MMA and jiu-jitsu coaches in the world, made the same point, in his heavy Brazilian accent: “You have to unnerstan’ you CAN lose. Somebody can beat your ass; but you can overcome, don’t get frustrated. You can’t be a quitter, you have to understand it’s not your time, it’s not your day. Just because you lose doesn’t make you a loser. It’s not the same fight every time. Be humble enough to understand—losing is part of the game. It doesn’t mean to let yourself get conquered, but to know that you can win again, at the right time you can be great. The key to doing well in competition is to accept.” Liborio holds the word reverentially in his mouth, emphasizing with his whole face and body. “Accept you can lose, you can not perform. Take this big bag of rocks out of you backpack.”

Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book “Bright-Sided” is a continual revelation about the dangers and industry of positive thinking in America, and she remains probably the most important writer we have. Positive, magnetic, “magical” thinking are dangerous illusions, particularly in investing and managing companies. But for fighting, positive, pro-active thought—thought that leads to positive action—play a critical role. And in fighting, illusions don’t last long.

Before Randy Couture was a multiple UFC Champion, he was a Greco-Roman wrestler who tried out and failed to make the number one Olympic spot three times (TK). He spent almost a decade chasing Olympic dreams, and came to MMA late, at the ripe age of 33. He wasn’t expected to do much.

“One of the things about being an underdog, there’s no pressure,” Randy told me. “Nobody expects you to win. It frees you up to go out and compete. We often complicate things with fear of failure, all that baggage of winning and losing. Being an underdog is freedom.”

“I realized I get way more nervous for wrestling than for fights. Way more keyed up. When I realized that, I thought, that’s odd. This guy could kick my head off, but I’m not worried about that at all. I’m having fun, I’m enjoying learning all this new stuff. I stopped and thought why the hell am I so nervous for the wrestling matches? I’d lost perspective, I was putting all this pressure on myself. It came down to one match, everything hinged on it, so I’d forgotten that I loved to wrestle and why I started wrestling—because it’s fun.”

Randy had been dealing with the endemic, systemic pressure that elite athletes face, the overwhelming pressure to succeed. The Olympics is particularly grueling in that respect—there are no seasons, no multiple game series, not many chances to fail. When you’ve worked every day for four years (or a lifetime) for a goal, and all that work comes down to the next ten minutes, it’s hard not to feel pressure—shattering pressure. But it is precisely how you deal with that pressure that dictates your chances of success. It is the Catch-22 vise for Olympic athletes.

Randy has found his way through; he’s regarded as the strongest mental competitor in MMA. He develops uncanny game-plans and sticks to them.

“The first thing is perspective—I frame things in a positive way, and stay reflective. It’s almost a cliché, but in the grand scheme of my life, if the worst thing that happens to me is I lose a wrestling match, even if it’s the Olympic finals, then I’m doing pretty damn good.

“Right away that takes some of the pressure off. I know I’ll survive it, it’s not the end of the world. I won’t like it; I don’t like to lose, but the people who really care about me, don’t care about me because I win. I think this helps me overcome the classic fear of failure that most athletes set themselves up for. The’re so worried about looking stupid, or making a mistake, they don’t do what they’ve trained to do, they get in their own way.

“You have to put a positive frame on things. In wrestling, in a heated match, sometimes the difference in the match is that you got called for “passivity,” or your opponent did. You know you’re working your ass off, and then referee decides for whatever reason that you are more passive than your opponent, so the ref gives him the choice, and your opponent sticks you in the disadvantaged position. And it would get to me, because no one was as active as I was in matches. It would really mess with me when I got called for passivity.” He shakes his head in remembered frustration.

“Then I figured it out, with my coaches, that it was OK, it was a coin-toss, the ref was going to call it on somebody. So why am I getting upset? It was taking me out of my game, and I was losing matches because everyone would put you in the disadvantaged position, and I’d get turned and scored on because I was pissed off.

“So I started framing it as ‘out of my control,’ what the referee does; it’s no big deal, this is just another thing to beat. Now my opponent will put me at a disadvantage, but he’s still not going to score on me. So psychologically that will have a big effect on him, it’s one more place where I can break this guy. Who gives a shit what the ref thinks? It’s all about my opponent.

“Once I wrapped my head around that, I started savoring those situations, not that I ever stalled; but when the passivity call came, I looked at it as a positive. Here’s a place where he can’t turn me, another place for me to attack him, wear him down. By creating a different perspective on the same situation, then technically things went a lot better. I thought better, my defense was better, and I had more success.”

When Yagyu Munenori, a legendary Japanese sword instructor of the Shogun in feudal Japan, wrote that ‘another man’s sword is your sword,’ he meant just that. If your understanding is deeper, his weapons can be your weapons. His own sword is more dangerous to him than to you.

Posted in: Blogging, My Writings | Tagged: Josh Waitzkin, Randy Couture, Renzo Gracie, The Fighter's Mind | 5 Comments

Fighting Fear

By Sam on February 2, 2010

“Fighting Fear”

Courage. It’s the one virtue that men and women prize over any other, the one virtue that will make up for any plethora of vices—even your most hated enemy is still respected, as long as he is brave.

Courage is the ability to confront physical or mental pain, fear, or danger. There are basic genetic reasons that humans are admirers of courage; there is an obvious survival value in being brave, and in being close to those who are brave. In a bad spot, you want to be around brave men.

It can be hard to know what courage is, in the beginning of the 21^st century, in the United States, with most of us detached from survival concerns. We’re out of the caves and no longer need to fend off wolves in the night. What is courage now? Is it going off to fight in a just war? Or is it protesting an unjust war? Politicians use the language of courage to further their own agendas (be it liberal or conservative) but we’ve all seen “behind the curtain” and we can’t trust the politicos or their heroic language.

In every other society throughout history, there is a point where a boy becomes a man. In ancient Sparta, the boy would have to kill a slave; but more often the initiation into manhood came from hunting. Looking at our models for ancient societies—like the Native Americans, or the Australian Aboriginals, there were rituals, religious performances, fasting and even circumcisions (in Africa); but afterwards, society recognized the boy as a man. He was initiated into the mysteries of adulthood; it was done, it was over, there was no question about it. He knew he was a man, and everyone else knew it—he didn’t have to prove himself anymore.

Modern American society has no single “coming-of-age” rite that marks a boy’s transition to manhood (is it driving? Voting? Drinking?) and perhaps as a result, men in America are uneasy, and manhood in America is an endless, relentless test. Instead of the manhood rituals of fighting and killing, all we’ve got left is sports.

Sports in school is where young men first test themselves, where they begin to define and understand courage. Their all-powerful father or mother can’t protect them anymore; and the professional sporting world is where we go for our heroes.

Being a man is less about dominating others than a fear of being dominated, a point Michael Kimmel makes in his book “Manhood in America.” The reason most of us get into martial arts at a young age is not to beat people up, but to protect ourselves, to prevent others from beating us up.

Once you start training, and you progress, I think the urge to fight and test what you are doing is almost inevitable. Amateurs fight to test themselves, to test their skills, and to prove they’ve conquered fear. Professionals fight more because of the money and the lifestyle they find themselves in, that “this is what they do.” There is still the test, the urge to compete driving them, but there is also a sense of inevitability.

Regardless of how you get there, climbing into the cage or ring is a direct show of courage, and these arenas are the few places left in the world where things can be simple: black or white, right or wrong, him or me. Bystanders make the mistake and think getting into the ring is about physical courage, about conquering fears of getting hurt—but that is barely any of it, fighters don’t care about getting hurt (in the normal way—they are afraid of getting hurt as it affects their livelihood, like any professional athlete). The real fear is of getting dominated, being made to look weak or stupid or unskilled, of getting “owned,” of being forced to quit. Every single fighter I know would gladly take broken bones and bloody faces to get the win. Pain is nothing. Fighting is about conquering a fear of being humiliated, of being dominated. When top professional fighters seem to make excuses for a loss , it has to do with explaining why it appeared they were dominated. The armchair warriors boo and hiss and criticize, but professional fighters have to have an excuse as to why they got beat, or they won’t be able to go on. Without a reason for their loss, they’re screwed.

I saw the movie “300” and I was wondering at its mass appeal, especially amongst the fighter/MMA fan set. Sure, it was violent, but the fighting wasn’t anything too new to movies, the buffed-out bodies we’d seen before. Visually, it was cool. Steve Pressfield’s book, “The Gates of Fire,” was vastly superior. So what was the secret of it’s popularity?

It lay in the demonstration of pure courage. The Spartans choose death with joy in their hearts; and they chose it in a black and white situation where others failed. It’s something that resonates with fight fans—to go joyfully, with gameness. The Spartans choose death, because they value the freedom to do so more than their lives. The simplicity of the choice resonates very strongly with us today, because we have so few choices like that in front of us.

This plays to the real world instinctual nihilism of all men, a version of just saying “Fuck it.” It’s not something easily understood but definitely felt, and here I think the sexes diverge—not many women can be satisfied with the answer, “fuck it,” while most men will understand it. Dostoevsky writes in “Notes from the Underground,”

“What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness….And what if it happens that a man’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself…”

We choose things that are against on own best interests because the freedom to make that choice is more important than our own interests. It’s a simple choice, in the end.

The fight sports’ primal aspect of one man against one man has some of this simplicity, which lends it power. The bravery and gameness displayed are the draw, as much as the technique. How many times do you hear fighters say “I don’t care who they put in front of me, I’ll fight anyone?” Therein lies the appeal, the “fuck it” attitude that fighters portray and men are drawn to. Fighters will gladly say “I’m willing to die in the ring,” and they are admired for it, for the commitment. In fact, that’s a stupid comment—you’re willing to die to beat some guy you don’t really know, in a fight for money to entertain people? But it’s not about the reality of the situation, it’s about the principle of the thing. The fighter is saying he’s willing to die, rather then be dominated. He’s valuing his free will over his life, something that we all admire. We come to the fights to see that as much as great technique—we want to see heart on display, we want a chance to see real courage, and it can be a costly show.

There’s an apocryphal story that Martin Luther King, Jr., told (that has been shown to be an urban myth—but it still is powerful): A young black man is on death row, and the warden has installed a microphone in the gas chamber, and as the gas starts to flow, we hear the words “Save me Joe Louis, save me Joe Louis…” whispered in a desperate plea. It could be true.

Humanity needs heroes, from the time we are children through adulthood, we need icons to hold up as charms against the darkness. Fear of the world is a natural instinct. Part of the magic appeal of Mike Tyson was that aura of invincibility—that maybe never existed, but people will still believe in “Oh the young Mike was the greatest of all time” because secretly, in your heart, you think If I was Mike Tyson I would never feel afraid again. Or Muhammad Ali, or Chuck Liddell, or Randy Couture.

Randy Couture’s title fight against Tim Sylvia was an example of the kind of iconic courage we love in our fighters—an older fighter, the crafty veteran, taking on a huge demolishing killer; on paper Randy’s chances were slim. When he came out and landed that right hand early, the crowd went into ecstasy, because here was David and Goliath, here was Captain America triumphing against all odds.

But the truth is that none of those great fighters exist in a vacuum—they all deal with fear—they all have feet of clay. Ali’s rants of “I’m the greatest” were directed mostly at himself. Mike Tyson’s terrifying ferocity came from fear; in hindsight, Mike was scared all the time. Randy Couture’s method of dealing with the fear is to turn the fight into a personal challenge. He takes the fight away from his opponent and makes it about himself; no one thinks I can do this, but I think I can. Randy looks at Tim Sylvia and sees a puzzle that he can unlock, with the right game plan. Randy turns a cage-fight into a personal challenge, a physical and mental obstacle—it’s not really personal, or malicious, or a ‘struggle-to-the-death’ with him—he’s just going to out-compete you.

When Floyd Mayweather fought Arturo Gatti and completely outclassed him—I don’t think Gatti hit him more than twice in six rounds—Floyd fell to his knees and cried when Gatti’s corner threw in the towel. Floyd cried that “God is great,” and refused to be consoled by his own somewhat uncomfortable corner. Watching it, I realized Floyd had been afraid; which throws his antics in the build-up against Oscar De La Hoya into a different light. Yeah they’re trying to sell the fight, but also Floyd is managing his fear. I don’t think Floyd’s afraid of getting hurt—but I do think he’s afraid of somehow falling short of his own “greatness” that has been assured him since he was a boy.

The old adage is that “courage is not a lack of fear, but controlling it,” and indeed, people without fear are crazy people. And we admire that, superficially, but not as much as we admire and are drawn to those that conquer fear, those that have the same fears as all of us but go forward anyway. The fight sports reveal these qualities to us more plainly than any other, because of the simplicity and purity of what goes on in a cage or a ring.

More than any fighter, the image of bravery that I take to heart is that famous picture by Jeff Widener of Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese government cracked down in 1989. An unknown, ordinary man, on his way home with his arms full of groceries, stood down the tanks. Standing down rumbling tanks, tons of steel and metal, with your groceries—standing down injustice. If we all could be as brave as him, instantly, without hesitation, the world would never see injustice again. But most of us will never get a chance to make a choice like that, and so we look to the ring, to the cage, for courage.

Posted in: My Writings | Tagged: courage, fear, manhood | 12 Comments

The Delivery

By Sam on January 26, 2010

I took the red-eye from JFK and arrived in Madrid at 7:30 in the morning, still pitch-black outside in the Spanish mid-October, and from there a quick hop to Mallorca, a giant Spanish island in the Mediterranean. I was curious if my one-way plane ticket would be a problem with customs in Madrid, but the sleepy officials couldn’t have cared less.

I was on my way to join the crew of a luxury sailing yacht, Mustang, and be part of the “delivery” (when just the boat without guests is moved a long distance) across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean, a trip of some 3,700 nautical miles. Quentin Oram, the Captain and an old friend of mine, assured me it would take about twenty days, as Mustang was a fast boat that would average 200 miles a day. Of course, hurricane season wasn’t quite over; my dad, an avid sailor, kept emailing me about a tropical depression that was mid-Atlantic. We’d have to wait for a weather window and keep a close eye on the water temperature off the West coast of Africa, where hurricanes form.

I landed during sunrise over the city of Palma de Mallorca and found the Port without any trouble on a glorious sunny morning, high Cirrus clouds and my rusty Spanish good enough for a taxi and some cafe con leche. In fine Mallorcan fashion I wandered the endless piers and quays with my backpack and hiking boots, perfect for New York but a trifle warm for Palma, looking for Mustang’s signature red hull (I’d seen her once, five years ago, on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean). I had forgotten just how huge all those boats are.

Palma is the hub for Mediterranean mega-yachting, and walking the docks amongst these absolutely absurdly ostentatious yachts and power boats— hundreds of feet long, millions of dollars, gleaming wealth– I was returned to the private world of the “yachtie”, the professional crewmember. Bright sun, blue skies, the smell of diesel, a forest of a thousand aluminium masts, with the medieval Spanish skyline of Palma’s massive cathedral, Catedral o la Seu, framing the picture. It was always easy to find the charter boats; their masts stuck up like monuments, sometimes hundreds of feet above the paltry private yachts of forty or sixty feet.

There were a few people stirring this morning, shorts and flip-flops, cleaning and polishing and chamoising the gleaming exteriors, and I borrowed the phone from the Captain of Kaori, a gleaming monolith of a sailboat that must have been over 130 feet long and glistening with newly made perfection, and found Mustang on a different pier, they’d just arrived that morning, come from Antibes. With a rising sense of elation I pounded my way around the waterfront to her and over the narrow pasareil (a kind of drawbridge that connects the boat’s stern to the dock) and shook hands with a grinning Quentin.

Quentin Oram is English and about forty with a lifetime of sailing etched into the lines of his otherwise boyish face; he’d done his first trans-Atlantic at age twenty from England in a wooden boat (a 30’ Falmouth cutter) without an engine, electrical system, or head (toilet) and had rolled into Florida, fifty-four days later, without having eaten for ten days. He’s since done two more trans-Atlantics solo, for a total of eleven, as well as sailed around the world. We’d sailed together with Florence Bel, his lovely girlfriend and French cordon bleu chef of a certain whimsical temperment (or sanity) in the Caribbean on a charter yacht and the three of us had done the Indian Ocean together in 2001, the two of them on their way back from Auckland and me leaving Thailand. All told, I’d done nearly a year and a half on yachts with those two, but it felt like more. Imagine spending five straight months on a ’38 foot sloop with two people who aren’t your family– you get pretty chummy. I hadn’t seen them since ‘01, we had crossed the 7, 000 miles of Indian Ocean together and then they left me South Africa, waving my handerkerchief good-bye from the dock in Capetown.

Florence came on deck, and I hugged her, and the three of us beamed at each other.

Mustang was a new boat to me, although Quentin had been skipper for nearly two years; an 83 foot sailing yacht, a sloop with a racing hull and a luxury interior for charters. Quentin and Florence were “yachties”, and I had been one with them in the past.

A word on “yachties”: they are the professional crew for the world’s luxury mega-yachts. They might number ten thousand or more, it’s impossible to say. The actual people who live on these 40 million dollar floating palaces of glass and shining plastic aren’t billionaires of foreign royalty. The people who actually live on these boats year round are professional sailors, mostly from the Commonwealth (UK, Australia, NZ, South Africa) with smattering of Continental Europeans, Scandinavians and a very few Americans. They migrate with the boats from the Med. to the Caribbean and back, occasionally doing the Pacific to get to New Zealand for the America’s Cup or other side-excursions.

These yachts are the playthings of the super-rich; and they charter for anywhere from $25,000/week at the low end to $130,000 or more. A week (and that’s without food and fuel). Some powerboat estimates come in at 50 grand a day. And, without exception, they lose money. Chartering is just a way for the owner to defray some of the 10-20% of purchase price he’ll spend a year on maintenance. The bottom line of this immense expenditure of money is that the crew must present a perfect picture to the guests and/or owner, a flawless vacation in paradise with silver service, better than any five star hotel.

Yachties come in four basic categories: Captain, Mate (Deckhand), Chef, and Stewardess. The Captain, or Skipper, runs the boat. The Mate, under the Skipper’s close scrutiny, runs the deck; sails, rigging, dinghy, and so forth. The Chef cooks and often runs the Stewardess, who cleans, serves drinks and dinner, does laundry, and a million other things. Depending on the size of the boat a couple may perform all these functions; or a crew of 30 may serve six guests on a 300 foot mega-yacht.

The lifestyle is hard work and hard play; “Another shitty day in paradise” was our motto in the Caribbean. It’s a job you can do hung-over, although this is all changing since I was involved. Yachties are becoming more and more professional, and new international rules and regulations (they’re legally not allowed back on board with a blood-alcohol level of .04– unheard of two years ago), as well as busier schedules keep the permanents out of the bars. Yachting is a closed community; the yachties all know each other, drink in the same bars and sleep with each other in Ft. Lauderdale, Panama, Antigua, St. Maarten, Auckland, Palma, Antibes, St. Tropez, Porto Cevro… It’s a floating village with all the gossip, backbiting and personalities.

I met the two other crew aboard, Meg, an Australian Stewardess, blond, thin and pretty; and Morne, the South African Mate, who looked like Clark Kent. Mustang had just sailed down from Antibes and gotten pounded, winds of fifty knots, a bit of a rough trip. There was another girl aboard, Georgia, Scottish, who was delivery crew like me, hired just for the trans-Atlantic.

We went out for lunch, and it’s a joy to be walking though a European city again; Palma is a bustling, beautiful city of old houses, narrow streets and elegant high balconies cloaking inner delights of space and light that one can only imagine. I’d forgotten how civilized civilization can be.

In the late afternoon we went for drinks, outside in a small plaza on the edge of the old part of town, at a yachtie hang-out called “The Corner Bar” and the bar was packed with ‘em: white t-shirts with the names of yachts emblazoned on them, board shorts and sandals, girls in sarongs or skirts, sunglasses on strings around necks, sun-ravaged hair and necks. English, Aussie, Kiwi and South African with a heavy sense of entitlement and competence. Leor, an Israeli, short and muscular with stylish hair, scoffs “I can’t believe you guys sleep on the boat without air-conditioning.” Everyone is tanned and smoking. Maybe half have permanent jobs, while the rest are looking and surviving on temporary “day-work.”

Yachties, like everyone else, bitch about everything. It’s human nature to complain, even living on a super-yacht in Palma.

We drink into the evening (although Quentin and Flo wisely bow out early), at various bars and a club, still hanging out with yachties; I don’t say a word in Spanish all night. Somehow I call up my old yachtie survival skills and find my way back to Mustang at seven in the morning, still dark.

We were in Palma for about a week, fixing a few things, getting ready, planning for the Atlantic. Morne got off the boat, and I took over Mate duties. It rained often, autumn in Mallorca.

One morning I was out slogging through the drizzle to buy acetone and hydraulic oil, with the boat’s credit card in my pocket, lost in thought. It felt like old times; I refer to my work as Mate on Wireless (a big yacht I’d crossed the Pacific on; the boat Quentin, Florence and I had met on in the Caribbean) as “a hardware store tour of the world,” and it certainly felt that way. I spent most of my time trekking from chandlery (boat hardware store) to hardware store, looking for this and that; I remember we were three weeks in Tahiti and I had a half day off.

On the rainy quay one of Morne’s old South African school chums stopped me and asked for a spot on the delivery. I shrugged evasively, “It’s not up to me, mate,” which is true. It’s up to the Skipper. But I didn’t know this guy and wasn’t about to push for him. The Mediterranean charter season was over and the yachties without permanent jobs were getting nervous about finding passage to the Caribbean.

We left the following day, and ran down towards Gibraltar for two days. It was my first sailing experience in the Med., and I found it as advertised: bad sailing. It was like a big pond; quick to change and rough and steep one moment, flat calm five hours later. We alternately sailed before 40 knots of wind and motored into 30, the steep waves crashing onto the bow. Not the great rolling oceans I’m used to, but a more fickle, unpleasant host– moody and not to be trusted. We eat marvelously, however. Quentin was inspired in that he has Florence just cook– she doesn’t have to stand watch– and this makes her happier and the meals are tremendous. One night it’s lamb and rice, the next it’s gnocci, home-made sauce, beans, potatoes, and always the Mediterranean staples of bread, cheese, and salty meats.

I sleep in a forward cabin, almost right in the bow, and the water rushes by my rack in the night, inches from me, an incessant kissing whisper. It’s a burbling whistle that somehow, like a snowflake, never quite repeats itself.

We arrive in Gibraltar at midnight on Oct. 17th, and go stern-to the quay (the boat sits perpendicular to the dock, stern close and bow straight out). We have some autopilot issues that need to be sorted out, and we need to watch the weather; we’ll be here for a few days, at least.

The Rock of Gibraltar towers over us, craggy and imposing, and across the Straits are the mountains of Morocco and the African continent. The weather is bad, grey and wet with cottony, sausage-thick clouds rolling low over the flat steel bay and the Spanish mountains behind Algeciras. Gibraltar city is clustered around the base of the Rock, a few dense streets of high-priced duty-free goods for the cruise ship passengers that constantly pass through.

Quentin gave us a day off and so Meg, Georgia and I hiked the Rock in the rain. We walk quickly up the narrow streets, the only pedestrians in the misty showers, and chat as we go.

Georgia’s story is fairly typical. She’s nineteen, attractive with bright blue eyes the size of dinner plates, and was “day-working” in Antibes. Day-work is what yachties without permanent jobs do; they hustle on the docks, offering themselves out for any menial job going on the boats. Usually this is cleaning, varnishing, and polishing; part of the brainless toil that keeps these yachts in such a state of perfection. Every day they’re out there, stopping at each yacht and asking if there’s any day-work. Day-workers are paid by the hour, and usually given the most horrible jobs going. In Georgia’s case, Mustang had some meat that had been left in the freezer for two months– while the freezers were off (the boat was in the yard and the crew was on holiday; apparently Morne, left in charge, had forgotten about it). Georgia had to clean the freezers out, crawling with maggots, with a stench that could peel paint. She was game, and did a good job without complaining and so Quentin offered her the delivery, same as me; a temporary spot as “delivery crew.” Georgia didn’t know much about yachting but this was a way for her to learn. That’s the typical way a Stewardess or Deckhand will get hired, through day-work. It gives the Captain and permanent crew a chance to see how someone will work, get a feel for their attitude before committing to hiring them. Attitude, especially for the unqualified work like Stewardessing or basic Deck-hand, is everything. Anyone can learn to do it; but you have to be able to live in close quarters with the same people for months doing the same menial tasks with smile firmly fixed in place.

The top of the Rock looks almost like a Japanese water-color, the epic craggy rocks thrusting straight up from the calm sea, shrouded in mist. The rain clouds roll up one side and hurtle high into space on the other; at times we could see tiny toy ships out on the metal sea, and Africa, and at times the soft clouds closed around us. We take some obligatory pictures of the famous monos, macaques, the monkeys climbing indiscriminately over the tourists and their rented cars. They are small, tawny, powerful things with bright golden eyes and closed and sullen mien.

The week in Gibraltar passed quickly. Quentin had his hands full installing a new hydraulic pump for the autopilot, a larger one as we don’t want to steer across the Atlantic. I repaired the mast boot (a seal at the bottom of the mast) and spent my time running to hardware stores and taking long runs out to the end of the Rock, to the light house and the mosque. Quentin got done and then we waited on the weather, a deep low pressure trough arrived off the coast of Portugal and we decided to give it a few days and leave without getting pounded by 40 knots on the nose; we’ve got some time before we have to be in Antigua.

I got Quentin off the boat one night and we wandered around the nearly deserted pubs of Gibraltar (it was a Monday) drinking and talking about women, Italian real-estate, and Cape Horn. We ended up at a bar near the docks with a good-looking young barmaid named Lisa, a Scottish lass from Glasgow. We were in a fine flow of spirits at this point and invited her to do the crossing with us, as Delivery crew. It wasn’t quite as mad as it sounds– without Morne we had only four to stand watch, and five would make life considerably easier, and that’s what Quentin had planned on. Lisa said she’d come by and check it out, unsure as to whether we were serious.

She did come by the next day, and although slightly bleary I repeated the offer and she left to mull it over, excited but unsure. She accepted almost in spite of herself, obviously a little nervous at the prospect of the Atlantic; she’d spent about a half hour on a boat in her whole life. “Youse not going to chop me up and eat me in the middle, are youse?” She asked in her atrociously heavy Glaswegian brogue. “You never know,” I reassured her, “we might end up shipwrecked and in life-rafts and you might just draw the short straw.” She laughed a little uncertainly.

The low hung around for days, and showed no signs of moving, and time began to run short, and finally we left in a cold rain. It was just time to go. “Eighteen days is what it takes in this boat,” said Quentin. “It’s been eighteen days twice on this route.”

It was a rough start, a three day slog out of the Straits into Force 7 and 8 winds, gusting through the 40’s. Upwind sailing, the sails sheeted in tight, the boat heeled hard over and slamming through the oncoming waves.

To my dismay and Quentin’s incredulous delight, I was sea-sick on the first day; sick as a dog, hurling over the leeward side. Quentin videotaped it, and I resolutely defended myself with plaintive cries of “too much time on land, too much beer, gnocchi, cheesey pizza….” But the excuse are all a little weak.

In truth, it had more to do with two straight years on land, and trying to sleep in my forward cabin. Mustang has a racing hull, which means it is shallow and built for speed; it also means she wasn’t built for comfort in big seas. Especially up forward, she takes stomach-churning leaps and bucks like a bronco– she rears up, lifts you high, and then drops away, suddenly you’re in free fall, drifting off the bed, until the hull touches down, sometimes with a heavy roar into a wave– those are the good times, fairly gentle. Other times she slams into a wave like a cannonball, with a crack that you think would start the hull in pieces, like we’ve come down onto a rock, a battering ram, but no, its just the cement of hard water. Being heeled hard-over on a port tack means ¾ of my body is on the bulkhead, and when we come shuddering down and slam it’s like getting tackled in football, a hard shock that rattles your bones and organs.

The good news is that it really isn’t even rough. Salt water is pissing in my hatch, onto my bed and alternately onto the drawers that house my few belongings. The foredeck is underwater all the time, my tiny room goes dim as a wave buries the hatch above. I survive, stand my watch, and the next day is slightly better, but still grim and grey and windy, and I found myself in a terrible mood. Why the hell do I still do this? The stink of diesel, of sweat, the oncoming boredom, I hate passage-making (a long sailing trip is often referred to as a passage). Sailing is supposed to be fun, this isn’t fun, why am I here?

On the morning of the third day I came on deck to a hard blue sky with a hard Prussian blue sea, flecked with perfect white, and as I gazed around slightly stupefied with sleep, I suddenly smiled and thought: ‘Oh yeah… that’s why.’

We beat up almost to Portugal and then tack and head south, and finally the wind begins to favor us and we do some downwind sailing. It’s a whole other world; the motion is gentle, the boat is nearly level, the wind is quiet and warm. Think about it this way; if you’re sailing upwind, i.e. towards the wind, then you must add your speed to the wind speed. This is called “apparent wind” and so a fifteen knot breeze upwind becomes twenty or twenty-five (we’ll do about ten knots). Downwind the reverse is true, so the difference is between pounding into waves with twenty-five knots of wind howling through the rigging, or easing along with the waves running up gently behind you, a following sea, with a lovely ten or twelve knot breeze, just enough to fill the spinnaker. The spinnaker is a free-standing sail for downwind sailing; when you see a picture of a sailboat with a big colorful sail that looks like a hot-air balloon, that sail is the spinnaker.

The days quickly settle into the routine of standing four hour watches. Appetites return, (Meg and Lisa had also been sea-sick; Georgia remained obnoxiously healthy and hungry).

We rush by Madeira and the Canaries, all unseen– there is no time to sightsee now, we have to get to Antigua to get ready for the Boat Show.

The Antigua Boat Show is one of the largest in the world, a exhibition of super yachts for charter agents (like real-estate agents) to examine. The yachts begin to trickle in for months or weeks in advance, and once there they tie up stern-to and bring themselves to a state of obsessive perfection, a mania of clean, an insanity of polished brass. The varnish gets another four or five or seven coats, bringing to a deep, glass-gold glow, and there is day-work and day workers galore, going over the interiors with Q-tips. Every night is a party in the eight or ten bars that crowd Falmouth Harbor, almost exclusively yachties, but everyone is at work the next day, cleaning through their hang-over. When the Show starts, the flip-flops disappear and it’s uniforms (usually matching polo shirts and shorts) and shoes and clean shaven faces. Lisa and Georgia will day-work and try to land Stewardess jobs on other boats, possible big powerboats as the money is better (though the atmosphere more formal). Meg will stay with Quentin and Florence for the Caribbean season, she’s happy on Mustang and is learning a lot about sailing, this is her second trans-Atlantic. Meg’s story is also somewhat proto-typical: she graduated University with a degree in Biology, worked as a dive instructor near Melbourne for a while, started travelling and ended up doing day-work in Ft. Lauderdale, at the Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show, where she was hired by Quentin and Florence and she’s been on board for eleven months– nearly an eternity for a yachtie. When I did a year and half on yacht Wireless I stayed through three captains, five Stewardesses, and three Engineers; the latter crew started calling me a “lifer”.

But all that hustle and bustle of the Boat Show is in the future, fifteen or more days away, the long expanse of the Atlantic still stretching before us. The idleness of passage creeps in, the slow routine of watch and coffee and lunch, reading novel after novel, sleeping in my damp, humid rack in the gloom, waking for night watch… time stretching elastic. There are occasional bursts of activity, squalls and sail changes. The blue horizon remains a constant.

We pull closer to 20 degrees North, where the Tropics begin, and where we can expect to pick up the steady trade-winds that will waft us westward to the Caribbean. Our course is a long crescent curving south from Gibraltar to Antigua. The barometer remains high, and the satellite weather updates are empty of any hurricanes or depressions forming.

I am sleeping fitfully, not quite able to stretch out full, the hull twisting and groaning around me, when Meg comes and taps on my door. It’s my watch, this time the 4 am to 8 am (the schedule rotates), up in the dark and down in the dark. Meg hears me mutter and vanishes, and I blearily rise and throw on a t-shirt (I sleep in shorts with my Leatherman on my belt). I stumble aft through the galley and the salon and up into the pilothouse, where Meg’s face is illuminated by the glow of the radar as she enters our position in the log, the final step of her watch.

“Anything going on?” I ask. I’d already heard from my bunk the engine die earlier, and the surge of the sails and the wind. We’d been motoring for nearly three days, through the “horse” latitudes, searching for the trade-winds. The horse latitudes are so name because ships becalmed here, in what’s now prosaically called the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, used to have to eat their horses after weeks without wind.

“Naaw, not really” she murmurs in her quiet Australian accent. “Keep an eye on the wind, it’s a bit squirrelly,” and I assure her I will, and then she goes, leaving me blinking and alone. I take my bearings, finally waking up, check the windspeed and direction, check our progress on the computer (it’s linked to the GPS) and pop up on deck.

It’s a perfect evening, dark, with bright full moon, and 13 and half knots of breeze on the starboard beam, full mainsail and genoa (the big triangle up front), right on course for Antigua some 1800 miles away making 8.5 knots. Smoking. There’s hardly any sea, just the water boiling and seething past the rail and stern and away into the night.

This is night watch, the only time you have the boat to yourself. I make a double coffee on the espresso machine and sit in the cockpit, drinking and trying to pick out the oceans on the moon through binoculars. The radar is reassuringly empty, as is the sea all around, and the moonlight is bright enough to write this by.

At night, we stay in the cockpit, and if we need to leave– to make a sail change (as the wind strength and direction changes, so do the sails), for instance– we wake up the next person on watch to help us. Think about it this way; if you fall overboard, at night, say, halfway through your watch– the boat will sail onward, steered blindly by the autopilot. Even if the next person on watch wakes up, the boat will still have to return (another two hours) so that’s four hours now you’ve been drifting and swimming, pushed by the wind and waves. The boat has travelled forty miles, who knows how close she’ll be when she returns on the opposite bearing, and who knows how a swimmer may have moved. During the day the boat has a horizon of five miles or so, but at night? It’s impossible to see something like a person in the water. Basically, if you go over at night, you’re dead. Period. Even if the water is warm enough for you to last several days, the chances of getting rescued are infinitesimal.

So don’t fall overboard. I can imagine the sickening horror of falling, the cold and welcoming water, and watching the boat sail blithely away, vanishing in moments to leave me alone on a heaving dark sea.

Night watch is a slow time. I listen to music, do some push-ups, review the weather and wind forecasts Quentin downloaded via satellite. Sometimes squalls or distant ships appear on the radar, but after a few days out of the shipping lanes we’re all alone.

A swell develops from the North, a premonition of wind. Waves move faster than wind; big waves can move 600 miles in a day, far faster than any storm. When a hurricane is coming into Florida, the days before will be calm and sunny with thunderous surf crashing on the beach, an ominous warning bell. True to form, the wind picks up slowly at night. It’s not a trade-wind, as it’s from the North, but it’s good and strong and we can use it. The 4-8 am watch doesn’t quite end in total darkness. As I wake Lisa and brief her on our status, the Eastern sky is lightening. I enter in the log our position, average speed, wind speed and direction, and barometric reading (reassuringly high); and then I’m back in my bunk, asleep, well before sunrise.

The days wander by. We fish without luck, and now we’re past halfway, under 22 degrees North, the wind on the quarter or even the stern (behind us; from the East) and we fly the spinnaker. Florence has already read every novel on board, and she comes up and talks to me on watch, about life and food. She’s been cooking effortlessly for us, despite any heavy swell, anything from goat’s cheese lasagne to cailles o aux raisins (quail with grapes)– it’s better than I’ve eaten in years. She tells me stories of cooking near disasters, how sometimes she has to play the French mad chef, and she laughs with French incomprehension at the Italian guests who want pasta with every meal. She talks about the difficulties of cooking for the owner of Mustang, who is on board for ten weeks a year, the menu must keep changing. “Fortunately,” she says with her Inspector Clouseau accent and a smile, “he likes my cooking.” One would have to truly be a Philistine not to appreciate what she does in that crowded galley, the stove and microwave swaying on gimbals, half of the food coming out of cans stored in lockers under her feet. On charter, she will regularly cook four or five course meals with the hightest quality ingredients the French Riviera can provide; the guests or owner will spend over 5 grand a week on food.

She and Quentin are both lucky to have a good relationship with their owner, as the owners, the true wealth that fuels this industry, are a notoriously fickle group. The relationship between the crew and owner is very different from crew and guests.

The owner is the absolute employer and last word on the yacht. He’s hired the Skipper, and the Skipper hires everyone else, ostensibly. The owner has not only bought the boat, but he pays for everything– a boat that cost 10 million dollars will spend, at the very least, a million a year in maintenance, crew wages, food and fuel. The owner has to be prohibitively wealthy or the boat will ruin him. These boats go into the yard, up out of the water into dry-dock every year or two for a “re-fit,” an overhaul that could cost anything, depending on what needs fixing.

There are good owners, that take care of the crew and cut no corners on cost; and there are owners who are tyrants, or don’t have the money and so try and cut corners. There are owners who own 300’ powerboats with helicopters and are on them for two weeks a year. There are owners that need protecting from themselves, the crew has to carefully watch them when they take the wheel sailing, or take the dinghy water-skiing. The knowledgeable owners can sometimes be worse, arguing with the Captain about the way things are done, noticing any mistakes by a nervous deck hand.

The yachtie life can be a gilded cage; sometimes I’d look around, sailing into a deserted atoll in the Pacific, or having a beer at sundown in the Caribbean, and I’d think “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this.” But in the end, it’s a fancy limo service; you’re just taking the rich man where he wants to go. The money is good, though, and you can’t spend it; I’ve never been richer than after a year and a half on Wireless, I’d saved close to 30 grand, pretty good for 24 years old, and by 25 I had to go to the American Embassy in Thailand to have pages added to my passport; and I nearly filled that up, too.

We all talk about it over lunch, Quentin and I with Meg and the two girls who are thinking about joining this lifestyle. The money is good, and there are few jobs where you can save like this; it is nearly impossible to spend anything. A Deckhand or Stewardess might make 2-3 grand a month, while a Skipper can anywhere from three to sixteen thousand a month (depending on size of the boat), and as the yachts are nearly all private companies based in Cayman Islands or other offshore places, it’s all untaxed. The boat buys clothes, plane tickets, all food; basically everything for the crew.

It comes up again a few days later as we sit in the shade of the spinnaker, four of us out in the cockpit with the blue water shimmering all around. The drawbacks to the yachtie life are very real and belie the fantasy-like existence of living on a yacht in the tropics year ‘round; the pace is hectic, the boat always needs work, cleaning, repairing– the “to do” list is endless and for everything that gets checked off two new items are added. The schedules can be tight, with a day turnaround between charters or visits from the owner, just a few hours to re-provision and try and bring the boat back up to spotless perfection. There’s various boat shows, and the twice a year back and forth to the Med. from the Caribbean. Your life is the boat and whatever you might be able to sneak in around the edges, a day or two off a month is normal and it can get tighter than that.

There are the social drawbacks. Meaningful relationships are difficult because of the distances and uncertainty of schedules, even between yachties. The yacht will certainly have charters through the major holidays, so you won’t make it home for them.

And then, of course, there is the sea. Living on a boat is living in a state of constant vigilance, even at anchor, even tied to the dock. Anchors can drag during the night, and you may wake up in a different place, or drift up onto the rocks. Tied to the dock you can still catch fire and sink. At sea, on passage, the vigilance is constant and unforgiving. Weather, other vessels, reefs and rocks and a thousand other things will kill you if you let them. 24 hours a day, you need to be ready; that’s why I sleep with my Leatherman tool in my belt– not from paranoia, but from a sense of professionalism– an alarm in the night and I could be out on deck and have to cut something loose before I even fully wake up.

We move into the final downwind leg, under a 1,000 miles to go. We lose the spinnaker one morning, it tears in half with a majestic slow ripping sound and settles heroically into the rushing green water, and we all dash like mad to haul the sail back onboard. Florence is on the foredeck suntanning and she’s the first one there, she knows the drill. I blow the tack with my Leatherman (pop open a certain type of shackle, or metal clasp, in order to recover the sail) and we pull the miserable wet sail on deck.

I eat the last of the oranges, dry and leathery. Then we hit a sweet spot in the wind and are making ten, eleven knots, racing down towards Antigua, scarcely 600 miles away.

I went into the US Merchant Service after high school, and it was there that I first heard of the phenomenon known as “channel fever.” Channel fever is the state of excitement the crew reaches upon a day or two from landfall; in the channel, as it were. It’s hard to sleep, you find yourself constantly thinking of all the joys of land: cold beer, ice cream, email, a chance to swim in the ocean instead of race above it. We’re still three days out and already I can feel the vestiges of channel fever creeping into my thoughts.

We get one last weather update, and the Atlantic is still clear as a bell. There are no Tropical Depressions sneaking up behind us, and now it’s November 11th, and hurricane season is pretty much over; although Antigua did get a hurricane last year in November.

We run down the last few miles to Antigua through a squally night, and arrive around 10:30 am– 18 days and 1 hour from Gibraltar, as promised. Safely on the dock in Falmouth Harbor, we’ll go for a long-awaited swim and then primp and preen for shore-going, for ice cream, beer and dinner surrounded by new faces and new people. Tomorrow we’ll worry about the future, we’ll start cleaning and begin the long process of getting ready for the Boat Show. Georgia and Lisa will day-work and start making the rounds with their resumes, and Meg, Florence and Quentin will work like crazy because on the heels of the Boat Show they have a charter to Grenada. I’ve completed a circumnavigation (more or less) begun in ’98 and will fly out of here, gloating in the knowledge that I can put “circumnavigator” on my resume now; and also a thousand dollars richer: standard delivery crew wages.

But that’s all for tomorrow, we’ve made the trip on schedule and have enough time. Today, we’ll swim and play under the Caribbean sun, living the dream, and getting paid for it.

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The Picture Fire

By Sam on January 26, 2010

There is cinematic drama to burning at night, the cold forest floor coming alive, the flames a rising, dancing brilliant floodwater. Fire surging and flowing around boles and through shrubs, washing in a wave upslope. The thorny brush explodes in ominous, building cackles. Acres and acres of flame, gasping in its heat and presence, a hallucinogenic landscape, lighting up the night.
I am one of the “holders,” spread back far along the line in the dark, watching the fire rip through the undergrowth, turning and looking for problems on the unburnt side (the “green”) of the road. The wind is good for now, pulling interior into the fire, pulling the fire and smoke away from us and back into the “black,” where the main fire is. I can barely see the next man in front or behind, we’re spread pretty thin with 150’ between us to cover more ground. Just brief man-silhouettes against the brilliant orange jewels. We’re watching for a wind shift that might carry smoke and embers back across our line, into the green, starting small spot fires. The night is dark and cool, and the sweat is chill along my spine. The front of my body is lightly seared from the heat, like sunburn.
When a group of trees torch off there is a noise like jet engines revving; with the multiple clumps going it sounds as if I’m standing on an airport runway, with planes everywhere winding up. It’s a noise that builds until I have to wonder: are we going to start something that won’t stop?

I was with the Gila Inter-Agency Hotshot Crew (IHC) last summer, an elite crew of twenty firefighters that travels from state to state fighting forest fires, working for the Federal Government. Hotshots, as they are officially designated, are among the better trained, more experienced and better conditioned wild-land firefighters out there. They are designated into Type 1, and almost all other crews fall into the Type 2 category. Often, when ground is considered too steep or an assignment too dangerous, only Hotshot crews will be asked to do it. There are some 90 crews in the country, (40 in California alone) with 20 or 21 members each, so of the 30 or 40 thousand wild-land firefighters that go to war in the woods each summer only 2,000 are Hotshots. We get assignments in a kind of rotating roulette; so that a New Mexico crew might find itself in Florida, or Idaho, or Hawaii, depending on the type of season and where the fires were big.
June 24th, 2003 begins with a quiet morning at Negrito Fire Base on the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, fifteen miles from pavement, with the crew coming back on active duty after two days off. The morning was slow and calm, drinking coffee and getting the trucks ready, taking care of little things. We’re far enough into the fire season that we don’t PT in the morning anymore; people are still tired and a little beat up from the last two-week dispatch (or from their two days off, depending on how they spent them. I’d just come back from a bender in Flagstaff with a few of the guys, and thankfully the charges had been dropped; and on a side note, girls don’t dig mohawks).
Then the phone rang, audible throughout the base on a speaker, and suddenly the word flies around, “dispatch, Arizona,” and the base bursts into activity, as when we leave we might not be back for a month; or we might be back in two days, you never know. They might dispatch us to Arizona and on the way we could get sent to Montana. Or even Alaska, or Hawaii for a volcano. We ride in the carriers, two massive trucks with air-brakes that look military in their size and demeanor, big cabs and large square boxes in back that carry the troops, painted the Forest Service green with the Gila IHC logo. We might be in the carriers for three hours or three days. The catch-phrase of Hotshotting is “Remain flexible,” as your life can change drastically in a few minutes.
Everyone has specific duties; I grab a trash-bag full of ice for the cooler (as an EMT I’m also responsible for the big Medical bin built into the carrier).The Squadboss and Assistant ride up front, and five or six crew ride in the back, each with their own bucket seat and cubby. This tiny personal space is more important than you think –essentially, we live in those carriers for about five months, when the season picks up. That cubby and seat is home, we’re on the road for months and that’s all you got.
We left Negrito and drove through Arizona, down past Payson, headed for the “Picture Fire.” Fires are usually named after relevant nearby geographical features like streams or mountains. It took us six or eight hours, punctuated by McDonalds, various conversations, naps, and CD’s on the walkman while watching Arizona roll by, accompanied by the incessant hum of travel.
“Hey Sam,” called Rob from the front.
“Yeah Rob?”
He turned his broad, Slavic (nearly Mongolian) face to me, young and blond with unruly surfer’s dreadlocks.
“How old was George Washington when he died?” There was no smile, no hint of humor in the bright blue eyes. His non sequitors were deadly serious. He thought that I should know everything, having gone to Harvard.
I thought about it. Fifty-five? Sixty-five? “I don’t know Rob,” I said. I didn’t even ask where that thought had come from.
Rob was a big, raw-boned blond-haired Mormon farmer’s son from nowhere, Arizona and he was considered half-crazy and slightly dangerous. His strength was inexhaustible, and his mind floated freely from time to time like a butterfly, alighting on brightly colored points of interest. This was his second year as a Hotshot, and he’d left the country last winter for the first time to go to Thailand (at the tender age of 21). It had utterly rocked his world; he’d nearly gotten married and come back with a deeply thoughtful air and his horizons much, much broader.
He nodded to himself and turned back to face the front. I pulled my headphones back up.
We arrived on the fire at 2000, and wound our way out through dirt roads, the light dimming around us. Dewey went and found the IC (Incident Commander) or whomever was in charge (referred to as “overhead”) and we lounged. Hanging around and waiting is part of the job.
The word came back; put ‘em down and roll to night shift. That meant they were letting us sleep from 2000 to 2230 (and taking us off the clock, the bastards) and then bringing us up for a twelve or sixteen hour shift, through the night. Pretty common practice, as the fire will lie down at night, without the sun to heat and dry things, with the moisture in the air. At night, the fire can be attacked directly, while during the day the fire behavior makes the fire front unapproachable.
We bailed out of the carriers, looking for flat spots in the trees and bushes with our bedrolls and bags, and everyone tried to get some sleep as the stars came out. I could find Scorpio, upside down to me (I learned it in the Southern Hemisphere) and Sagittarius, and Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper easy here and Polaris. I even slept.

Up at 2230 by headlamp light, a quick snack with Powerbars and granola chomping in powerful, stubbled mandibles, and then back into the carriers to gear up and drive to the fire proper. Our first night we were going to burn.
Hotshots do a lot of burning, and we often do it at night. We burn to control the fire; a way to corral it and keep it inside artificial confines. Fire won’t burn what’s been burned, and this is probably the major way wild fire is fought. The fire, on its own, would “stand up” during the day and “rip,” meaning it would exhibit extreme behavior and burn hot and fast and leap Road X. However, if we come along the night before and burn along Road X, with the right wind and control to keep it on the right side of the road, then fire the next day will stand up but run into whatever is still burning from the road that we lit the night before, and go nowhere.
When we burn we have igniters and holders. The igniters ignite, with fusees (road flares) or drip torches (basically watering cans with gas and diesel in a 1:4 ratio and a flaming wick) or grenades, gun fired flares, or any combination; dictated by the type of fuels, wind, and terrain. Sometimes we even use ignition devices that ride in helicopters, giant drip-torches and ping-pong machines that drop ping-pong balls filled with something like napalm. Obviously, this can generate a lot of heat very quickly. The igniters want to burn as much as they can, but they also need to walk the fine line and not put too much fire on the ground and lose control of it.
The holders space themselves back along where the igniters have been and make sure the fire stays where it is meant to. They watch for embers blowing across the line, or anything that might put fire on the wrong side of Road X, into the green. Wild-land firefighting has become a hard science, we crunch numbers and factor in things like Rh (relative humidity), FMC (fuel-moisture-content) and PIG (probability of ignition). Rh is usually measured every hour or even half hour by a Hotshot crew, “spinning” a wet-dry bulb (it’s a tool to find the Rh) and noting it down, watching for trends. For instance, if every day at 1600 the Rh goes below 10% and the fire starts exhibiting extreme behavior, then we won’t burn or even go near the fire then, instead attacking later that night when Rh has “recovered” to 30%. FMC is measured at local ranger stations in forests throughout the country. Fuels are divided by size and into ‘hours,’ roughly the amount of time it takes for water to either saturate or evaporate from them. So there are 1 hour fuels (grass), 10 hour fuels (little sticks) 100 and 1000 hour fuels (trees, big down stumps). On a lot of fires in the Southwest we’ll get 1 hour fuels that have an FMC of 4 or 5, and I was even on a fire where the 10 hour fuels were at zero. For comparison, paper is usually around 7. So when the fine dead fuels are much drier than the newspaper you crumple and put in your fireplace—you can bet that fire will be explosive, exhibit “extreme behavior.”
Extreme fire behavior is a matter of definition, but essentially it means exactly that; any fire activity that seems extreme. In practice, fire on the ground, with flame lengths up to six feet is within normal behavior. When a fire begins to climb the “ladder” fuels, bushes, tall shrubs and anything that will carry it into the canopy, it can “torch” or begin “crown” fire. Torching is very common, the fire gets into the base of a fir tree, cooks around and builds up some heat until the lower branches ignite, and then the whole tree goes up at once, with the jet-engine-roar and a tremendous amount of heat and burning embers blowing into the air. Think of a Christmas tree burning up. This is within normal fire behavior. “Crown” fire is far more rare and dangerous, when the fire gets into the crowns, the canopy, and moves on its own, without the support of fire on the ground. Crown fire can move very fast and send up columns of smoke into the sky that look like a volcano is erupting. A big fire, with a big column will put out the energy equal to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima every ten minutes. These fires exhibit extreme behavior, create their own weather, and subvert the natural world in their fury. On a hot summer day on a fire in Arizona from a high vantage point I’ve seen three separate columns; so they’re pretty common during the fire season. Nothing can be done directly to these fires; we have to back off and attack from farther away, indirectly.
FMC and other factors go into extrapolating PIG. A PIG of 95% means that 95% of the little embers and ash that float across the road are going to start a fire when they land. These are just the basics; fire behavioral scientists get into far more complex models and number crunching, with things like energy-release-content (ERC) by the acre, and comparing it to past fires that have been “explosive.”
Yet for all the numbers and charts there is a delicate art to burning. You need to burn fast, and get as much burnt as possible; but you can’t lose it. You can not put more fire on the ground than you can hold; meaning that you don’t want the fire to really crank unless the wind is with you. Dewey has the reputation of being a very good, very aggressive burn-boss, and the Gila Hotshots often show up on a fire to burn it. He is cautious, however; “You can’t pick the fire up and put it back in the torch,” is one of his favorite sayings to his igniters.
We finish up the burn for the night, and “pass the match” to another crew; they will keep burning.
We roll out of there to the sounds of twenty-one people hiking in a tight line at night, three miles, by headlamp light. The creak and groan of packs, the tapping and slapping of fuel bottles and the sawyer’s plastic wedges (for falling trees), carabineer’d to their packs and clapping like cow bells. The heavy stomp of feet in the dust and the whispered hush of breath as 21 people hike out at a good pace in the dark. It almost sounds like a ship, like a vast beast or train of horses with their saddles squeaking rhythmically in the dark. No one speaks; perhaps a mutter and a laugh float from somewhere, disembodied. The trees and dark loom around, and my headlamp beam so tight it is hard to see, the dust from our boots clouding and obscuring the narrow beam. My acute focus requires teeth-grinding concentration. I stumble again and again, and finally turn my headlamp off and hike by the ambient light around me, which is much better. Dark trees loom around, the white ghost moon floats along overhead. Burning stump holes glow a luscious, brilliant crimson orange and fire-edged snags float past as we pound on along the line.
The sun is well up by the time we are back at the rigs, headlamps off, fellow crewmembers dirty and haggard in the growing lightWe load up and drive into fire camp, set up in a nearby town. Fire camp is its own creature: hot food, showers (we’ll never have time to use them—maybe once every two weeks), medical supplies, equipment, all the overhead, helicopters; in a sea of tents. We bed down for the day in a High School gymnasium with the windows blacked out. There are probably a hundred people on night shift, all bedded down on the basketball hardwood floor, on bedrolls and sleeping bags. It’s not quiet, there is snoring and squeaking and a constant shuffle to the bathroom, doors opening and closing. I fumble on my headphones and listen to a David Bowie instrumental album called “All Saints” and somehow sleep, for a few hours.

On the 25th we’re up for dinner as breakfast, and back on the line in the dark. This time we have a more serious mission: we’re going to try and catch this fire.
The fire is burning hot during the day, untouchable, and overhead has been throwing retardant at it to try and hold it. Retardant is that red slurry that they drop from the planes, the air tankers. It’s a mixture of water and red clay and a kind of soapy detergent. It will slow down a fire, but it won’t stop it. To stop it you have to have crews on the ground.
The fire was up on a ridge in very thick manzanita. We were going after it to try and hold it along that ridge. There had been problems with wind on it all day, and if it got over this ridge there were miles and miles of unburned timber for it to ravage.
We began following the black, the fire’s edge, putting in line and leap-frogging with a couple other Hotshot crews; we’d take a quarter mile and they’d jump out in front and start digging, and then when we caught up to their line we’d leap them. Some places you could “cold trail,” places where the fire had run out of fuel and burned out, you could run a bare hand through the ashes and make sure it was cold. Other places we had to dig through the duff of leaves and grass to create a mineral soil fuel break. The terrain was rocky and steep and the fire was “fingery,” meaning it had lots of dips and bends, like a convoluted coastline.
Basically, a Hotshot crew is a tool that punches line, like a bulldozer but more maneuverable and adaptable. Line is when the vegetation has been removed so the fire will burn itself out when it reaches the line. Hand-line (as opposed to ‘dozer line) is what Hotshots and hand crews put in, a variable width scrape, a shallow trench around the fire. The crew has a very particular line order, called tool order, and digs progressively. It works like this: first comes the line scout, usually Dewey or Kreug, putting up flagging where he wants the line to go. Then come the sawyers and swampers, the guys with chainsaws and their assistants. The sawyers cut away brush and fall trees, the swampers pull away this “swamp” and toss it clear. Then come the diggers, the rest of the crew, with a variety of tools, each one taking a few swings and moving, and by the time the last guy passes you have good clean line, 18 inches across, down to mineral soil, which low-intensity fire won’t cross. A Hotshot crew moves fast, and the speed of digging depends on many factors; steepness, type of digging, how many saws needed, how long the crew has been digging today, how many days has the crew been digging for. On really big fires during a busy season the crew will dig for sixteen or eighteen hours, fall down and sleep right there, and then get up and keep digging. For a week, two weeks. An 18 inch trench won’t hold back ten foot flames, but if we burn just a little strip on the “black” side, and then burn a little more, and then a little more, we can put in a 300’ “black” barrier—and that will hold ten foot flames. This is called “indirect attack.” Ten foot flames are too hot to get near, but two or three foot flame lengths are easily manageable, and we would dig right against the flame so it goes out quickly, robbed of fuel, and this is “direct attack.”
Towards dawn we were miles out, and we could see another big pocket of heat on a hillside across a small valley. It was a rosy glow, the brightest thing out here, and Dewey decided to go for it. We would really have to catch that part of the fire, “hook it,” to have the night’s work be meaningful. So we went out after it, “going direct,” and the other crews would work towards us from behind. We would try and put line around it, and then tie that line back to the line or “cold” black behind us.
Hiking through that manzanita was a major pain in the ass. It was thick, with tough, gnarled limbs and dense stands. Manzanita is hell to cut, as the bark holds dirt which dulls the saw quickly. The hike turned into a battle of cursing and shoving and branches in the face, over and under and sideways, with twigs catching packs and slapping hardhats
“Fire applies the test, then supplies the lesson,” you hear that often as a young firefighter. What they mean is that the fire situations we study, the so-called “tragedy” fires and near tragedies, contain situations where people were tested on their fire knowledge and physical conditioning and situational awareness before they were aware of the test, before they had learned the lessons. The Mann Gulch fire in the 50’s, that killed thirteen smokejumpers, introduced the idea of backfiring or burning out a safety zone. The Supervisor, Wagg Dodge, lit a fire and lay down in the ashes as the main fire roared over him, and he survived while his men, panicked by his actions and not understanding his orders, ran and died. Storm King in 1994 is a case-study for a combination of factors coming together to kill another 14 people; weather, fire-behavior, loss of safety zone and situational awareness. The firefighters were essentially “caught out” somewhere they shouldn’t have been, and had no warning of a big wind event that was headed their way. The Thirty Mile Fire in 2000, they lost their anchor-point (safe starting point) and didn’t prepare to deploy (climb into their fire-shelters, the one-man tinfoil tents we all carry as a desperate measure) and four firefighters died. The young firefighters were watching a fire blow-up from a place they thought was safe. Ten feet below them on a slope, on a dirt road, people deployed and lived unharmed. I’ve been there and walked the ground with a fire behavior scientist. We study these fires like a law student studies cases and try and put ourselves in their shoes.
In all these cases, the firefighters got the “4 F’s” as an old structure firefighter had put it to me once –“fucked by the fickle finger of fate.” Combinations of things went bad, factors started stacking up against them; things that could happen on many fires but don’t.
After the tragedies new rules are written up, new protocols are put into place to try and avoid them from happening again. We read the official reports, full of precise time details (“at 1435 they stopped for lunch at a big tree near H2, etc.”) and perfect hindsight. And sometimes, on fire when something happens or you suddenly change plans, you look at your watch and think of how the dry report will read: “They made their first mistake at 0430…”
Safety is paramount, safety is King. The job we do is backbreaking, slave-labor type job; but the environment we do it in is extremely unstable. So we have highly skilled professionals making decent money doing extremely menial labor, but they have to be well-trained, equipped and paid because of the safety issues. Almost everyone on the crew went to college, some with advanced Forestry degrees, and they are smart, thoughtful people. Dewey and Kreug are probably two of the smartest, safest, most professional people I’ve ever worked with. Yet on most days we do a job that is very like ditch-digging. But once in a while things start to go bad, and that’s when the experience and professionalism comes into play and we back out safely, or find a safe spot to weather the storm.

We started cutting our way around the far spot just as the sun was breaking over the hills a hundred miles to the east. The fire was still creeping, skulking around, staying on the ground, but it was hot enough for us to put our Kevlar shrouds down to protect our faces and necks from the heat.
Now we were also going over our “work-to-rest.” Work-to-rest ratio is very strictly enforced on fires these days, a direct result of changes brought on by the Thirty Mile fire tragedy, where fatigue apparently clouded judgement. Normally we can only work 16 hours and then have to be down for 8. If we go over, it requires special permission from the IC and afterwards we have to be down for half of what we were up for. Dewey had apparently gotten permission.
The digging wasn’t bad; it was the cutting that was hard. We were running three saw teams, and they were killing themselves as usual. The sawyers are the hardest working part of a crew; they not only have to carry the saw (a Stihl 44 with a 40 inch bar, 27 pounds fueled) everywhere but cutting all day is far and away harder than digging (with exceptions). Manzanita sucks to cut and is hard swamping because there is nowhere to throw the swamp, you have to toss it high into “the green,” the area that isn’t going to burn. Sawyers are usually the first to go “tits up,” meaning they pass out or fall down from exhaustion, heat prostration, and dehydration. Kreug was famously evacuated by helicopter from a fire in California he was lead sawyer for. Diggers sometimes go tits up, as well, but not with the frequency of the sawyers. When making fun of someone for going tits up (or just ‘tits’), you hold both clenched fists over your nipples, thumbs out, and ‘squirt’ with your thumbs, indicating that someone is going ‘tits,’ (I learned this from Kreug).
Digging can be hell, too, especially in “bad” digging areas with a lot of rocks or thick tough grass, or places where the duff layer (that layer of organic material, moss, pine needles, grass all rotted together) is a foot thick. The digging here was tough, but not deadly, and after a few hours in the steadily rising sun we’d successfully ‘hooked it.’ I was digging past Dewey, who had perched up on a trunk of a dead tree to get above the sea of manzanita, and he said with great satisfaction, “This is good Hotshotting.”

We were out for nineteen or twenty hours, so the following night, the 26th, we didn’t get to the line before 9 pm. This fire had gotten fairly big, somewhere around 20,000 acres, and every night we were in a totally different area, a different division. We had caught the tricky part; now we had to finish securing the perimeter.
It was becoming the routine, life in the narrow confines of a headlamp, rocks and roots appear and instantaneous decisions are made, and I trip on the unseen; like a boxer falling to the punch he never sees coming.
Lost in the black, we weave like coal miners in a nightmare pea soup fog of smoke, disembodied headlamps desperately stumbling over narrow chunks of ground.
The man in front of me is a brief shadow against the glowing night, and the man behind me is a haloed warm shine. The darkness heavy all around, filled with smoke and glittering ash-dust, kicked up by the train.
We probably walked six miles that night, and dug a mile’s worth of line. Due to some map misreading in the dark by other Hotshot supervisors (Dewey was scouting something else) we went after a “slop,” a place that the fire had supposedly burned over the line, and we dug like madmen on it, three of four crews leap-frogging each other in the dark, the incessant whine of chainsaws, the thunder of picks and shovels. It felt good to be digging hard and fast, working as a smoothly functioning machine, all parts in place.
There is a lot of competition between crews as to who can dig faster; so when we “leap” a crew we give them maybe a thousand feet and see how far we can get before they catch onto were we started. Generally speaking, the Hotshot crews are more or less the same and dig at 40 chains an hour (a surveying unit of measurement, 66 feet). Of course, we compete harder with out-of-region crews, and nobody likes California crews (basically because they don’t like anybody else; Hotshots are generally friendly but California crews have a reputation for undeserved arrogance). So we dug and dug, and ate our bag lunches in shifts under the stars. We get taken off the clock for a half hour for lunch, but usually we only take ten minutes, just time to sit down, shove something down your throat and water up, there’s too much to do.
Then the word filters back, passed from the guys with radios; we’re in the wrong place, it’s supposed to be burning, and we were digging line inside the fire. We’re lining the interior. Ha ha. We reluctantly, slowly, stopped; and listened as the other crews, one by one, heard and shut down their saws. Finally there was just one California crew still ripping away, and finally they stopped, and in the silence came a loud drawn-out raspberry over the radio. In the darkness the Sups had made a map-reading mistake; and what they had taken for the line was actually inside the fire.
The “can-do” attitude is important, but is a double-edged sword and can pose a threat to firefighter safety; and here was a beautiful example of Hotshots getting all fired up and tearing into a job without realizing it was a futile, incorrect job. The grunts laugh, the overhead gets red-faced. Kreug took it to heart, although he had been pretty much rail-roaded into agreeing with the other Hotshot Sups. He must have apologized three times, when we were just laughing. It was difficult map-reading in the pitch black night.
In hindsight we all were brilliant; of course it wasn’t a slop, a slop that big would have been seen by the helicopters during the day, I had a feeling we were in the wrong place, and so on. We all remained flexible, there was no grumbling or bitching about working for nothing. That kind of stuff just happens, that’s life as a Hotshot. The plan is continuously evolving with the changing face of the fire, and Dewey had promised us at the beginning of the year that “You will put in unnecessary line.”
Dewey was still a little angry and took us on a pretty serious hike out, somewhat cranking up the pace, but no one fell out, so he was happy again by the time we reached the carriers. It was no big deal, just some unneeded labor.
Behind me, Rob asked quietly, “Sam, whaddya think about buying an Enduro off-road bike and driving from New Mexico to Central America?”
“I like it.”
He nodded aggressively to himself.
We slowly divested our gear, taking off packs and stowing tools and climbed onto the carriers, faces black with days-old soot. The urgency had gone out of this fire, it had burned itself out or been contained nearly everywhere. This is a common pattern for fires, crazy and emergency mode for the first few days, then a day or two of slower work, and the a day or two of securing and “mop-up,” making sure the fire is really under control by putting out anything within 100 or 200 feet of the edge.

The 27th, another day of sleeping in the gymnasium, in your dirty boxers on top of the sleeping bag and air mattress, feverish and dreaming of fire. People were beginning to get tired, eating into their reserves of energy, but luckily the fire was pretty much ‘caught.’ We were moving into mop-up.
That night we were burning again, this time on unburned pockets of fuel inside the fire in a different place. The weather forecast was for a wind event in the next day or two, and the only thing that could possibly lose us this fire was a big internal push with a ton of wind.
I went on a little mission with four other guys to go deep inside and burn what we could, but trying to get manzanita to burn at 0100 (without the heat of the day) is like rolling a large boulder up a short hill. Using the drip torches we lay down strips of fire. Little glowing jewels, droplets splashing and I try and lay enough together to build up some heat. I lay it down in patterns, zig-zags and X’s and eventually ‘ripping it,’ the flame climbing ungainly to its feet and blowing through the manzanita; three foot flames, five foot, ten as the flames grow and rage upslope like home-grown tornadoes, deafening crackles and the acid stink of heat, your headlamp off, night vision blown by the brightness. Then, as quickly as it built, the fire dies as it runs out of manzanita, or doesn’t bridge the gap to the next clump. I ran out of fuel pretty quickly, while some of the other guys, slightly more savvy, use their fuel more efficiently.
Our job was done for the night, and we were almost certainly getting demob’d the next day; demobilized, “kicked loose,” this fire didn’t need us any more, we’d most likely get sent to another. So once your assignment was completed the unspoken orders were to rest your crew, as tomorrow we would roll back to days.
Kreug was out there with us, and he had found the “biggest fucking juny” anyone had ever seen, an alligator juniper that might have been six or seven feet in diameter. A monster juniper, as alligator juniper is usually a small, gnarled tree that grows slowly and lives forever. “You know how old that bastard is, how many fires have burned through here around it?” Kreug asked me, a mostly rhetorical question. Old. A lot. It had been dead for a hundred years.
We were practicing AHT (Advanced Hiding Techniques) and were probably a mile interior in the now quiet fire. You could see snags burning all around, trees with fire in them, and sometimes one would fall, a distant thump. We sat around a warming fire and as we drowsed and talked the flames crept into the ancient alligator juniper, a thousand years old or more. Kreug didn’t think the fire would get into that bastard, but it had, skulking from the grass up the dead bark, finding homes in the cracks and enlarging them. The juny burned like a candle, like a balsa wood model; a massive-boled leafless caricature of a dead tree, like an Australian Boab. Limbs like gnarled, clutching fingers casting into the starry sky.
Everyone was dozing so I quietly made coffee on the fire in a tin cup and crept away to watch her burn. Flames spouted from every limb, fire like a blast-furnace through the hole in the center, and its brickwork, alligator skin seemed cracked everywhere with red lurid light that glared through the seams, pulsing like a strange heartbeat come to life. After a thousand years of hours of peace, the tree was living and dying in a calm, orderly, orgiastic fury.

The next morning, June 28th, in the small town of Young, I woke up early, at four in the afternoon, and picked my way out past my filthy, snoring brethren. We had another fire to go to, but not until later that afternoon, after demob.
The sky outside was a bright and unmarred blue, hard in the heat, burnished by air; our wind event had arrived. I walked through the light and whipping dust to the carriers, and got my journal, and sat alone in the mess tent and wrote all this, with the wind whistling and the tent flapping and snapping around me in a fury, like a ship in a squall.

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Striking in MMA–an old article

Here’s a synopsis of The Fighter’s Mind

Fighting Fear

The Delivery

The Picture Fire

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