Reflections on the Selma and Nuttall Staff Rides

The Vast and the Tiny; Progression and Recurrence

By Erik Apland, Field Operations Specialist

Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

In his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins writes: “Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . in his Letters from Birmingham Jail. . . attacked the ‘Strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively.’ . . . Like almost everything in Western civilization, the concept of historical teleology [the belief that history has a purpose] has its roots in the Christian intellectual tradition. . .  For the ancient Greeks, time was not linear; history was cyclical.” (Please excuse my use of ellipses to summarize a long quotation.)

From October 24 to 27 this year, I had the privilege of attending the Selma Staff Ride, a field course in the history of a single struggle in the campaign for Civil Rights, in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama. Over a whirlwind couple of days, my fellow students and I saw the riverbank in downtown Montgomery where ramps once delivered bales of cotton to waiting boats. We later walked across that same river on the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge. We stood and talked under wide-spreading oaks in front of the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Selma and at the City of St. Jude Catholic Church complex in southwest Montgomery, important sites of the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. The staff ride explored themes of moral courage, cultural change, principled leadership that inspires in the face of entrenched obstacles, and much more.

Having lived my entire life in the West, it takes these journeys to the Eastern U.S. to feel connected to some of the triumphant and cataclysmic events of American history. It moved me in the same way that visiting a historic fireground does, overturning my numerous misconceptions and imaginings with concrete, material reality, the proof of my own senses.

At the beginning of October I was in the Pinaleño Mountains outside Safford, Arizona, participating in the 2004 Nuttall Fire Staff Ride. I marveled at the size of the mountain range, its incredible rise from desert floor to forested peaks. I simultaneously felt claustrophobia standing on the stretch of fireline that the hotshot crews had occupied, and in the two safety zones they used, both so tiny in the face of the vastness of the topography and the fire that ran up at them.

At Nuttall, we explored similar themes as those in Selma, with a slightly different focus that came out of the events of 2004. Walking the line and congregating in the aspen stand and H-4 safety zones, we talked about resolving tactical disagreements, sharing critical information across cultural barriers, and loyalty. Long conversations stemmed from the concept of cultural change here as well, this time looking at the culture shifts in fire crews and of emotional and mental resilience, from 20 years ago to today.

I can’t really sum up the entirety of my experiences on these two staff rides, there isn’t space here. But neither have I had the time to comprehend all I saw and felt. I can summarize two particular dichotomies. First: the overwhelming vastness vs. a stifling but familiar smallness. Second: the dichotomy expressed in my opening quotation from Vincent Bevins: time as a progression vs. time as a circle.

Progression and Recurrence

From these two staff rides I came to think about history as both a progression and a cycle. Events can bear striking similarities but unfold in different ways as the inputs (culture, weather, human factors, fuels) change. The recurrence of similar events tells us two things simultaneously: changes flow around and through us, even if we try to stand stationery like a boulder in a river; and that we must change inputs to get different outputs. In all parts of our lives we experience progression and recurrence.

Almost exactly halfway chronologically between the South Canyon Fire and the Yarnell Hill Fire, the Nuttall Fire bears similarities to both tragedies--but this 2004 incident does not share the outcomes of 1994 and 2013. Progression and recurrence from 1994 to 2004 to 2013 raise questions about all three fires and challenges us to reflect on where we are today, after another decade. Which of these events, if any, could happen again, and why or why not?

It is likewise with Selma. The movement for voting rights won their battle to end the open disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. Today at the state capitol in Alabama, two sides of the building boast monuments to the Confederate past: a four-faced commemoration of the Confederate military on the north side of the building, and a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at its front. Every day, elected servants of the people of Alabama walk by these gleaming monuments as they pass into the peoples’ house and conduct the peoples’ business. Fifty-four miles away in Selma, home of one of the most important struggles for human freedom in world history, decay and poverty face the main street, the Alabama River, and the Brown Chapel AME Church in which the marchers prayed and sang.

The Challenges We See Ahead of Us

After decades of initiatives and trainings in the federal agencies, we remain a fire workforce that reflects neither the ethnic nor gender diversity of the communities we serve. Indeed, the Prineville Hotshots of 1994 who fought the South Canyon Fire were a crew that more closely matched that diversity than almost any crew before or since. We’ve seen progression, there is no doubt, but on this issue we see endless recurrence. What inputs here must change to nudge the cycle into a new orbit?

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, time is neutral. It ticks by inexorably whether we are moved to act or not. The challenges we see ahead of us in our organizations, whether our organization is a crew or a fire program or a fire agency, can seem vast like those sky islands of the Arizona desert. It seems unfair by comparison, but the actions of people are almost always familiarly and stiflingly small. And yet that is the scale where we live and most often have the freedom to act.