The Standby Season
For most of a fire season, I was on standby. Geared up, gear checked, contract signed. The deal was simple on paper: I had to be able to reach my contractor's base of operations within two hours, at any point, for the length of the contract. In exchange, I'd get work deployment to a fire, paid days, the thing the whole arrangement existed for.
Two hours doesn't sound like much of a restriction until you try to live inside it. No long hikes. No exploring the rest of Oregon, a state I'd moved across the country for and would mostly not get to see. Every plan I made, I made with one eye on the clock and the other on my phone, waiting for a call that would tell me the bucket had opened up.
It never did. No deployment came. The season ended, the contract ended, and I drove home with the debt I'd taken on to be available for a job that, in the end, never activated.
I don't think anyone involved did anything wrong, exactly. That's what makes it worth writing about instead of just being angry about.
The Bucket Doesn't Bend
Money for wildland fire work like a lot of money for a lot of work that matters doesn't exist as a single pool you draw from based on what's needed. It exists in buckets. This bucket is for suppression. This one is for standby. This one is for hazard fuel reduction. Each bucket has a trigger condition, and the money inside it can only move once that condition is met. A fire ignites: suppression funding activates. A contractor needs bodies on call in case a fire ignites: standby funding activates, but only the specific line item that pays for being available, not for the actual risk of having reorganized your entire life and finances around that availability.
The problem is that risk doesn't come in discrete triggers. It's continuous. I was exposed financially, logistically for the entire length of that contract, whether or not a fire ever started. The bucket that was supposed to compensate for that exposure was built around the assumption that the interesting case is the fire, not the waiting. So when the fire didn't come, the money didn't come either, and the only thing that had actually been continuous the whole time my risk was the one thing nobody had built a bucket for.
That's the mechanism, as far as I can tell. Funding gets organized around events. Labor gets organized around exposure. Those are not the same shape, and when they don't line up, whoever's closest to the ground absorbs the gap. Not the contractor. Not the agency. Me.
Dragging Branches in the Snow
The other place I've felt this same shape is smaller, and it's not about money I didn't get it's about work that barely gets funded in the first place.
Part of prescribed burn prep is building and holding a line: clearing a strip of ground down to bare mineral soil so a controlled fire has somewhere to stop if it decides not to behave. I spent a lot of one January dragging branches and brush into a pile, inside that line, while it snowed on me. It's slow, unglamorous, physically miserable work, and it exists for one reason: to lower the odds that a fire, when it eventually comes, gets away from anyone.
Where the Full Bucket Always Is
That kind of work is chronically underfunded relative to the thing it's meant to prevent. As of last year, wildfire suppression—the part where a fire is already burning and agencies throw everything they have at putting it out—accounted for about 57% of the Forest Service's entire budget (1). For years before a 2018 funding fix, it was worse: in 2015, for the first time in the agency's history, suppression consumed more than 50% of the budget (2), and when a bad fire year hit, that number would climb further, eating into the money meant for everything else the agency does—including the prevention work.
There's a name for what happens when the suppression bucket runs dry mid-season and starts pulling from other accounts to cover the shortfall: fire borrowing—when rising suppression costs force the Forest Service to divert funding from other forest programs, including the prevention work (3)—the exact kind of work I was doing in that snow. The prevention money gets treated as a reserve for the response money, never the other way around, even though a recent large-scale study found that every dollar spent on fuel treatments like thinning and prescribed burns saves about $3.75 in avoided wildfire damages (4).
Nobody's disputing that prevention works. The dispute, if you can call it that, is entirely about which bucket gets to be full when the money runs short. And it's never the one that pays for a guy dragging branches in the snow so a fire has somewhere to stop.
Not Just Fire
I don't think this is only a wildland fire problem. Once you notice the shape money organized around discrete, fundable events, while the actual conditions on the ground are continuous and don't respect anyone's line items you start seeing it anywhere labor sits downstream of a grant, a contract, or an appropriations category that was drawn up by someone who has never had to live inside the gap between the categories. I'm not going to chase that thread very far here. I just want to name that it's not unique to fire, because I don't think it is.
Four Faces and a Long Drive
The drive back to Kentucky took a while, and most of it was forgettable in the specific way long highway drives are I couldn't tell you much of what I passed through the Midwest. I did stop at Mount Rushmore, mostly because it was on the way and I figured I should see it once.
It's underwhelming, for something with that much hype behind it. Four faces cut into a mountain, on land that wasn't stolen in just the one way people usually mean when they say "stolen." The Black Hills were guaranteed to the Lakota by treaty, in writing, by the same government that later took them back once there was gold in it. That's a different flavor of theft than the more casual kind it's theft with a paper trail showing exactly what was promised before it wasn't kept.
I thought about that more than I thought about the carving.
I still don't know what to do with any of this, and I'm not going to pretend I've landed on an answer the essay can hand you on the way out. I got in my car in Oregon with debt I hadn't had before the season started, for work I was fully prepared to do, that never came, because the money for it had been organized to answer a question did a fire happen that wasn't the question that mattered to me the whole time I was waiting for one.