Behind me, down a dirt road snaking into an eastern Oregon desert canyon, flames feasted on tinder-dry sagebrush and juniper.
Ahead of me, a cowboy tumbled off a flatbed truck when a big juniper full of berries exploded like a Roman candle.
To my right, a steep canyon wall in the Oregon desert. No way I could climb up that.
To my left, a descent into a wildfire creeping up the canyon.
Maybe this is what hell feels like, I thought.
How exactly, I wondered, did I get here?
My editors at the daily newspaper I was writing for in Oregon had sent me out in the morning on what I considered a plum assignment: Cover a wildfire in remote rangeland.
I had a camera, a notebook, and a pen. I wore Air Jordans, faded denim Levis the color of the sky, a t-shirt and flannel shirt and a ball cap.
Thought I would blend in covering a heroic bid by a determined group of ranchers and cowboys to halt a wildfire racing across the dry grass, sagebrush, and juniper they grazed their cattle on.
I was miles off the nearest highway, traversing dirt roads through canyons and hills. I followed the smoke and terse directions from a rancher’s wife to the canyon where I found a smattering of pickups parked at the top.
I walked down the road until I came to the crowd of “firefighters.” The ranchers and cowboys lit backfires on one side of the dirt road in hopes that the fire climbing up the canyon wouldn’t jump the road and keep heading east uphill.
I knew I had amazing photos of the rancher on the back of the flatbed spraying down the backfires to keep them from flaming up. He looked like an Old West gunfighter, but with a hose squirting water connected to a water tank with hundreds of gallons of water in it.
The thing about junipers is that those berries are full of alcohol. It’s how you make gin. Thousands of berries in big clumps hung on the huge juniper in front of us.
Alcohol and fire … not a good mix.
Especially on a roasting hot day in a canyon surrounded by brush and grass sucked dry of any moisture.
The juniper tree exploded in flames. Behind me, flames. Ahead of me, a flaming juniper tree. To my left, a burning canyon. To my right, a canyon wall.
My only option was to sprint ahead, hug the canyon wall, and hope I didn’t go up in flames with the tree.
I made it, to state the obvious. Probably never sprinted that fast in my life. My sprint came with with painful light burns to my exposed skin on my left arm where I tried to shield my face and the left side of my face.
I remember driving the hour or so back to the newspaper office, my arm and face throbbing.
When I walked into the office, my fellow reporters and editors looked at my beet red arm and face and asked, “What happened to you?”
This was back in the pre-digital age. I handed the film from my camera to a photographer for him to process. “It’s all right there,” I said.
Then I plopped down and started writing, telling the story.