"I don't have to smile or anything, do I?"
At the top of the plaque is the plane's name: 'Twin Beecher jump plane, nicknamed 'The Silver Coffin.'' I'm standing next to a small private airstrip at the edge of the Siskiyou Mountains in Oregon. Before me is the aforementioned plane. It's thick and boxy, pieced together with rectangular panels that narrow as they near the tail. Like a coffin. Indeed. Across the small, empty parking lot are four lodges with worn wooden boards and triangular roofs. They remind me of old summer camp cabins. The smallest of them, the office, is at their center. An American Flag hangs outside. Next to it, a sign that reads, "Siskiyou Smoke Jumper Base Museum."
"The politicians wanted to tear down the base, so we protested for six years and finally they said we could have it as long as we stopped bothering them."
Gary, pictured above, is a retired Smoke Jumper, which is to say his was one of the most intense and dangerous professions on earth. Though a large man, Gary holds himself with a sort of hesitancy: his shoulders hunch forward, his head hangs low, he speaks with a quiet, reserved voice. He doesn't talk much about himself, but when speaks of his comrades, many of whom died in service, it's with a sad reverence.
In 1981 the Siskiyou Base was closed by the Forest Service in an attempt to save money. Retired jumpers like Gary came together to save the base from demolition. No longer in operation, Siskiyou is the oldest standing Smoke Jumper Base in the U.S. and is a registered non-profit museum.
"A few years after it was shut down a preventable fire spread and caused over 500 million in damages. That amount of money would have kept us open for a thousand years."
"Did your team transfer to other bases after you were shut down?"
"Yeah, most of us went to Alaska. That's where I went. It was the farthest possible place from D.C. and all those bureaucratic politicians, so we could get away with a lot more stuff. We weren't criminals or anything like that, but – uhhh – we broke the rules a little bit."
Lesser-Known History Lesson:
Smoke Jumpers are relatively new in the United States. The program began in the 1930s. It was small, maxing out at roughly 30 participants, underfunded, and unorganized. Then WWII happened. The Japanese followed Pearl Harbor with an incendiary bomb attack on the U.S. west coast mainland. The bomb, which was dropped by a plane launched from a submarine into one of our National Forests, was thought to be the beginning of many such attacks to America's rural interior. One successful fire would take significant man-power and millions of dollars away from the war effort. In an attempt to combat this threat, the government funded the Smoke Jumper program with the thought that jumpers could parachute into remote fire zones to contain potential fires before they caused significant damage – minimal expenses, and little manpower.
The efforts were warranted. Soon after the program was launched hundreds of small, unmanned incendiary balloons sent overseas through wind currents were discovered floating across remote forest regions in the west. If you're imagining hot air balloons, your aim isn't far off – though smaller and deadlier, these incendiary balloons operated similarly. When they fell too low, a fire was triggered to lift the balloons back into the wind currents; when they rose too high, sand bags were triggered to drop.
It was an ingenious idea. The balloons gave no hint as to where they originated. And since they were relatively simple and inexpensive devices, they could be mass produced, making them extremely difficult to stop if significant numbers were launched all at once.
In a brilliant scientific effort, geologists traced the origin of the soil found in the balloon sandbags to a small Japanese island. In a subsequent recon mission, pilots reported hundreds of balloons being launched from the island's beaches and dozens of factories along the island's coast. The factories were swiftly destroyed, and the balloon threat eliminated. Those geologists were then recruited by Herbert Hoover to become the first geological unit in the CIA.