When I attended Washington & Lee University, one of my classmates was a fellow from Oregon who paid his way through college by fighting fires. Each spring, he would get special leave to go home a week or two early and join the smoke chaser squads back home. The jobs of these specialized forest fire fighters is to rappel out of a helicopter with a chainsaw and cut a fire line in a forest that is burning. The idea is that if you get sufficiently ahead of the fire, you can create enough of a fuel-deprivation zone between the fire and the rest of the forest to contain the fire.

It sounded like dangerous work, and it was. When I asked my friend about his job, he mentioned that sometimes, you could be in a forest and see the flames racing across the treetops overhead. He mentioned that once he and his squaddies had to run full tilt out of a forest fire that was overtaking them, and that they nearly did not make it. I asked him what would have happened if they got caught, a little worried that I might not like the answer.

He said that they all carried emergency shelters on their belt. The way he described them, they sounded like a big sheet of space-age insulating material, like a cross between a small tent and a sleeping bag, and you just hunkered down and covered yourself with it, sort of like when you were a kid and you pulled your blanket over your entire body to keep out the monsters at night. The emergency shelter material would shield you from the fire, but you had to maintain a perfect seal on it. If you did not, and you were in the flames, the superheated air would rush in and cook you within your own shelter. What's more, these sheets are opaque, so it can be impossible to know when the fire has passed. My friend told me that once his supervisor had to deploy one of these shelters to save his own life, but also had to stay in position for hours until other fire fighters came through the area and found him. The poor guy was cramped up so bad, that he pretty much rolled over like a turtle, unable to stretch out his arms and legs. He must have been incredibly uncomfortable, but he was alive, and that is what mattered.