Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire [Hardcover]

Murry A. Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2000

During one incendiary summer, Murry Taylor kept an extensive journal of his day-to-day activities as an Alaskan smokejumper. It wasn't his first season fighting wildfires, and he's far from being a rookie-he's been on the job since 1965. Through this narrative of one busy season, Taylor reflects on the years of training, the harrowing adrenaline-fueled jumps, his brushes with death, the fires he conquered, and the ones that got away. It's a world full of bravado, one with epic battles of man versus nature, resulting in stories of death-defying defeats, serious injury, and occasionally tragedy. We witness Taylor's story; learn of the training, preparation, technology, and latest equipment used in fighting wildfires; and get to know his fellow smokejumpers in the ready room, on the tundra, and in the vast forests of one of the last great wilderness areas in the world. Often thrilling and informative and always entertaining, Taylor's memoir is one of the first autobiographical accounts of a legendary career.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

To most of us, the smokejumping world is as alien as Mars or the deep seabed. Yet for Murry Taylor--as for many other Alaskan smokejumpers--it's not just an annual summer job, it's his heart's blood and life's core. He, with all the smokejumpers, strains yearly to achieve the three-mile qualifying run in the requisite 22.5 minutes or under, his physical pain superceded by the fearsome anxiety that he might not make it, that he might never again do what sounds more like a nightmare than a cherished dream: parachute repeatedly from 3,000 feet out of small planes into searing fires.

Taylor is 50 and has been smokejumping since 1965. Jumping Fire, his first book, focuses on one particularly incendiary summer in 1991, from April 29 to September 24, recording the day-to-day minutiae of an Alaskan smokejumper (including the tale of that summer's doomed love affair) while interspersing the narrative with memories accumulated from his nearly three decades of smokejumping and stories by and about his colorful colleagues.

The writing is vivid and immediate. Taylor clarifies the workings of parachute drogue release handles, Stevens connections, and cut-away clutches, but he doesn't inundate us with alienating terminology. The technical details are explained as they come up in the many scenes and anecdotes that shape the book. There are stories of jumps that ended in strangulation and multiple fractures and jumps that ended more comically, with the hapless jumper planted deep in a puddle of duck excrement, or landing on top of a moose. The guys rib each other mercilessly, perform their preflight gear checks religiously, and come to the assistance of their jump partners with a dedication that is inspiring.

The beauty of Alaska infuses Taylor's narrative. He describes the miraculous shift from winter to summer, with willow trees and red alders budding, massive plates of ice shattering, and the sunset-sunrise specials that last all night with the same care that's devoted to his scenes of blazing trees and scorched hills. By the time he pens the epilogue, dated December 1999, Taylor has become the oldest active smokejumper in the field's 60-year history and is trying to decide whether to sign up for the coming season. Should he choose to finally retire, he could always take up writing full-time. He's a natural. --Stephanie Gold

From Publishers Weekly

The oldest smoke jumper in the 60-year history of Alaskan firefighting, Taylor gives a detailed and exciting account of his adventures parachuting into the wilderness to combat wildfires during the summer of 1991. This is a tale of love and loss, life and death, and sheer hard work, set in an unforgiving and unforgettable landscape that's second only to Norman Maclean's classic Young Men and Fire. The book begins slowly, as Taylor methodically introduces the reader to his Alaskan locale, the routine of his yearly training and the inevitable list of colorful supporting characters (in this case: Fergie, Quacks and Big Ernie). But the energy picks up as Taylor carefully shows how quiet summer days can give way to unrelenting natural disasters. Between firefighting tales, Taylor reminisces about life at 50, recalling his past adventures, and failed marriages and relationships. Though sometimes bordering on mawkish, these digressions become a sad parallel to the lonely adventure of being a firefighter, and Taylor mercifully does not dwell too long upon his solitary lifeAhis descriptions of how smoke jumpers have died in the line of duty is a constant reminder of the hazards of his job. Finally, Taylor details a horrific fire; he deftly captures not only the savagery of nature, but also the strength of the human spirit and the joy in combating the wild, as Taylor and his colleaguesAmany of whom have been injuredAreveal the passion that made them want to take on the dangers of smoke jumping in the first place.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (June 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005893
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005895
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,447,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Raised on a farm in Central California, Murry Taylor went to the mountains as soon as he was old enough to work there. After six summers working on timber stand improvement crews and marking timber for logging, he graduated from Humboldt State College with a degree in forestry. As a professional forester for the U.S. Forest Service, he pioneered the first Wilderness Management plan in the nation that set limits on human occupancy. At odds with the agency over its clearcut logging policies, he quit in 1972 and returned to his first love, parachuting to wildfires. After a twenty-seven year career as a smokejumper in all eight western states and Alaska, he retired as the oldest active jumper to ever do the job. In 2000, his last summer, Harcourt published Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire. He continues to write and practice labor intensive management on his 40 acre homestead in Northern California. His webpage is: jumpingfire.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars There IS such a thing as an old smokejumper!, June 3, 2000

By 

Bob Weppner (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire (Hardcover)

Thanks to Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, I have no need to climb Everest. Thanks to Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, I do not have to go long-line swordfish fishing in the Grand Banks during hurricane season. Now, with equal gratitude to Murry Taylor, I have been purged of any desire to parachute into a destructive wall of raging flame in western Alaska armed with nothing more than rope, shovels and a Pulaski axe. (Actually, Taylor also jumped into fire zones carrying a dog-eared copy of Lonesome Dove and a plastic-bottled fifth of Jack Daniels.) Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire describes the life and work of the most venerable Alaskan smokejumper and the other crew with whom he risked his life regularly in the hot Alaskan summers. It is, on the surface, as gripping a work as the other authors' in its description of the excitement, danger, and backbreakingly hard work of line firefighting. But it also describes the life trajectory of one blue-collar American in the latter half of the twentieth century. Taylor, who comes across as a modest but candid Renaissance man, reflects on why he went to the wilderness and why he stayed. His has been a life alternating between keen loneliness and rollicking battlefield camaraderie. His tone in describing all this is one of equal parts humor, romanticism, melancholy, and a wry realism. At one point, Taylor bestows on another oldtimer colleague the accolade that he was "truer to his core nature than any man I've ever known." That description would just as readily suit the author. Besides being a heckuva writer with a gripping story to tell, Murry Taylor sounds like a man the reader would like to meet.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome pageturner, June 15, 2000

By 

J. Lyon (Northern VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire (Hardcover)

Got this book a few days ago and literally read most of it in one sitting. Thorough and well written. I didn't really know much about smokejumping and wild firefighting before this other than the news blurbs about the fire season in the West and some TV shows about wild fires. Bought the book because it looked interesting, and it definitely exceeded expectations.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful Read, June 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper's Memoir of Fighting Wildfire (Hardcover)

I've always been fascinated by smokejumpers...who they are, what compels them, and whether they are all as crazy as I have thought they must be. It's an incredible true story. It brings to life the adreline rush of jumping and fighting fires, the boredom of the down time, the love of freedom and the trade-offs they make in their lives to follow this passion. It communicates the strong ties to fellow jumpers and the personal loneliness of a chosen lifestyle. Most beautiful of all are the descriptions of the pristine country they protect which most of us will never see. A truly wonderful book.