“Only The Brave”: A Reflective Review
By: Dusty Lacroix
Hey gang, I’m a guest writer here at the ‘ol Press. Me and the head honcho met swinging tools and being tools in the great state of Texas, and he thought I could, well, shed some light on some different things. Here’s one of ‘em:
I was the tender age of 22 when I got one of our great nation’s oldest mascots tattooed on my ass. Well, not technically on my ass, but ass-adjacent on my upper thigh. Smokey Bear’s furry visage (it’s not Smokey Thee Bear, fuck off) has now adorned my skinny white body for almost 5 years, and will for the rest of my life. Why, pray tell, would I do such a thing? Well, let me tell you a story.
It was late June in South Dakota. Not the shitty part though. Think Mount Rushmore, pine trees, elk herds, and mountain magic – not corn and depressing Indian reservations. Anyways, your boy is riding in the back of an extended cab Ford F-550 fire engine with a couple of other dudes on the way to what will be his first real wildfire.
The fire itself was pretty uneventful, it had been skunking around in some grass and logs on a hillside that had already seen the effects of wildfire many a time; she was a docile beast to say the least. We and some other personnel from the area put in a line around it (think aggressive gardening) to stop the spread, and kept it in check. We get back at a reasonable hour as it’s getting dark, maybe 10pm or so. I scarfed down a frozen ‘za and went to bed. What’s memorable to me about my first fire is not the fire itself, or the journey that led me there, but how i felt at 4am the morning after.
Waking up with adrenaline pumping, sore as fuck from digging and carrying a bunch of random shit, my brain was racing. I couldn’t shake it. The only thing I can reasonably take a stab at what it felt like was the feeling that a 6-month old Australian Shepherd has when it knows its owner is about to take it for a walk. It wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more. The stoke was real. We’re all chasing something, and since then I’ve been chasing that feeling every summer.
Anyways, that whole summer of ‘15 I had been joking with one of the dudes I worked with about getting Smokey Bear tattooed on my ass. A few more fires, a lot more times getting my ass kicked, having to go to two services for the fallen (thankfully no one I worked with directly), two broken lumbar bones, and 550 hours of overtime later, fire had taken the piss out of me, but I wasn’t ready to be done with fire. I got the tattoo.
In “Only The Brave”, we see firsthand the quest of Eric Marsh (played by Jeff Bridges) to make his fire crew into the nation’s first municipal hotshot crew (hard work and hard dudes). Along the way, conflict at home comes into focus as we see the toll the job takes on his marriage and home life with his wife, Amanda (Jennifer Connelly). The other central character is Brendan “Donut” McDonough, a former junkie and current father looking to turn his life around by joining Marsh’s crew. While Marsh’s crew succeeds in making status as the Granite Mountain Hotshots, tragedy strikes on the Yarnell Hill Fire, and I’ll leave it at that. (editors note: watch the movie if you haven’t, jeff bridges and tim Riggins fighting fires what else do you want?!)
I saw “Only The Brave” when it was released in theaters, but after spending this past summer on a hotshot crew, the movie definitely hits differently. All of the surface level stuff is there – the crew buggies, the supt truck, the ever-present veneer of testosterone that naturally occurs when you smush 20 dudes in their twenties into 4 trucks (luckily on my crew we had a few women to temper our apellike tendencies).
The thing that really hit home for ol’ Dusty though, was the real people being portrayed. Not the names or the faces – my first season in fire was two years after the Yarnell Hill Fire. It’s the characters you meet. It was like seeing everyone I’ve ever worked with in 6 seasons of doing fire.
There’s definitely a type of person that becomes the superintendent of a hotshot crew – maybe a divorce or two, a seasonal drinking habit, competitive to the core, hard as fuck. Seeing Jeff Bridges up on the screen as Eric Marsh made me think of all the Eric Marshes I knew, the Eric Marshes who led me, the Eric Marshes that I was maybe becoming slowly.
The Brendan McDonoughs of the world – seasonal employees on a hotshot crew with a bad past, trying to get their head and their heart right through hard work. Men and women looking for an honest day’s work, looking for the meaning of it all, somewhere on a nuking hillside of juniper in the hot desert sun. In a lot of ways they’re the Peter Pans of the world, wanting to stomp around the woods in strange corners of America, chasing adventure, refusing to live in any other box than a government-issued crew buggy.
There’s something I can’t fully explain that’s out there on that smokey horizon. Run a chainsaw until your arms want to fall off. Drink two gallons of water in a 16 hour shift and piss once. Be so sleep deprived you almost throw up from the amount of coffee and chewing tobacco you’ve been consuming to stay awake. Have a rolling rock come within inches of breaking your legs. Befriend 19 other weirdos who think this is all sort of fun. Then it becomes clearer. No less smokey, and you can never fully hold it in your hands or frame it over your mantle, but it becomes as clear as the Arizona sun hitting Granite Mountain in the June dawn.
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