A Raving Review
It’s not everyday that an author receives a review that so succinctly summarizes the author’s intent. Frank Carroll, the reviewer, and I briefly met at a fire during my second summer as a Hotshot. He was interviewing women working on fire crews to make a recruiting video. We recently reconnected when he recognized my name on Facebook as one of the women he had interviewed decades ago. Here’s what he wrote about Dances with Fire:
“Kate Hamberger’s autobiographical account describes her time serving on the Prineville Hotshot crew in Oregon 1986-1987, with a sojourn in the ridiculously-named Happy Camp and in the historic Siege of 1987; Prineville BLM helitack in 1988 during the Yellowstone Fires, and on the Horseshoe Meadows Hotshot crew in California in 1989 where she survived in the California hellscape of heavy brush fields and mountains steeper than a cow’s face, and the Florida Everglades where sawgrass, peat fires and politics defied their best efforts and from which tales too tall to tell still haunt her memory. (Her book)… is a master class in first person writing on wildland firefighting on elite crews.
Stripping away the flash and glory of the heroic snippets of stories about firefighters on the evening news, Kate’s account of the daily episodes that push individuals beyond the limits of reason and physical ability fill a story peppered with humor and poignancy in an intimate and very human account few authors achieve. Firefighting is a physical and mental trial literally unimaginable to those looking in from outside. Kate’s account humanizes the astonishing adventure in ways that left me sweating, hurting, laughing, and dragging my sorry butt one more chain to salvation, right behind her in the moon dust on the fire line, in the smoke, and in the unbearable heat that is the wildland firefighters’ lot.
It’s a wonderful eye-opening account of the equivalent of a private soldier in war. There are books that try to blend the soldier’s account with the bigger picture. They often fail because there are already great books about the big picture. There are few great books from the single POV perspective of a raggedy ass hotshot. Her book is, to the best of my knowledge, a powerful recruiting tool for the next generations in fire. Her story breaks an overwhelming and, from the outside, terrifying line of work into little bites: the next step, the last chain, the next hilltop just around the corner, the objective almost there, the puking in a primitive kid fort, the moral and cultural dilemmas, the too big boots narrative. It allows people to see and believe, If that Cowboy girl from Prineville can do this, I bet I can, too.
Her story allows people to believe they can learn.”
Rookie Year.
