The Story of the Devine Girls 1975

Transcription

1 The Story of the Devine Girls 1975 Most of the young women hired for the Devine Fire Suppression crew in 1975 were city girls and university students between 18 and about 22 years of age. This was a first experience for all of us and our young foreman, Norm Slavik, worked us hard and trained us regularly to be a solid, productive unit on all the work we performed for the Pemberton Ranger District. His wife, Sandy, was our cook and we also had a flunky named Linda who assisted her. In those days, the fire suppression crews did many kinds of work to enhance their assigned area if there were no fires to attend to. We dug outhouse holes, built recreation sites (shovelled a lot of gravel!), trails and stairs, hung cattle fencing and brushed out logging roads among other things. We used shovels, Pulaski s, Sandviks, mattocks and a couple of girls were trained to use chainsaws. We learned how to start pumps, lay hose and dig fireguards. After work, we would put on full 50 lb. backpack pump tanks of water and do the death march around the Devine neighbourhood to build up our strength for firefighting with heavy gear on. We were always happy if we got a leaky pump tank as it both cooled us off and got lighter along the way! Some of us even had energy left in a day for the 3 mile walk into D Arcy for treats and phone calls home. Being city girls we were used to anonymity and had to learn to relax around the party line gossip surrounding us in the tiny hamlet of D Arcy. These were interesting times in terms of gender and racial politics. One straw boss, a much older man, (probably early 40 s!) confronted us and told us that it was not possible for girls to work in fire suppression. They were much too weak and the work was unfit for young women. We were told that lifting rocks was dangerous to our childbearing organs. Such attitudes would be laughable today. Also, the Native American Indian movement was in full swing at that time and evoked sympathies in local native bands. Road blockages by Mount Curry and D Arcy First Nation bands effectively isolated us at Devine and had us feeling vulnerable for a time.

2 Norm was aware of the skepticism of the gender experiment and he fostered in us a determination to succeed. We were highly disciplined. Coffee breaks were exactly 15 minutes and lunch 30. We were assigned jobs and assessed on our performance. His plan was to ensure that we were fit for anything demanded of us. Though some disparaging remarks were made here and there (like: you are not allowed to work in bikinis which we got a laugh out of after our outrage was over!), we went about our business as regular workers. We didn t know till much later, that Norm was always on guard to protect the camp from issues and intruders if necessary! The 10 Mile Fire started in late July, as we recall, from a spark from a train wheel. The call came in as we were having lunch and we were loaded into our crummy which bounded up the road to the site of the fire. On the way, one of the crew got carsick into a hastily offered hardhat. She was allowed to ride in the front seat after that! It was like a war headquarters at the fire, with much activity, equipment, aircraft and teams heading off in various directions to fight the fire as it jumped up into the bluffs. There was some confusion, too, as one of our crew s teams was fighting flames that threatened to cross a hose line, but were ordered back down to the railway tracks to be assigned to fight another hot spot. After hiking along for a ways, climbing a bluff with tools and pump tanks, hiking further back through a tricky blowdown area of criss-crossed logs, the flames crackling louder, we were led right back to the place we had started from the endangered hose line!! Another part of our crew hiked in for a sad mission to a hillside on the opposite side of the valley where a bird dog aircraft had crashed, killing the pilot. The body had been removed, but a fire still burned around the hot engines in the forests and we had to get a fire guard around it and water onto it so it didn t spread. Two of the girls were trained to put out root fires at high elevations, being hoisted by Sikorsky helicopters to rocky outcrops, jumping from the helicopter onto the rock to dig out smoldering roots and use water tanks to spray onto the roots to ensure that they were cold. It was exhilarating! The big fire was an enormous physical, emotional and mental challenge as it stretched our notions of what fires actually entailed fire fighters to do. It was a shock to walk right into a fire and work from the inside and under explosions of trees, planes flying overhead, the sound of bulldozers and people yelling orders. Amidst this chaos, and as some of us were pulling a heavy hose up a hillside, an older woman tailed us with paper and pencil in hand, badgering us for an interview for a story for McLeans magazine. It would have been an exciting opportunity, but we cared not a fig

3 about it under the circumstances. We did not comply as we were wedded to the responsibility of the job at hand and also too exhausted to think beyond the tasks. As things got organized and more resources were brought in over the initial days of this fire, our crew was assigned to keep the pumps running and to run the fire retardant mixing plant. Both jobs were tricky and important. The pumps were very loud and had attitude and it took a knack to keep some of them performing well. The fire retardant mixing was heavy, dusty and noisy work with helicopters coming in to bucket out the product to the fire. The bags of Phoscheck were so heavy it took two of us to sling them, split them open and feed the contents through a hopper that mixed them with water. There were no protective masks and our air passages were full of the red chemical we coughed it and sneezed it. Our camp went without water for a time during the fire as the pump that filled the cookhouse tank was taken to the fire. So we washed in Spruce Creek (beside the camp very cold!) or up at Gates Lake when there was a chance. When the fire was done after two or three weeks, we went back to work as usual. We had a lot of fun getting to know folks in the area. People in the area would offer us rides to town or even Vancouver as needed. We were invited to parties and even hosted one towards the end of the summer. We utilized the North Vancouver to Seton Portage train to visit home or to stop off at Whistler and regularly used the simple system of putting out the flag at the Devine train stop to hop aboard the train. It was an amazing opportunity and a pivotal summer for many of us. Our crew: Norm Slavik - Foreman Doris Zurcher Sub-foreman (and local to Pemberton) Sandy Slavik Cook (and Norm s wife) Linda - flunky Jo-Ann Zyla Lisa Perrault Ainslie Cowan Cathy Gallagher Mauri Clemens Vicki Hocking Peggy Picton Sue Hollick-Kenyon Patti Ginter Most maybe all - of us went on to complete diplomas and degrees some post graduate. Two of us became forest professionals.

4 We had a reunion in 1995, which most of the crew came to. We met up in Pemberton, with Norm and Sandy and went back to the site of the camp. We had never really known what the impact of our crew was beyond our personal experience. Norm assured us that the excellent performance of our crew had meant that women wildfire fighters did not work out of separate camps in the years following, but were assimilated into regular fire suppression crews. We submit this selection of memories with pride in our crew. Lisa and Jo-Ann August 2012 Devine Girls Jo-Ann Zyla (L) and Lisa Perrault (R) Friends since tent-mates in 1975 until today!

5 The new crew members start to arrive at Devine Camp. We settle into our new digs for the summer. The camp is built...

6 We had standard transportation for tools and the crew out to our everyday work, brushing roads, building rec sites, digging outhouse holes and stringing cattle fencing. We even went in the Pemberton Parade!

7 We couldn't have asked for more beautiful country to work in.

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9 Then, at last, there was actual fire suppression work! The Devine crew worked on both the main fire that started at the railway tracks and on the opposite side of the valley, on a fire caused, tragically, by the crash of the bird dog aircraft early in the fire.

10 Later in the fire suppression work, our crew manned the pumping station and also ran the Phoscheck mixing equipment to supply the fire retardent. The farmers field we set up in looked like a bloody battle ground.

11 Crews rested when and where they could.

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13 Reunion 1995! In 1995, most of the Devine crew was located and met up in Vancouver to retrace the journey to Pemberton, Devine and D'arcy. We found the campsite abandoned. Minus our tents and trailers, it was still a lovely parklike spot - largely due to our hard work cleaning it up years before. Trees that had been small were tall - although we hadn't changed at all! We walked the road to the D'arcy General Store and took some photos there. Then some of the crew hopped the train for a ride back to the camp. Amazingly, the conductor aboard was the one who had reported the 10 Mile fire and he remembered that our crew had been stationed there. The Devine railway station building has been replaced, but the sign looked like the original. We drove and drove to try and find the big logging bridge where we had had our photo back in In the end we settled for standing in the road over a large culvert! We stayed the night at the Birkenhead Lodge and relived the summer of 1975 and caught up on where everyone's lives had gone from there...