Ankle Deep in Ashes (eBook)

A Smokejumper's Memoir of Depression and PTSD

Gary Atteberry (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
316 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9332-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Parachuting into a wildfire is the easy part. An elite smokejumper's life unravels when PTSD and alcoholism hit home. This is the true story of survival.

Gary was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and graduated from Oregon State University in the early 1990's. He has enjoyed what the Pacific Northwest has to offer since he was a young boy. Whether he was taking family vacations to Northeast Oregon or solo road trips as an adult, there was always an adventure. Traveling the world and visiting many cultures, Oregon will always be home for Gary. His career has taken him North of the Arctic Circle and to the Southern portions of Australia, all fighting wildfires. An adventure that he dreamed of well before it came true. Gary is now happily retired from the US Forest Service, still living in Oregon and enjoying the outdoors as much as possible.

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How does the hero of the fire line become the victim of his own mind?For twenty years, Gary Atteberry was an elite U.S. Forest Service Smokejumper parachuting into the heart of wilderness wildfires. He found brotherhood in the air and peace in the great outdoors. Then the trauma came home. Ankle Deep in Ashes is the raw memoir of a life nearly destroyed, covering:*The psychological toll of fighting fires and losing a peer. *The spiral into high-functioning PTSD and alcohol addiction. *The choice to seek help and the grueling, honest work of recovery. *A powerful, modern look at the hidden epidemic of trauma in first responders and veterans. This is the true story of falling from the sky and climbing back to life. Scroll up and grab your copy today.

Textauszug

The Things a Kid Remembers

My family was postcard perfect: mother, father, daughter, son. We lived most of my life in a postcard perfect home, in a postcard perfect neighborhood. My sister became report card perfect. I became a smokejumper. Specific events may have encouraged that path.

We had dinner together every night in my family. We liked what mom cooked; leftovers were rare. She seldom made forays outside of Betty Crocker, but one regular departure was the 1970’s white suburban version of tacos—fried burger with seasonings, shredded iceberg lettuce, diced tomatoes, and shredded cheddar cheese. But the best part was she would shape the shells herself. No broken neon yellow taco shells for us.

I remember watching Mom separate the tortillas and drop them one by one into the cast iron skillet of hot oil, wearing a big oven mitt while she used tongs to fold the finished tortilla in half to make a proper taco shell. I watched in awe from my four-year-old’s height, looking up at the brave way she accomplished this clearly dangerous procedure.

One day, at some point in the transition between dropping the tortillas into the skillet or folding them into shape, something went wrong. Flames erupted.

To me, looking up at the fire in the skillet, tongues of flame leapt so high they seemed to touch the ceiling. I was terrified, I couldn’t move; but Mother only gasped an exasperated, “Oh, shoot!” She wasn’t frightened in the least, only annoyed that the accident would ruin the timing of dinner. She twisted the knob of the range. She found the lid to the skillet and banged it on. The flames disappeared.

I was in complete awe.

Mom opened the windows to air out the kitchen. While the breeze eddied the haze in the room and diluted the smoke that stung our eyes, I felt a laugh bubble up and out: It was so funny that Mom had filled her kitchen with smoke as thick as Portland fog.

Elements stand out here: it was a good moment, a happy moment; Mom was wearing “protective gear”; she knew just what to do with that fire—there was a proper way to deal with it (and she knew what it was); and she did it with no fanfare. The smoke in the house was as cool as an actual special effect. This is my first memory of a “disaster” fire, and it is associated with competence, good cooking, and a warm emotional bond. It’s one of my favorite memories of all time, and my smokejumper memories have followed its pattern.

Another memory—a set of memories, really—is entirely different, and accounts for another aspect of my future career. It is as much about needing to be alone as it is about the kind of life I eventually chose to live. It is about my father.

My father was a businessman—an executive. Every day, I saw him go to work in a three-piece suit. Every day, I saw him come home angry and stressed. Clearly, my father wasn’t happy—at least I didn’t think of him that way. And from an early age, I related office work to unhappy work. It was impossible to understand why, day after day, year after year, he spent his life that way, giving everything at the office, having nothing left for us at home at the end of the day.

There is a time, though, when he and I connected. It would happen every year and I looked forward to it with wild anticipation. Every summer, ever since I was about six years old, my parents would arrange for our summer vacation to happen over my birthday, July 28, at Wallowa Lake. Each year, we would rent these quaint little cabins at a resort called Trout Haven, a sleepy place owned by an older couple, Walt and Carol Hearn.

Wallowa Lake is picture postcard perfect in its own way. It’s an out-of-the-way location, at the end of the road in the corner of Northeast Oregon. Wallowa Lake is a long kidney-shaped lake that sits in the deep moraine carved out by a glacier high in the Eagle Cap Mountains. The lake is deep blue, crystal clear, and very cold. At the foot of the lake, water flows out to form the main tributary of the Wallowa River.

Trout Haven, where we stayed, is near the head of the lake. The rustic resort is a cluster of seven or eight small wooden cabins, all painted white, nestled up in the ponderosa pines on the west side of the moraine. The cabins sit on an elevation above the rest of the property. Standing on the porch of any one of them, you catch sight of the lake through the thick trunks of the pines; and the ground before you is thick with tall, clumped, thigh-high native grass. From each of the cabins, skinny trails lead down to the shady common area, which is an always-freshly- cut lawn with a swimming pool that seems perpetually vacant of guests—probably because the sunny lake looks more inviting. Its surface is warm, but even six inches down it is cold, even in July. There’s a thrill to it.

Toward the lake, on the left, is the boat house, a huge red barn where all the boats are stored in winter and which is a gathering spot in summer: it has a fire pit next to it, and a ping-pong table inside.

To the right of the common area is Walt and Carol’s home, right on the edge of the shore, but elevated, like the cabins, above the lawn and the swimming pool and the shoreline. It is red, the same shade as the boat house, and has a giant screened-in porch facing the lake.

On each of our vacations, a lazy, old German Shepherd lay at the foot of the porch stairs. The porch was one of my favorite places. It had a great view, it had the dog, and it had an old-style Coke machine: insert a dime, lift the top and pull out your favorite soda. My summer favorite, as a kid, was Grape Crush. I can still taste it. Looking over the porch railing at the lake below while I drank my pop, I considered the boats at the dock. Walt had a dozen different wooden fishing boats, all mostly of the same size—12- or 14-foot motorboats, all painted the same red as their home and the boat house.

As a kid, the fact that the family vacation coincided with my birthday seemed like a huge birthday present. Over the years, I understood it as more of a get-away for my parents. Until the end of my sixteenth summer, we went every summer, the same week in July. There was no question about it, ever; and plans were made for the next year as we finalized our trip the current year.

When I was a kid, my anticipation for this trip was palpable. I could hardly contain myself; it seemed impossible to bear the wait. I dreamt about it, I daydreamed about it. Every aspect of it was vivid: the long road trip down the freeway from Portland, the winding, car-sick drive down Minam Canyon, then the emergence into the fertile Wallowa Valley, and grocery shopping at the local Safeway in Enterprise, on to the drive through what was then the sleepy town of Joseph (before the bronze factories and art galleries), and then the final leg: the bumpy drive down the narrow, mud-holed, dirt road that curved along the side of the lake to Trout Haven. And then: running up the trail and entering the cabin for the first time, inhaling the sharp odor of the Pine-Sol, and the excitement of the sudden feeling of arrival.

Of all these vivid memories, what shone most of all were mornings on the lake with my dad. Every year, our early mornings were the same. Other details of the vacation might vary to some degree, but the morning routine with just me and my dad was always the same, from when I was six years old until I was sixteen. We would wake early, right at sunrise, dress in cold stiff clothes, then tiptoed to the door. The mountain air was always cool, even in late July. At the time, Dad smoked, and as soon as we were out the door, he lit his first cigarette of the day. After his first puff or so, we gathered our tackle boxes and fishing rods from the porch and walked down the trail through the tall grass, across the commons, and down the steep trail to the boats and the dock.

The early morning water was dark, shaded by the eastern slope of the moraine. The lake was still as glass.

Loading our gear into the boat, speaking quietly, Dad gave me the responsibility to untie from the dock, then we would gently motor out. When I was very young, Dad steered us out, then he would let me drive the boat. As I got older, he taught me how to do it all.

Sitting in the boat, out on the still lake, we trolled for rainbow trout with a lure called triple teazers, a little lure in the shape of a minnow. These came in various sizes and colors and mimicked shiny fish that captured the light down in that deep lake. Sitting in the boat, watching the flashy lures and the occasional early morning bird—swallows, shore birds, sometimes even birds of prey—was mesmerizing. We spoke little, limiting our conversation to which lure to use and how quickly or slowly to troll.

To this day, certain smells bring me back to those memories, one memory especially: Dad lighting a cigarette while we were on the water. He used a zippo lighter for his Winstons, and when he lit a cigarette, the first drag didn’t smell like cigarette smoke. It didn’t smell like burning leaves. It smelled like something different, something interesting. Whenever I catch a whiff of that lighter smell now—for a cigarette, a joint, or any light fuel, I am instantly back in a boat on a lake with my dad. Likewise, the smell of outboard motor exhaust always takes me back to trolling around that lake, and to all those sensations: the chill in the air, the anticipation of the sun cresting over the mountains, the quiet wait for warmth.

Dad and I never talked much about anything except fishing, never talked about school or girls or sports. We...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.3.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9332-5 / 9798350993325