Word: forests
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...looks like hell. His unshaven face is covered with grime, his eyes are swollen and bloodshot, and his raspy speech is punctuated with third-degree coughs and sniffles. "I'm sick as a dog," he growls. The dense smoke on the fire line in Northern California's Klamath National Forest has cut visibility to a lung-searing 150 ft. It is eclipsing the sun like a primordial fog and slowly choking the solemn line of fire fighters. Brand, 26, from Kentfield, Calif., pauses occasionally on the steep slope to vomit discreetly in the woods. "This is unhealthy as hell...
Since late August, more than 900,000 acres have been destroyed, the worst loss of timber since 1910. When one fire is contained, crews are quickly dispatched to other outbreaks. "They are just putting them out by sheer force of will," says Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco. Hardest hit: California, where over 700,000 acres, an area almost the size of Rhode Island, have burned. It's the third severe fire season in a row for the West, where drought conditions are so extreme that bears have been forced down from the mountains...
...trick is to keep your energy up," says Jerry Midder-Rider, 32, a veteran fire fighter from the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Mont. "You just work, sleep and eat." Midder-Rider is warming himself by a gas heater at a base camp deep in the Klamath National Forest, scene of the worst fires and several deaths. Exhausted after twelve hours on the line, he enjoys relaxing briefly with companions from as far away as Maine and Alaska. "We're all equal out here," he says. "That makes all the difference...
...exciting might send many fire fighters packing. "A fire is quick and dirty," explains Larry Humphrey, 40, a natural-resource specialist from Safford, Ariz., who is in charge of 250 fire fighters. "I guess I don't have the patience for any other job." A 15-year veteran of forest fires, Humphrey has had only one day off in a month, but says he would keep on working for free. As he talks, nearby flames shoot several hundred feet up a Douglas fir in a matter of seconds. The tremendous roar is followed by the thunder of a "widowmaker...
...global power, worth challenging and defending. Let smaller-souled men paint still lifes of kitchen sinks; Boorman is a muralist, with epic ambitions and a lust for impossible risks. He has spent his movie career navigating wild rivers (Deliverance) or cutting his way through jungles (The Emerald Forest), plunging into the mythic past (Excalibur) or the hallucinatory present (Exorcist II: The Heretic). Each film is an exploration of the dark places where civilized man butts up against his own primitive soul...