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Jana Williams sat on a lawn chair beside the Denali pickup, clicking her hooks together while staring at the smoke-gray sky. She should be doing paperwork, checking bank balances (always a serious worry, though not as bad as at the start of their first-ever firefighting season), following the feeds from the six MD 520N firefighting helicopters that made up the Firebirds team…something constructive.
Instead, she was parked in the summer- and wind-parched landscape of Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge beneath a smoke-stained, dark Purgatory of a sky, while wildfire threatened the farms around Hood River. The tarmac of Ken Jernstedt Airfield shimmered with the summer heat, hazing the tied-down small airplanes almost to invisibility though they were only a few hundred meters away.
And the mos
