I am on my way home from my second two week tour on the fire. Both assignments were simultaneously among the the most challenging but also rewarding experiences I’ve ever had in fire.

It’s been a couple years since I’ve been out on the line, rumbling up questionable forest roads in a line of dust-covered trucks to the same drop point every day. But even though I’m not tied in with my Division Supervisor and picking the choice gems out of my sack lunch with the crews I’m assigned to out on the line, the experience is similar.

Every day I report to my info shop and walk through the same prescribed course of action on repeat for 14 shifts. Every morning I’m tuned in a few minutes before briefing and my co-workers take their cues and deliver the same salutations and too-early-AM appropriate question regarding the quality of my sleep, etc. After briefing we fall in step on the long hike through processes, checking boxes and filing away completed tasks that, if missed, would definitely result in a barrage of public inquiry as to its whereabouts.

There are meetings. There are complaints about the sack lunches. There are tie-ins and touching-bases and loops to close all day long. The LOFR is in and out. The Sheriff drops in to remind us he’s still here, still paying attention, and that he appreciates us. I report out to him, every day, and the friendly-but-intense facilities manager for the city.

The ten people in the office where I work wake up with me everyday. They share the morning thrash and the afternoon wall of overstimulation and a desperate longing for a nap. They wander out with me after ten PM like a barely-organized March of zombies to our respective sleeping locations where we will get not-enough sleep before we repeat the cycle over again. And again. And again.

These people are now my tribe. More than thirty days of knowing what they’re coming over to ask, how they like their coffee, who to avoid talking to first thing in the morning (me). We’re our own crew, with a mixed bag of personalities and opinions, some of which play nicely together and some that don’t. But after a month of 16 hour days of breathing the same air and chaos and order, bent on the same mission and purpose, we are family.