I looked again at the helicopter from Chuchapate. The shiny Bell 205 was manufactured in 1974, the pilot was saying.1974? These helicopters pull hard duty in the smoke and wind and grit on wildfires, between dropping water, ferrying crews and lighting fires where firefighters can’t get. This one had done this for half a century, possibly.And it was from the national forest in California where I spent eight years of my 20s fighting fire, five of them on a hotshot crew based in backcountry Santa Barbara. We rode in helicopters all the time. I remember fighting a fire next to the Chuchapate station, then returning a few months later for the funnest non-fire project ever — 20 of us dropping 30 acres’ worth of scorched pines. Yeehaw.“I’m thinking about whether I might have ridden in this very one,” I said to the pilot’s nods.“It’s quite possible,” he said.The decades since I last flew in such a helicopter have stacked like cordwood. I knew I’d trigger memories tagging along with the Fire Club from Utah State while they visited fire camp in Francis, a quiet, smoking corner of the Yellow Lake Fire, and then the helicopter operations at the west end of Heber Valley Airport.A handful of aviation students and helicopter instructors came on the tour, too. That got the pilot talking, and the rest of us got quite the detailed education in how these craft really work. The intricacy of the parts and how they fly together suggests delicacy as well as the kind of sturdiness that has kept this ship flying after I had moved on to my next life and saw my kids born, my son’s three sons born, a whole ‘nother full career.If not in that specific helicopter, I have many memories, including a few close calls, riding 205s and 212s, Sikorskis, watching air tankers drop their loads below us while hovering in a wide-windowed Alouette, a gun run down a canyon outside of Las Vegas in one of those little “MASH”-like helicopters because pilots like to have fun, too. We were always trying to get our pilots — often Vietnam vets — to have this kind of fun. Sometimes they obliged.I’m told by crewmates who stayed in the biz that things were looser, more fun in my era of aluminum helmets and a lot less consideration of the hours or days we worked at a time. I haven’t seen the job grow less dangerous as a result. The fatalities on the line still happen at what from a distance looks about the same pace, with a lot of the same mistakes, which adding rules to remember won’t solve. But maybe the extra bureaucratic care has blunted the inherent risk. I hope so.In my 20s, I never wanted to miss a fire or a shift on a fire. Initial attack that stretched from responding typically in the afternoon and grinding on through sunset, sunrise, noon, sometimes the next sunset and once or twice the next sunrise just made for better stories later.Incident command once lost track of us on a fire in Kings Canyon, California, and we just kept cutting line on up to timberline and then fired out a long indirect piece for 59 of 60 hours, only stopping for a nap when we ran out of water and waited for more. It’s not combat, but it was the kind of ordeal young men and women will look back on for a lifetime, inordinately proud and also with a certain confidence gleaned from the experience.  Big seasons when my paychecks laden with hazard pay, night differential and crazy OT landed one after the other in my dresser drawer, undeposited, was pretty much my ideal. I earned more in those years than my schoolteacher mom. Per hour wages were low, but they added up to a decent full year for a 20something in six months. Better than journalism, actually.I kept a paperback, usually a thin Louis L’Amour, in my fire pack with the fusees, water for me and an extra gallon for the crew (others had to pack saw gas and chain oil), military rations, headlamp, coat, shake ’n’ bake fire shelter, radio in later years, 35-40 pounds worth of stuff, you got used to it. We wouldn’t realize how good of shape we were in unless we brought substitutes to fill out the crew who didn’t do this work every day.There was a whole life at the station, too, the routines when back from fires, the debriefings of what we did well and not so well on the line, the grinder sharpening P’s and shovels and McCleods, the saw shed, repainting freshly sharpened tools, including a red stripe for fire ready.I rehandled the pulaskis, actually a custom tool we called super pulaskis with a double mattock end we welded together, and had a nostalgic moment at the Yellow Lake Fire camp listening to the logistics guys talking about their work.One of my tasks when we were at fire camps was sweet talking logistics folk out of as many pulaskis as possible to take home so we could cut off their grubbing ends. My unwitting suppliers often wondered aloud how we could break so many out there. Maybe ducking paperwork this way in my day is no longer possible.  I learned a lot in those years. And I saw fire from covering them for years after that, when I worked in the West and wasn’t stuck editing. But Sunday was the first time I saw some of the incident command work up close, the maps, finance, planning, all that.I was a grunt back then, with of course no idea that some of my fellow grunts would become type 1 incident commanders and the like today, no doubt flying around in some of the same helicopters we might have shared on our way to and from assignments beating dirt or backfiring all those decades ago.Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.The post Journalism Matters: Nostalgia hangs like the smoke in the air appeared first on Park Record.