And his casual, profanity-studded phrasings don’t rise to literature. His fellow smokejumpers are largely ciphers to us, so the drama tends to be abstract when Ramos describes the close calls and losses they endure in the line of fire. We get a great deal of information about the gear, the techniques, and the history of the profession, and less about Ramos’s inner life, conflicts, and relationships than we might expect.
Yet Smokejumper is more of a manual than a memoir.
Notably, Maclean’s son, John, who wrote another smokejumper classic, 1999’s Fire on the Mountain, about the South Canyon Fire, provides the introduction to Ramos’s book, praising it as a rare inside story. Smokejumper is a workmanlike complement to Norman Maclean’s eloquent 1992 classic, Young Men and Fire, which explored the complex physics and human toll of Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch Fire and the 13 men who died there. He was a volunteer fireman at the age of 17, and with the truest of grit he worked his way to the elite corps of smokejumpers, where he’s now in his 16th fire season, based in Winthrop, Washington state’s North Cascades Smokejumper Base. A team of 15 smokejumpers parachuted into the area on the afternoon of August 5, 1949, to fight the fire, rendezvousing with a former smokejumper who was. A restless, self-described “Puerto Rican kid from the SoCal suburbs,” Ramos had no collegiate prospects after high school. He wasn’t tall or physically powerful, but he had a stoic ability to develop his strength. In the book’s opening chapters, Ramos gives a terse account of his early days.
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