Bill Selby: Decades on the fire line

If wildland firefighting is a young man's game, nobody told Bill Selby.

The 71-year-old firefighter fought his first blaze in Washington in 1958.

Last week, he was an operations section chief on the northern rim of the Black Crater Fire, leading the burnout operation that let fire crews get a handle on the raging blaze.

What is a 71-year-old retired guy doing hiking over tough terrain, sucking up smoke and working all night long?

"I like it," he said. "Keeps me in shape. The pay isn't good, but the work's good. The camaraderie is what I miss when I'm not on a fire."

Selby describes the Northwest Interagency Incident Management Team as a "fire family" - a family that he extends to include the firefighting agencies they work with all around the region.

To hear Selby tell it, firefighting was a primitive affair when he started.

The quality of the people is so much superior to what it was when I started in the 1950s, you wouldn't believe it," he said.

He recalled a fire where a crew boss and a supervisor got into a fist fight. On another fire, the water tender was a water-filled pickup truck with a plastic-lined bed, a plywood lid and a tiny pump.

And the training...well, there wasn't much.

"They used to give you a shovel and a Pulaski (a specialized firefighting pickax) and send you out into the woods," he said. Not anymore and it's a great thing."

Training is much more demanding and weeds out the unfit - those who can't cut it physically, but even more importantly, those who don't have the right temperament and attitude.

As far as that goes, Selby is no dinosaur, even if he is an old-timer. He welcomes the relatively new presence on the firemen of women firefighters and supervisors.

"I have found that women on the fire line are just as good or better than men," he said. "I think they're more dedicated. They have to shine, you know."

Selby said that fire crews today focus on safety and he proudly noted that the only accident on the Black Crater Fire as of Sunday night was a fender-bender in the fire camp parking lot.

Equipment, too, is better nowadays - from engines to aircraft.

What has gotten worse is fire behavior. Selby says that decades of fire suppression combined with lack of treatment in forests where the big timber was logged off have created heavy fuel loads.

"It's pretty difficult to stop a fire," he said. "Also, the climate is changing. We're getting hotter and dryer; that's pretty evident."

Whether the cause is human-caused global warming or cyclical climate change, Selby says, the result is tougher fires.

Selby retired from a 40-year career with the U.S. Forest Service in 1998 - and immediately started working as a firefighter.

"I retired on July 3 and went on a fire July 4," he said.

He started his career cruising timber for harvest in the Okanogan National Forest on the Canadian border in Washington. He served in John Day and Lakeview and was once promoted to Portland to do human resource training.

He characterized that role as "teaching Rangers to be people."

But most of all he loves fighting fire, leading topnotch crews in efforts like the Friday night burnout that seems to have turned the corner on the Black Crater Fire.

He says he doesn't do much in the off-season besides gardening and traveling with his wife.

"I don't do a damned thing," he said. "I lay around all winter and I get out in the spring and pass my 'arduous steps test' like a breeze. Some of these young guys are panting and sweating. I guess I'm hardened, you could say."

Selby once served as a smokejumper out of the North Cascades Smokejumper Base in Winthrop, Washington.

Now, his son, Bill Selby, Jr., runs the smokejumper crew out of the Redmond Air Base.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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