“As it turned out, I liked to suffer, and the depth of one’s suffering directly correlated to the degree of one’s euphoria at the top.”
This is Kelly Ramsey, describing the grueling, daily training hikes she undertook before taking a job as a Rowdy River “hotshot” — the firefighters who specialize in controlling and extinguishing wildfires. The sentence is a nod early on in her memoir to the physical suffering to come in the rest of the book.
Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West describes the two seasons Ramsey spent working as the only woman on a 20-person hotshot crew. Both of which involved battling some of the worst wildfires in California history. (Remember 2020 and 2021? Ramsey was in the thick of all that.)
Ramsey is an eloquent and lyrical writer, which elevates Wildfire Days well beyond the realms of simple anecdote into a real page-turner. It’s impossible, for example, not to quickly notice what a master of great opening lines she is. (“The day before the apocalypse, we slept at the UC Davis Forestry camp,” begins one chapter.)
Also working in Wildfire Days’ favor, Ramsey is spectacularly good at vividly describing the torturous physical challenges involved in wildfire work.
On the amount of equipment she was required to lug up and down steep, uneven terrain all day:
I tried not to do the math: pack, forty-five pounds; tool, five or ten pounds; banjo, ten pounds; hose, ten pounds each, times four: total … one-hundred pounds? I wasn’t sure of my own weight, maybe 140 or 150, so what I carried was 70 percent of another me…? Don’t think about it.
On fighting her own body’s instincts, day after day:
The hill looks vertical. The leg is tired: it claims to be broken. It’s so fucking tired … The muscles clench and scream. You can’t breathe. Or you’re breathing too much, you’re gasping, but you still can’t get enough air.
On the sleep deprivation inherent in sleeping outdoors, in the open air, surrounded by her crew members:
Sleep was a perpetual concern and hard-won achievement. The simple roll of tarp, pad and sleeping bag was necessary, because packing up in the morning was a race — we had five minutes from wake-up to be in the trucks fully dressed, boots laced (the most time-consuming part), and you were forbidden to walk around before wake-up time lest you cut short someone else’s rest.
Ramsey breaks up passages about her physical suffering with other less exhausting and pertinent information. She writes beautifully about California — “Not a state, so much as a world” — and her awe at its natural gifts are ever-present. She gives an easy-to-understand overview of California’s history with wildfires, while never losing sight of the fact that humanity has turned these events into something new entirely. (“Smothering smoke implicated each one of us for our part in making a hotter world, enabling such a catastrophe,” she writes at one point.) She also explains, very usefully, the methods fire crews like hers use to try and get blazes under control.
Thankfully, Ramsey is not averse to a bit of humor now and again, successfully describing her first encounters with her fire crew in a manner that conjures images of Top Gun’s beach volleyball scene. (“The bro show was in full effect and I realized with horror that not a person in sight could loan me a tampon.”)
At the end of the book, there are elements about Ramsey’s personality that remain confounding, despite her attempts to explain her own contradictions. Her desire to feel attractive to others is irritatingly persistent, but coexists awkwardly with a chosen profession that involves having a “nose crammed full of ash and black soot boogers” on a near-daily basis.
Ramsey’s desperate need for approval is well contextualized with stories about her childhood and, in particular, about her alcoholic father. But one can’t help wondering why she didn’t opt for a quicker or easier path to approbation. Trying to impress 19 men in some of the harshest working conditions on Earth while at a major physical disadvantage, looks an awful lot like masochism after a while.
If there is one reliable consistency in Wildfire Days, it is in Ramsey’s refreshing honesty. There is a frankness in her writing that is unconcerned with whether she looks cool to the reader or not. She admits when she is embarrassed, or trying too hard, or not knowledgeable enough about the task in front of her. She admits when she behaves cruelly and hurts others. Seemingly nothing is off the table.
As a result, Wildfire Days is hard to tear yourself away from. Not just because of the lessons it has for the reader about the risks inherent to the place that we all live, but because of Ramsey herself, a figure as complex as the fires she once fought.
‘Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West’ is out June 17, 2025 from Scribner.
Ramsey will appear in conversation with Manjula Martin at Copperfield’s Books (775 Village Ct., Santa Rosa) on June 19 at 7 p.m. On June 20, Ramsey will be in conversation with Miriam Bird Greenberg at Mrs. Dalloway’s (2904 College Ave., Berkeley). Ramsey will also make an appearance at Corte Madera’s Book Passage (51 Tamal Vista Blvd.) on June 21 at 1 p.m.
