The short boat ride on the Missouri River north of Helena, Montana, was serene. Bald eagles completed their morning flights. Mountain goats fed at the water's edge, oblivious to the three of us in our motorized raft. Soon after the river turned sharply left, we landed by a modest sign that commemorates this site of tragedy.

Forty-seven years earlier, a random lightning strike during a brutally hot and dry summer started a small fire atop the south wall of Mann Gulch, a rugged box canyon opening on to the river. The following day, 5 August 1949, 15 smokejumpers parachuted into the canyon to contain the fire. They were joined on the ground by a forester from a nearby station. By 5 p.m., the crew had gathered their equipment and began an orderly march toward the fire.

The fire suddenly transformed into an explosive, fiery wind and charged toward the firefighters. They threw down their tools and raced desperately through the dry brush and grass up the north slope of Mann Gulch. Eleven of the young men were killed outright. Two others, who were terribly burned, died the following day. Two men outran the fire to find shelter at the rocky crest. The crew's foreman had set an escape fire and survived by lying down in its hot ashes; in the official hearings that followed the fire, charges were levied that his act was responsible for killing the young men.

While smoke still drifted from the gulch, Norman Maclean, an English professor from the University of Chicago, visited the site. Maclean had grown up in Missoula, Montana, and had worked on firefighting crews as a teenager and after undergraduate school. A love of Montana's forests and trout streams drew him westward every summer.

Maclean retired from his teaching post in 1973. At a time when many retirees are content to reflect on their careers and rejoice in grandchildren, Maclean set out to understand certain milestones in his own life. He wrote of his family and his murdered brother in A River Runs Through It, a series of autobiographical stories that was published in 1976. Then Maclean turned his attention with obsessive intensity to that tragic fire in 1949. He had to know what had transpired. His subsequent years were marked by intensive library research and lengthy sessions with experts in fire science. He tracked down the two remaining survivors and revisited Mann Gulch with them. He even located and interviewed others who had less direct links to the fire. Maclean took a series of arduous trips into Mann Gulch, seeking on each occasion to understand the dynamics of the earlier tragedy. His studies vindicated the actions of the foreman. In 1990, Maclean died, leaving a manuscript for his close friends and colleagues to edit and assemble.

In Young Men and Fire, we have a scholarly and detailed investigation that begins 25 years after a natural disaster. We also have the profound meditations of a teacher, writer, and naturalist as he addresses the tragic losses in his own life and in the lives of others. We sense the writer's burden and obligation to tease beauty and truth from seemingly chaotic occurrences.

As a teenager on a fire line, Maclean himself had narrowly escaped a fiery death. In describing the episode, Maclean states that "[f]ear, being only partly something that makes us run away-at times, at least, is something that makes us come back again and stare at what made us run away." In a publisher's note, Maclean's files are quoted: "The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead." If Maclean could precisely define the events in Mann Gulch, he just might understand in a more universal sense how human beings react to and rationalize calamity. The quest for self-understanding simply never ends.

Throughout Young Men and Fire, Maclean speaks of the need to change catastrophe to tragedy. Catastrophe seems random and inexplicable, tearing apart human plans and aspirations. Tragedy raises the loss to a level that we can comprehend morally and intellectually. Maclean writes that

"[t]his is a catastrophe that we hope will not end where it began, and might go on and become a story. It will not have to be made up-that is all important to us-but we do have to know in what odd places to look for missing parts of a story about a wildfire, and of course have to know a story in a wildfire when we see one. So this story is a test of its own belief-that in this cockeyed world there are shapes and designs, if only we have some curiosity, training and compassion, and take care not to lie or be sentimental."

Young Men and Fire (1) represents a closure for many thoughts and events in Norman Maclean's life: for the fire itself and the loss of young life, for the death of his wife, for the death of his brother detailed so poignantly in A River Runs Through It.

The book closes with the following:

"I, an old man, have written this fire report. Among other things, it was important to me, as an exercise for old age, to enlarge my knowledge and spirit so I could accompany young men whose lives I might have lived on their way to death. I have climbed where they climbed, and in my time I have fought fire and inquired into its nature. In addition, I have lived to get a better understanding of myself and those close to me, many of them now dead. Perhaps it is not odd, at the end of this tragedy, where nothing much was left of the elite who came from the sky, but courage struggling for oxygen, that I have often found myself thinking of my wife on her brave and lonely way to death."

Now I have caught up with my wife and our guide. He locates a flashlight that belonged to one of the smokejumpers. We find hardware from a pack frame and the rusted remains of a 5-gallon water can. Burned arboreal skeletons from the conflagration still stand. Concrete crosses with plaques mark the point of death of each young man. A wooden post stands at the site of the escape fire. I discover that I am caught up even further in Maclean's sustained passion for learning the truth of Mann Gulch. As I rest in a gap in the rocky reef through which two of the survivors clawed their way, I think about Norman Maclean's quest and about similar quests that all of us must make on behalf of loved ones, of patients, and of ourselves.