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Squarespace. Think it. Dream it. Make it. A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbleached in today's episode of the show, if you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website. This American Life dog.

To fight this massive fires out west there, these camps hidden from view, if you were driving by, you might not even know who they're like. One of the largest fires in California history. The creek fire has a base camp for 700 people in the parking lot of a ski resort in central California, just outside Fresno.

If you know where to go, the first thing that you see when you pull up to camp is these 20 somethings running back and forth with bright yellow fire hose, hundreds and hundreds of miles of it. Their job is to untangle miles of hoses all day, every day. One of our producers, Miki Meek, recorded the sound that you're hearing right now. Talk to these guys, including RJ Brown, who's 23, in a dirt streaked yellow jacket and a facemask with a panda nose and mouth printed on it.

The official motto of his employer, the California Conservation Corps, which sends young people all over the state to do this kind of job, hard work, low pay, miserable conditions and more.

You guys want hard work or pay miserable conditions and more.

That is the actual motto, the best part of your job.

And what is the worst part of your job? The best part. I said no. Hang on. Start with the worst part.

Just the worst part is when when they say you over here on the walkie talkie, oh, we got sixty thousand layers of hoses coming in and then once the 60 comes in, they bring in another 30.

So when you hear 60000 hoses coming over the radio, what is going through your head when you hear that defeat? Like I want to go home? Oh, no, no, no.

I don't want to do this. The way this job works is this. Trucks come back from the fire line and dump huge piles of jumbled hoses, five guys, and tangle them. And then with each hose, they take one end.

All right. Ready? Everybody grab a corner and sprint across the parking lot. Each is 100 feet long. So it's kind of a long way to go. They let out one bright yellow hose next to another, next to another, to the whole parking lot is blanketed with tidy yellow hose. What do you do to keep yourself safe when you're rolling hoses?

I'll just be thinking about music in my head that I have already listened to. And it keeps and it just keeps me going.

They're not allowed to wear headphones on this job. His teammate, Corey Rovi, has a different strategy to deal with that. I seek it out and I tell everybody what's on your mind lately. Can't break my stride.

It was like last night I had the strangest dream I saw all the way to China and a little rowboat to find you. And nobody got everybody's right. So that song just keep going in my head.

Next step in this process, the wind, the hoses up in coils, put them on pallets, wrap them in plastic wrap and send them to be cleaned. After that, those go out to the fire line again, then back to the hose and crews, then back to the place where they're clean over and over, week after week after week, which is life at a fire camp. You have the same day over and over and over till the fire's out.

And he visited Creek Fire had been going for nearly two months and burned more than 350000 acres. It's over 500 square miles, putting out a fire that large is a mammoth task. The base camp that Mickey met, R.J. Qiryat, is like a mini city with a makeshift laundromat cafeteria mechanic shop, sleep trailers of triple bunk beds. Like most people at the camp, Corian RJ works 16 hour days and they sleep right on the asphalt, like right next to where they work intensive pitched.

They sleep in their uniforms so they can squeeze in a few extra minutes of rest each morning. I was.

Chris, what do you guys what are you guys dream about at night?

My dream yesterday was about Hoess, because my role in all this, I was so mad like, oh, I can't take no breaks, no days off.

But the thing about RJ Inquiry, they love their jobs. Despite the repetitiveness and exhaustion for this, RJ worked retail, a car wash where he had an office job coding. Now it feels like they're part of something important, the team captains for their crew. And they have this can do attitude that it's actually kind of the culture of this camp.

Like I just make sure that the crews PMA is always at its highest positive mental attitude, either, meaning people say something like, hey, I just keep the female up.

Is that is that a well-known acronym? Yes. I had never heard of that acronym.

I could use some more PMA in my life right now, with the fire season running longer than ever, it's seven or eight months out of the year. Now, there's this entire ecosystem of people like RJ and Corey who swoop in and live in fire camps for months all over the west on program, we meet the people putting these fires out, doing all kinds of jobs you never think of to do it in this unusual situation where they have to push the same boulder up the same hill every single day.

And in the second half of the program, we have a different large group of people who are battling a different large sort of threat. And the stakes could not be higher. They're literally trying to save the world. WBC, Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us. Again, the extinguishers, so we heard about these fire camps from Goosy Johnson. She's a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and spends most of the year chasing fires around California, covering them and know so much about them.

She took Minkey and one of our other producers, Gary Salvin, to the fire camp, a creek fire. And as these stories of the people there and what they do and of daily life in this place. Here's Lucy, the drive up to the Creek fire base camp should have been beautiful. This is Ansel Adams Country in the high Sierra, but the two lane highway was lined with trees that looked like charcoal toothpicks. We passed houses where the only thing still standing where the chimneys.

The local gas station reminded me of a Salvador Dali painting. The letters on the big sign out front had melted, dripping down like icicles. I've been to dozens of fire camps. At the big ones. There's always a stand selling T-shirts printed with a year in the name of the fire and you see firefighters wearing them. There's a predictable rhythm to daily life at these camps. They start with a briefing right at 7:00 a.m. This is where everyone gets their orders.

I'll be at the creek fire. This happens by the ski lifts.

A quick roll call, a little T here. Roven Here, Grayback 17. Over a hundred firefighters are here. They looked cold, tired, wearing thick stocking caps and heavy jackets.

Hundreds more are listening on the radio.

This was day forty eight of their fight against the Creek Fire Plan on your same work assignments today we're just really controlling that perimeter and making sure nothing moves on us and there's no way to put out a fire this big.

So the best they can do is stop it from growing. The actual mechanics of that feels surprisingly primitive.

Hundreds of crews spread out all along the fire's edge, working on their own little speck of land, scraping the ground down to mineral dirt with chainsaws and shovels and bulldozers.

So there's nothing left to burn when the wildfire gets there.

So be flexible. It's kind of a key to it. If something changes where we need to move equipment around. That's kind of some of our reasoning for not getting rid of a ton of stuff yet, because I know you guys are kind of getting Groundhog Day out there.

A lot of the top brass, the incident command team spoke to the firefighters through two flat screen TVs set up on a platform. They were at a command post more than an hour away.

To me, it sounded like a county fair. All right.

Thanks, John. Next up, fire behavior that morning. The most gross yesterday was out in this Edison Lake area, mainly closer to the South Fork out here than any place else just for the folks in the field. Lots of heavy fuels burning out there, lots of smoke coming out of it. So make sure you take breaks with your being in the smoke every day. It's probably for some folks it's twenty four hours of smoke that they're experiencing out there every day.

All right. Thanks, Patty, for safety.

A thick shroud of gray smoke hung over the base camp. The people at the center of the operation are the hotshot crews. They're the most elite of the wildland firefighters dispatched to the hottest and the farthest corners of a blaze and the social hierarchy of fire camps. The hotshot crews are at the top after the morning briefing. I talked to process in the parking lot. He's a squad boss for a hotshot crew out of L.A. County. His wife's also a wildland firefighter on a different crew.

She drives a water truck called Tinder. He told me that in the last month they'd only overlapped at home one day, which was challenging with a two year old daughter.

We bounce back and forth between my family, her family and daycare.

That's a bunch of young guys from his crew sticking their heads out the windows of their sherbet green bus. It's called a buggy chirping. Pete, Pete, Pete. The Phoenix is their crew logo.

Phoenix, gorgeous little bird.

How many times a day do you hear that? Oh, man, it's pretty constant. Do you like when they do that? I mean, not way I like it. I look forward to it, but I think for me it tells me, OK, the guys are good, they're they're happy right now. So maybe sometimes when I don't hear it. OK, yeah. What's going on. Yeah. You guys are up to something.

Pete's crew is called Little Tohunga. Our little tip for sure at forty two. Pete's been on the crew the longest. Some of the younger guys that he hatched from an egg at the fire station and keeps them all safe under his wing.

Pete's not just their boss. He's a life coach, a mentor and a therapist all rolled into one, giving them advice on everything from how to clean their chainsaws to buying their first house.

He even reminds them to pay their bills back at home.

I feel sometimes like like I am their their dad.

The reason it's like that, because I'm with them so much more than I am with my own family. It's like I know what makes them go off, what doesn't it.

How to come down, how to roll them up when we need them to be put on the shorter side, he's got school tattoos on his arms to remind himself that that's part of life. The crooners for Cool Head, he keeps a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck in the side compartment of his truck. He grew up on the east side of L.A.. Still lives there as a kid. Pete says he never went camping or hiking, never even visited the mountains.

He ended up in this job on a total fluke.

Back in the early 2000s, the Forest Service was trying to hire more people of color.

I remember he came on the L.A. Times and said hiring 500 firefighters is like front page and saw my buddies came to me. I was the guy with the car like, hey, can you take us to this? Drop us off. You know, we want to go. I end up taking them and staying with them a couple hours in line. I put in an application. So I think like a month and a half later, I get a call from the Stanislaus National Forest offering me an apprenticeship.

And the rest is history.

I guess little T is now majority Latino with a lot of first generation firefighters like kids of immigrants. Here's a typical day for the Hotshots at camp after that morning briefing. They load onto their buggies with backpacks crammed with tin fuel tools and water. Their packs can weigh up to 50 pounds. They didn't carry their own stretcher because if one of them gets hurt, they're on their own. They then drive out on a narrow backcountry road, pull up alongside a mountain and start hiking in the wilderness.

It's a brutal two point eight mile trek to their job site. No trail, no switchbacks, no signposts. They had to keep going back there for two weeks. Here's one of the rookies on Little T Dickinson.

Every day you're like, we're doing it again. Again. We got to go up there.

And there is about a foot of ash the whole time on the ground and your foot sinking into the ground. And then there's rocks under the ash. So your boots are getting torn up on these big boulders.

But the ash is probably the biggest part because you just constantly bring in ash.

They're not issued protective breathing gear and smoke exposure may be why cancer rates are higher among firefighters.

I mean, for me, when I got to the top, I was spitting black. And when you're pushing at a pace hard like that, I was breathing out of my mouth most of the time, which you try not to do. But I was doing it. And so I just. My teeth were black, everything was black. A whole crew was coughing like they had smoked cigarettes their whole life. Um, I think we accepted it at some point.

You know, this is our life. You know, we'll just keep going up there every single day.

They had to return to the same area, a little patch of the creek fire about six miles long. The flames were threatening to blow out into a new part of the forest. The air was so smoky that planes couldn't get in to do regular water drops. So for most of their 16 hour workday, little wrapped up their chainsaws and sliced down burning trees.

They cleared huge piles of brush and branches with their hands and scraped out a dirt path with what are essentially common gardening tools, rakes, hoes, axes, this path can be up to 30 feet wide.

The goal is to give the fire no place to go. Sometimes they literally fight fire with fire, torching trees and brush before the wildfire can get there. One of those jobs that's both monotonous and super dangerous. All the while, they have to be on the lookout for falling trees called snags. They're one of the ways that hotshots get killed in the fields. Little T ran into a lot of snags their first few days on the creek fire.

Here's one of the guys on the crew, Frank Placentia, Jr..

Your heart's pumping. The adrenaline is pumping. You're scared. You're worried, you're nervous. We all like snag or tree, and we all have to bail out and you can't control it could be just walking by and just poop. And it was, you know, big or small.

They'll go. The trees are falling.

What does that sound like? It's a loud crack. It feels suspenseful because you don't know where it's coming because you're surrounded by trees. It's a big tree. It's a big boom.

It shakes the ground. It'll shake the ground. And so you feel that it's not. Yeah, it's not a good feeling. It's definitely not a good feeling.

Again, here's Pete, who's been hot shotting for more than a decade.

There's been trees that have fallen right where I was standing, literally within seconds of me taking three steps like five. That literally could have been it. OK, I got to clear my mind of this because I. I got the rest of the same or the rest of my career thinking about what I can do on that. But fuck man, that was close. That could have been it. There's so many ways you can get hurt or die on a wildfire.

Firefighters get cut by chainsaws, crushed by boulders and into car wrecks on dirt roads. Little T as one set of fire where a plane accidentally dumped thousands of gallons of flame retardant on a firefighter from another crew, killing it. And then earlier this season, a squad bus like Pete died while fighting the El Dorado fire in Southern California. The flames burned over him afterward. Another member of the crew who had been upset about his death went missing. Suicide and PTSD have risen among wildland firefighters.

It feels like dumb luck that Pete hasn't seen a dive on his own crew. He's in charge of a bunch of guys in their 20s. A lot of them are pretty new to this job. He can stop worrying even when they're off the fire and get to go home. He says they've gotten injured and even died in car accidents. Tired and in a rush to get home after a fire.

I've heard a lot of firefighters talk about this is a problem. Pete says his wife Jen, sometimes busts him for not being able to leave the guys back at work.

Sometimes I, I, I get this blank stare and then we're sitting on the couch and watch TV, but was watching TV and she look at me again right away. Her question always is, are you thinking about work? I was thinking about the guys.

I'm like, what are you thinking? Are wanting a romantic and dinner. Like, I'm thinking about Frank.

Yeah. Honestly, that that does happen. You know, what are they doing right now? Like, oh, I wonder, do they need help? Like, I don't want them to get hurt. Like I, I want to get back.

Really. I'm curious because you spend so much time with these guys, does it ever feel easier to be more like a dad to them than to your own children who you don't get to see very often? Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's I don't know how to answer that other than. Yeah, it is like that, unfortunately, I guess, you know, because I do see sometimes a difference in how I treat everybody in my family and how I treat these guys, sometimes more understanding and more patient.

We're literally stuck with each other for seven, eight months out of the year. If the guys get in an argument or are not seeing eye to eye, you can't just walk away. You have to deal with it at the moment. Or it could potentially cost us our lives with the family. You walk away and you come back a day later or whatever to be with us, you can't. So I'm aware that it might be unfair. I'm 100 percent aware of that.

Long fire seasons are now so consistent that there's a whole army of private contractors that chases these fires across California, too. It's a multimillion dollar industry.

Their jobs are to make life a little easier for the people out on the fire line at the creek fire. Most of these contractors are set up in the main parking lot of the ski resort, which is the equivalent of downtown here. There's hot showers, the sleep trailers, they're highly sought after in an industrial kitchen that packs up these brown paper bag lunches called the five thousand calorie meal. The mobile laundromat is in a white trailer in the back of the parking lot hooked up to a water tank.

It has 16 washers and dryers going all the time.

This is one 32 year general is the person in charge of washing everyone's filthy laundry. She says little t always text her the second they get off the mountain just so they can jump to the front of the line as soon as they roll back and they can put a little detergent in there and we go, How many loads of laundry are you doing today?

About 460. Yeah, could be more. We're either working or sleeping. Basically, there's no real downtime. Generes, blue latex gloves. So she doesn't pick up poison oak. Does it smell really bad when it comes in? You know, it can. Some of these teams, they what's called spike out, spiking out means camping out in a remote spot near the fire line and they spike out there for sometimes two weeks. There's no laundry service, no shower.

And yeah, there's socks can stand on their own sometimes. One of the guys who works for her was a lot less diplomatic.

So if you or if you go to the store, you buy one because you boil them and now you leave them out for a month. That's what some of these clothes smell like. The only snafu Jones had here at camp was a sock mix up. She accidentally put one firefighter's expensive wool socks in another guy's bags.

And we were we were able to unite this earth. So it's just as well he was upset about us, but we got him back, too. So all is good. I looked at the socks. I got, I think, a couple of days. So, yeah, it was very high stress socks. But you know what that I'm telling you, that is the comforts. They were his socks. He wanted them back. The creek is the fourth fire camp Jones worked out this year.

She says the smoke in each of them smells really different here. It's like a campfire from all the smoldering pine trees, but a more populated areas where buildings and houses burn. The smoke smell synthetic and greasy. It stings her lungs. That reminded me of the fires I saw on wine country in twenty seventeen. More than 5000 houses and buildings burned down. The smoke smelled awful because you were breathing in people's lives.

Kelly Rose has one of the most important jobs in the camp right now. She works in a trailer printing the maps and action plans for all the teams. The printers are on 24 hours a day, and Kaylee is the only person on her 12 hour shift, so she can't leave the trailer. People are constantly running in and out. They never have time to chat, which means that this person who everyone relies on is the loneliest person I met at camp.

The most exciting drama that had happened the week I was there was a BlackBerry busting into a giant grease fat from the kitchen. The cook told me the bird chugged about 100 gallons of grease. But as usual, that news hadn't reached Caylee yet.

Have you seen the bear? The bear has been used in Greece now where I never even heard of this. I'm like in the dark over here. Am I kidding? No one tells me anything. I get any time I get any, like, juicy info and like, no way. Like, no one talks to me. I'm all alone over here.

Says the only time she leaves her trailer called Firedog is to go out to the porta potty.

She's so isolated that she hasn't even figured out how to read the map. She's printing their typographic in color coded to show where the fire's the hottest with symbols for all the different teams.

At this point, the end of the fire perimeter kind of looks like a Sasquatch with its front, like kicked out Cayley's twenty. She wears a hoodie and has perfect makeup.

She recently broke up with her long time boyfriend, but she explained to one of my producers, Lily Sullivan, that there's a rule at camp.

It's like basically you can't be macking on these boys and like doing that. That's our policy. It's an actual policy. It's an actual policy. Like we sign it. We have to keep it like professional. Yeah. You have a job to do. Yeah, exactly. We have a job to do.

But like, yeah, the view is great and I'm not necessarily here, but every fire is different.

You don't think there are other people here. I'm trying to think now.

Fed fires usually don't have cute people tend to be older and yeah, Fed fires, meaning fire camps run by the U.S. Forest Service, the camps run by the states agency Cal Fire, like Cal Fires that it's that Cal Fire is like you boys say.

I get a call and she says, I'm sending you here to me a Cal Fire. I'm like, Sweetie, every girl on our team would be like, awesome, because what's the difference?

The Cal Fire, I don't know what it is, but there's always like younger. And even when they're not, I don't know if it's because they have, like, nice uniforms and they have to be really, like, clean my it's nicer all around, not only because there's cute boys, but because you get better food. It's like if you're going to stay at this five star hotel compared to this three star type thing. So Cal Fire is like the five star hotel Fed fires like three.

Kaylie doesn't actually sleep at the camp. Her company rented her a cabin about 30 minutes away. But it's the worst part of the job.

It's creepy. She says the curtains on her bedroom windows are See-Through. Did you get some sleep last night? I was like, yeah, I was on face time with my mom all night.

All night. Like, we set it up and then we go to bed.

We'd say, you really you put your mom on FaceTime and you guys go to bed like you sleep like that. Yeah, like we're usually not in creepy places, but this just happened to be creepy. When I get back to the cabin, I face Summer and we'll talk all night and then I'm like, OK, like let's set up our phones. And she's like, OK, so we literally fall asleep. Like if I open my eyes, I can look at my phone and see her and like I just wake up all throughout the night and like look to see if she's still there.

Does she sleep with the light on so that you can see her now? I sleep with the light on and so she can see me because I feel like there's something there and the my alarm goes off in the morning. She's like, really?

Wake up. Yeah. Kaylee is thinking about moving out of her cabin and into a tent at the camp just so she doesn't have to feel so alone.

It can be weirdly easy to work on these wildfires and not think about the big picture at all. This year was a turning point.

The combination of climate change, drought that in these trees and more housing built in high risk places. California is all six of the state's biggest fires in modern history. For the first time, firefighters began using the term Gigha fire to describe a million acres burning. We still have huge wildfires, the very Manifest Destiny type of attitude, believing that with enough people in it, there's no fire we can't conquer. But we've spent four months in almost two hundred million dollars on the creek fire and it's still not out.

The creek fire destroyed eight hundred and fifty homes and businesses.

Most of them were in little mountain towns where nothing will be ever totally normal again, not even the ground after a big fire that are toxic from melted insulation and all the other synthetic stuff inside a home when it burns down and with the forest gutted, you can suddenly see for miles.

I talked to a bulldozer operator named Dean Willis, who goes by Woody.

He got a glimpse of this and was still thinking about it a few weeks after he'd gone home on his very first shift on the creek fire. He was sent out to protect the neighborhood. The fire hadn't reached yet. It was on Cressman Road. He'd never been here before.

All of a sudden, like, there's just fire. You don't exactly know where to go.

So he started pushing away anything that might cause the houses to catch fire.

I was basically in the bulldozer pushing cars that were on fire, playground set decks, you know, like wooden decks off the back of a house, brush trees taking that fuel away from those houses he worked through the night, but most of the homes didn't survive.

And we drive through there and we go, man, why that one survived and the other one did.

I don't know what is a dozer operator for the state's Cal Fire Agency. Unlike hotshot crews, he spends most of his time alone moving huge piles of dirt, dozer scraping fuel breaks to get ahead of the flames. He jokes that the stereotype of a bulldozer operator is someone who's kind of salty and will push back against orders. They don't agree with what he's bald with piercing blue eyes. He says he hates a big fire. Camps like the one at the creek have become once upon a time.

When Woody first started, the fire camp was just a few boots and a lot where you went to pick up your paycheck and radio. You know, it's been a really long fire season.

How are you feeling at this point?

I don't I'm not going to. I don't like it. I don't like it. I mean, it's it's it's too much. It's just devastation. You know, you see all the comments on social media, the new law in California. It sucks. I don't want to be running the bulldozer in December in Southern California protecting structures. I mean, I will do my job. Of course I will. But I care for people a lot. And I don't enjoy seeing houses burning.

Nobody wants to do that. People want to go to the it's the holidays. They're not. Ralphie, from a Christmas story not staring out of fire.

So I first met Woody in twenty eighteen at another California fire, the Ferguson. It happened north of here that year. At least six firefighters died. Two of them were dozer operators and included Woody's best friend from childhood. His name is Braden Varnay, and he is the one who got Woody into firefighting. It was dark, it was extremely steep, and his bulldozer slid off the side of a road and you perished. Got a slitted tumble down the mountain.

It took two days for firefighters to retrieve Breeden's body. They draped an American flag over his remains and carried him out of the canyon. Now what? He has Braden's job at their local fire station in Mariposa. He sees himself as part of the lineage of dozer operators, one that started with Braden's dad, who held this spot until he died of cancer from the job. Right. And I always wanted to be partners on the bulldozers. Braden will always be on my mind.

Braden will always be with me on the fire lines in the morning, drinking coffee out of a plastic water bottle that's been cut in half out of a homemade coffee pot. Do you ever think of that?

How much longer you can or want to do this job for you? Counting down the days until retirement?

I'm not one of those guys yet. I still have nineteen years left. You have nineteen years left. Yeah.

So I started late, so. No, no, no, no. I have eighteen years left. Eight. That's still a lot of years.

Well the retirement formula used to retire at fifty, now they retire at fifty seven.

Do you think you can make it until you're fifty seven. I mean if you look at a billboard statistic billboard if I don't catch cancer I'm doing pretty good.

Woody. Eight eighteen years. Can you imagine what the fire season will be like in eighteen years.

I don't think I'll be left with it. Very well might be that way. I don't know.

I mean that brush grows back. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. You know, it's a crazy job sometimes.

Hey, what's going on? I met up with a little hotshots again on their very last night at camp. They were about to get to go home for two days. They stood out from the rest of the scraggly and bearded dirty men in the parking lot. Everyone on little T was showered, clean shaven. It's a crew tradition. And one of the buggies, the guys were watching a Dodgers game on a little TV show.

They looked relaxed and happy, even though they just heard the fire season might get extended another two months into January. That's something that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago.

Again, here's Zach and Grace, like a lot of the crew, their contractors who get laid off at the end of the season.

What do you think about the season possibly going all the way until you get so excited? We were all excited. Yeah, it was fun when they asked everybody on this cruise and shot up.

How do you just keep going on and on and on each other? Like, honestly, each other, like the synergy, the family dynamics.

You guys are all positive attitude through mandatory. That's mandatory.

You cannot have a negative attitude and get away with it here. I would say this is probably impossible if you don't have a good attitude.

But when you're having a really bad day, what do you tell yourself that day? It's so weird. I totally get why it sounds weird, but that's like a big thing that we have is like no bad days on the worst day. It's not that bad.

We always say it's like it can always be worse, could be harder and it can be a lot deeper. Colder, it can be wasted.

The truth is a lot of people don't last more than a few years at this job. The adrenaline high eventually wears off and they move on to other jobs, jobs that are easier on their families. One of the hardest parts of shotting is just how much they're on the road. More of their life is spent out at fires than at home this season. Little T has been on Back-To-Back assignments since June. Nevada, Utah, Arizona, all up and down California.

The way their assignments work as they go out for 14 or 21 days at a time, then only get two days off before shipping out again with all the overtime.

It's good money. One of the chainsaw guys on the crew said he'd make seventy thousand after taxes. So some of them don't really work during the off season while they're out fighting fires. Life goes on without them. They're reminded of this in a very literal way. They often go without cell service for days and then the second they get back in range, they're bombarded by everything they've missed. Joel Gonzales is one of the captains on little T, some guys over hundred messages a day.

You think you're thinking of something.

You think you know someone who's in the truck right now. What's the situation?

This is a busy year for us. And she doesn't understand that. One of my guys, he's just he just can't be on this all the time, you know? And then when he does get his hands on. I mean, he does shoot the messenger. So it's like how many on the low end? Maybe like in the in the 20s. In the high end, maybe over one hundred.

It's like, call me, call me. Where are you. What the fuck. What's going on. He'll talk to me about it.

And you will. And I won't.

Under the bus I get a lot hachem women don't understand what we do. Why doesn't she get it again?

Here's the squad boss who gets tripped up by the crew. He says they're constantly asking him for relationship advice. He keeps it pretty simple.

Sit down and talk, put yourself in her shoes. But the problem is they never actually have time to use it.

I could be telling them that today, this morning. But then he never makes it home to be able to do that. And now it just turns into worse and worse and worse. And unfortunately, it doesn't work.

It's really hard to understand or even sometimes believe that you're gone so long or believe that you're on a why didn't you have service? You know, why don't you have service? I just talked to you a minute ago. Well, yeah, I know. I was hiking and I had service for one second and now it's gone. And now they don't hear from you again for three or four days. You can't explain that.

You know, they've already been a couple break ups this season. Pete says his first marriage ended in divorce because he was gone so much. I'm like the seasonal guys. He's year round. He was on a fire when his son was born in this season, missed his daughter's birthday. He'd often scrolls through photos of them on his cell phone.

Get a picture of my boy.

He showed me one of his son, now eleven competing in this one. Was that cool getting to be at his meet?

Oh, yeah. Well, didn't make it to this one. It's a picture they sent me back. I've been to some of his meets. Not too many, but yeah, it's fun. It's definitely fun watching them.

Are they always very forgiving of you being gone, not being there for the big things in their life?

I like to say. Yeah, because I think they don't know. Any different, they think it's the norm, you know, like, oh, that's always gone working, I think.

Thank you. One of the guys from his crew stopped by his truck. This happened all the time. I was talking to him.

OK, I'm sorry. So they brought me my breakfast. They brought me my lunch. It's like the first thing on their plate. OK, we got to take care of Pete and then we'll do our thing. It becomes to where you become very, like, catered to. Well, this is not normal in real life. It's not like that. I mean, your kids are going to talk back. Your wife is going to want different things different.

It's going to be a different type of reaction. And somebody has been doing this so long, someone like myself and a lot of these other guys, you don't want to deal with that because it's a lot easier here. It's a lot easier.

Pizza, the perfect worker for these long fire seasons, he loves his job, and when I asked him if the relentlessness ever gets to him, he told me no. The more fire, the better. The more I work, the more I don't have to think about real life. Betsey Johnson for the San Francisco Chronicle, she's got a book about the Paradise Fire that's coming out that you can preorder online. The Creek Fire after burning for nearly four months is right now about 96 percent contained.

Crews expect to get it to 100 percent at the end of this month or the start of the year.

One of the Hot Shots, Model T, Matthew Hackish, just came out with an album this month under the name Unholy Smokes. The song is about constantly being on the road.

The great big gap in Russell Crowe's pizza. So we need to get. Here I go again. Wondering, my friend. Coming up, scientists at snowboarding gets a call to come save the world. We move from Hot Shots to cold shots in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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Think it. Dream it. Make it. It's this American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today's program, Boder, we hear stories of people trying to save the world by teaming up together and getting in there every day, doing the same things over and over, like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the slope again and again till the job gets done. We have arrived at Act two of our program and this act we move from people who are saving us from something very large to people saving us from something tiny act to the other extinguishers.

So the people in this act active and working at a task, some of them for years. And this has been in the news in just the last few weeks, they have actually succeeded.

It looks like they got their boulder up to the top of the hill. David Kestenbaum spoke with four scientists who have been working on a coronavirus vaccine, one of the ones that was just shown to be effective. David was a scientist in his early career. They worked at Fermilab.

And from the coverage, he could not understand what exactly they had done in any detail and wanted to know that and who these people were and especially how does it feel to have helped make a thing that could save so many lives, fix the global economy, get life back to normal again for everybody?

Here's David, I'm going to tell you the story of some of the people who made this one tiny thing, it's a key thing that's in at least five of the vaccines that are being tested. If you get the vaccine shot in the coming months, this thing will probably be injected into your body and it could save your life. And the story of all this, you could started all sorts of places. I'm going to begin here in China.

I'm from a very small village around the East Coast. It's Shandong province and both my parents are farmers.

This is Nanchang Wang. His way into science is playing outside noticing bugs and locusts. Scorpions just got them curious about stuff.

Yeah, why? We can think why we need to eat faud. Yeah, I'm curious about all those.

It's funny for me it was when I was in like 10th grade, I think I learned about Newton's equation for gravity and I learned that that explained to both the orbits of the planets and also what happened when you dropped a ball. And I was like, I mean, that's amazing. There's an equation that describes both of those perfectly. It was the rules behind the thing. It was the same thing, you know.

Yeah, those are really beautiful stuff. Yeah.

When I first emailed in the wrong, he was super excited to talk, said no one had really interviewed him about all that he had done and got himself a scholarship to one of the top universities.

And the thing he found himself gravitating toward is this field called structural biology, which I think favors a particular kind of person. You're basically trying to figure out what molecules look like, where all the atoms are, so you can tell how something works or if it's a virus, how to fight it.

And the thing is, people work for years trying to figure out the structure of one tiny molecule. The traditional way of doing it is that you get a bunch of those molecules and try to get them to lay out in a neat repeating pattern. Then you hit them with these powerful x rays, which give you just this pattern of dots. Then you have to apply these mathematical algorithms and sometimes it's just not solvable. It really is like pushing a boulder to the top of a hill.

It rolls down over and over. Neil Armstrong was good at it, though, for his thesis, he worked out the structure of part of a coronavirus, not this coronavirus. This was years ago. It was a coronavirus that was making the news back then, the murres coronavirus, because it caused Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. After that, he needed a job. So he reached out to a guy who was also looking into Meurs, Jason MacLellan at Dartmouth.

How would your friends describe you? Wow. I have no idea. Fun, good to hang out with, uh, likes having a beer or two. I was going to save the world.

I think that was on anyone's radar. Nanchang came over to the states to work with Jason and his team. This was 2014, six years before the pandemic. They wanted to make a vaccine for murres. And one of the things they were trying to figure out back then that would end up being key for the vaccine we have today was how to manufacture copies of the tiny spikes. There were all over the surface of the murres coronavirus. The spikes are why they're called the coronaviruses.

The viruses have a corona erith of these little spikes sticking out all over it. The spike is the part that sticks to your cells when it gets in your body, lets the virus break into your cells and start replicating. It's the scary part of the thing. In a way, if they could make just the spikes without a deadly virus attached to them, maybe they could train your immune system to recognize the virus and fight it. But it turned out to be damn hard to make the spikes in the lab.

Basically, you stick the genetic code for the spike into some cells.

What are the cells of the leaves to either Choa cells, Chinese hampster ovary cells, or HK two nine three cells, which are the human embryonic kidney cells?

I say I don't know why I wanted to know all this, except that this is the kind of knowledge that is going to save our asses. The problem was when they got the genetic code for the spikes into those cells, they did start spitting out spikes, but the cells weren't making a lot of them and the spikes on their own were unstable. They kept changing into the wrong shape. Yandong spent a long time trying to stabilize them, add something, tweak the genetic code, try again.

Again, there's a tedium to it. Each try takes a while around two or three weeks, two or three weeks. So you would start it like March 1st. By the third week in March, you'd be done with that test and most of the time it fails. Yes. And then you start again and then you don't know for another three weeks if that new thing works.

Yes, yes. But we can do like at the same time even more twenty.

Oh, so you do 20 of them at the same time.

Oh yeah. We did a lot actually.

And every time you tried this in your mind are you like, oh, this time it's going to work.

Yeah, I would be very confident. Sometimes I think it's going to work if it doesn't work out. This project that really I got disappointed and it's funny that you're so optimistic because most of the time it feels right.

It just keeps failing and failing. Yeah.

That that's kind of the life as a beginning, this kind of lab work. It's kind of like cooking, but for the fussiest restaurant ever, lots of little precise steps. You mix the stuff up in a flask, set it on this little platform, which gently swirls the stuff in it. Keep the whole thing at thirty seven degrees Celsius, leave it overnight. So you're constantly having to be at the lab at a certain time to do the next step.

His wife told him, you always say it'll be five minutes, but it's hours. They tried so many different things, scouring the scientific literature for different ideas, modifying them. The thing that finally worked was changing the genetic code for the spike so it would swap into prolene amino acids. They helped hold the spike in its spike form, kept it from changing shape. Also, the cells were spitting out way more spikes, 50 times more.

Now, the day it worked is really exciting because we knew what we'd been doing. All of this work, it's a lot of trial and error. You're basically just failing until it works. And finally, you got one for like, wow, that looks fantastic.

We knew we had something that when they vaccinated mice gave them a shot containing these murres coronavirus spikes the mice as little immune systems developed antibodies, lots of them. It looked really promising, like you might be able to make a really good vaccine against the murres coronavirus. This was basically the road map for the vaccine we were all going to need when the pandemic started, but the major scientific journals were not interested in publishing it.

We tried to try to six different journals and it was rejected five times.

Wow, that's kind of amazing, looking back now. Yeah, if we look back, yeah, yeah, our I was getting signed up three rejection for rejection and the final rejection.

Yeah, he told me he fell into a real depression. No one seemed to see the value of their work. He saw a therapist pointed out all he had accomplished and suggested that he might feel proud instead of sad. It didn't really help. This was twenty seventeen. The pandemic was three years away. The fact that they had trouble getting it published to me it doesn't mean the scientific journal editors are idiots.

Back then, most people thought the next pandemic was going to be some new form of influenza, not a coronavirus, which of course is the argument for funding. Lots of basic research. Sometimes you don't know what thing is going to be important.

When the current pandemic began, Jason McLellan had moved his lab from Dartmouth to the University of Texas at Austin, Nanchang had gone with him.

Jason told me one day in January, January 6th, he was in Utah snowboarding and he got a call from the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, Barney Graham. Graham had been working with him on all the Mars coronavirus stuff, and he was calling about some pneumonia like illness in Wuhan, China. The local health authority was reporting 41 cases.

He let me know he was talking with the US CDC and they wanted to quickly make a vaccine candidate. It looked like it was a Baedeker and a virus. And he wanted to know, are we game? Are we going to can we can we help out, try to rapidly determine the structure of the spike and get the vaccine made?

And and you said you said I'm busy, I'm snowboarding. Yeah, yeah. I was actually I was getting some boots, heat molded, so I had ten minutes to talk to him while their heat molding to my feet. But I immediately WhatsApp my grad student, Daniel Rapp, and told him, you know, we're going to race. We got to move quickly on this. Let's get prepared.

It's worth pointing out they were running full steam at this in January. This is before Wuhan went into lockdown, before that giant hospital got built.

The whole thing was barely in the news and life here. It was totally normal. So they are all going to the office to work frantically on this thing. Well, all around them, people are going to restaurants and church kids are in school. The thing they were going to try to help make is called an MRN, a vaccine, instead of giving people shots filled with coronavirus spikes, you inject people with the genetic code for making the spikes. The code is wrapped in this little package, and once it gets injected into your body, it goes into your cells and then your cells start making the spikes, loads of them, which on their own are harmless.

But your immune system sees these foreign things and learns to fight it, which should hopefully protect you if the real virus comes along. This is the genius of vaccines. We're not that good at making drugs against viruses, but, you know, it's really good at fighting them. Our immune system, if you just show it the right piece of the virus, it often figures out how to fight it off. It's like the answer we all have inside us.

The big thing they had to work out for the vaccine was what part of the genetic sequence for the coronavirus were they going to stick in the vaccine to make the spikes? And how are they going to alter that code so that when the spike was created, it would be stable and not twist around five days after Jason got that phone call. Chinese researchers posted the genetic code for the new coronavirus online so teams around the world could look at it. Jason and the others started going through it right away.

So how long did it take?

So you get the sequence and how long until you're like, this is the thing we want in the vaccine? Oh, an hour maybe.

Really is probably within 10 minutes.

I mean, as soon as you did the sequence alignment, you just put them in like. Yeah, that's because the spike on this coronavirus that would cause the pandemic, it was very, very similar to the one on the murres coronavirus, the one they had been studying. It's often noted that these vaccines came together really quickly. But it seems like the reason they came together really quickly is because of all this work that went on for years. Yeah, I think that's right.

And yeah, it definitely is just. It's not like it just happened in 30 days, like it happened. I found this graphic online showing that of sars-cov-2 two had emerged ten years ago. We'd be nowhere this far along to having a vaccine.

They sent the genetic sequence off to a company that they'd been communicating with for a while called Moderna. Moderna, like a bunch of other scientists and other companies have been working for years and how to even make an MRI and a vaccine, which is a whole other story. Anyway, a few weeks later, they had one ready for testing.

I mean, this is like the first vaccine to potentially be tested in humans for what was then a burgeoning pandemic.

This is Kalmykia Corbitt, a viral immunologist at the NIH who'd been working with Jason and Hwang and everyone else. She was there when the package arrived from Moderna. And just a note about Kalmykia. She told me that she was one of those kids who won all the science fairs, couldn't leave a math problem unsolved and also win the Nobel Prizes were announced. She would write the speeches. She would imagine they would deliver and read them out loud, pretending to deliver them in a very dramatic way with tears as if they were the Oscars or something.

Anyway, she was the one who went to get the box of the first vaccines.

When they arrived, it came. And I like for the first time anything came from I don't know where I had to like, show my idea. And I remember, like the loading dock, people couldn't even bring the box up to me. I had to, like, meet the driver downstairs. I don't even think it came on a plane.

I actually think that they had it driven from Boston to Bethesda.

When you got that box, like, what did you think? I I remember asking the guy, the loading dock to take a picture and he was like, I can't get anything.

I was like, if you take a picture of me with this box and he's like, oh, no, I can't do that because he was too busy.

I mean, because it's not his job. I'm just this, you know, nerdy scientist about to vaccinate some 200, 250 mice with a vaccine. It's like I mean, he didn't neither of us really understood the gravity.

This was in February. Excuse me. He remembers at some point going to see your family sitting down on your mom's bed and kind of briefing everyone. I think things might really change soon. I think the virus is about to be a big problem. I talked to all the researchers about what it was like in this period, making and testing a vaccine they hoped would work, but not knowing. Meanwhile, more and more of the world was shutting down, more people getting sick and dying because Wikia told me she used to look at the daily numbers for the world and then had to stop.

It wasn't healthy. Barney Graham is Kozmic, his boss. He's the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH. And the guy who called Jason while he was snowboarding, he'd worked with them on all of this stuff, the most senior member of the group. It weighed on him, though he didn't always recognize it. He says he's not always in touch with his feelings. We talked in the evening he was at home or had been for months sitting in front of a bookcase, little bust of Benjamin Franklin on it.

He seemed tired. Making the vaccine took so many steps, so many decisions, most of the time you just grind through the day and try to make the best decisions you can and and keep everybody moving. And there's also a sequence, you know, things have to happen in a certain order or you get blocked. And so just keeping things moving takes up most of my attention most of the time. Know, maybe my wife could say something.

And then his wife, who was in the room while we were talking, my name is Cynthia, jumped in.

Well, I mean, she's a psychiatrist and at a couple of points have been chiming in in a very sweet way to sort of explain her husband's calm exterior. She said, you're forgetting the story, which she started to tell.

He came out of his office and he was clearly distracted and upset. And of course, if you want to know what's going on with fire, you have to ask him and you have to not let him off the hook until he tells you. And so I continue to just probe. And he he said, what if I selected the wrong sequence? We had selected the sequence right. Initially, but the question was, was it the right one? Usually we spend we spend months or even years experimenting to decide this is the best one to use.

He was worried about the time that would be wasted in the development of the vaccine itself and how many people would die, how many children will be left without parents, how many old people would not get to see their grandchildren grow up? I mean, he was just thinking about all of the terrible consequences if this had been the wrong choice.

And it's just, you know, like I said, I tend to be a little obsessive. And, you know, you just can't get certain ideas or thought patterns out of your head until you find a resolution.

Clinical trials began on March 16th, which is pretty incredible. This is right around the time when businesses were just deciding it would be safer to work from home. Shots were eventually given to tens of thousands of people and then the wait began to see if it worked. Meanwhile, the coronavirus kept spreading in the U.S. or as the president called it, the Choung Flu and the China virus. Here's Nanchang, I'm from China. You know, I do have some some some feeling that, yeah, the president should not say that to to my home country.

I'm pretty angry about that. I think that it makes no sense. It was offensive, but it also just struck him as dumb.

There were so many things the president needed to be doing to tame the pandemic. Why was he wasting his time with this? And then maybe you remember this, there was a story in the news back then about how the FBI was looking into whether Chinese spies working through the consulate in Houston had tried to steal vaccine research. The FBI was going to be questioning people at the University of Texas. One story included Mian Chang's name as someone who worked there from China.

Friends told them to get a lawyer. He says he and his wife looked into whether they could leave the country if they needed to. In the end, no one came to question him, but it was unnerving.

The moment when all these researchers learned that their vaccine was going to work was a few weeks ago when Pfizer announced that its vaccine was more than 90 percent effective. Pfizer had started its phase three clinical trials on the same day as them, but Pfizer got its results. First, Pfizer had used in its vaccine the thing this team had come up with. The coronavirus spike stabilized the way they had figured out Pfizer had licensed it from them. So if the Pfizer vaccine worked, they figured theirs would, too.

Barney Graham got a call before the results went public.

I've been right here in my office for 10 months, so I was in my office and it was in the evening, late evening. And apparently their data and safety monitoring board had met earlier in the day and they were going to put out a press release the next day on Monday. And I got off the phone. I went over and sheepishly told my wife and my son, who was visiting at the time, that, you know, it looks like it's going to work.

And and that just kind of released a lot of emotion, and I think that I've been holding back for the last 10 months and so I retreated back into my office and just kind of let all that out for a few minutes and. They all came in and consoled me, but, you know, that that moment kind of caught me by surprise that there was so much in there to come out, the whole family was in tears.

It's just a relief to know that you've gotten to that point because in vaccine development, there is a thousand choices to make a thousand decisions and a thousand ways to fail. And and, you know, most of these kind of development projects don't turn out and to to get through all the way to get an answer. That said, it worked and even worked better than you expected. That was quite a quite a moment.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting to be emotional at all. I sure wasn't expecting to be crying, crying, tears were being there, that's for sure, but what kind of a cry was it there?

Like, lots of different kinds of crimes. OK, so in my family or my siblings or my friends are listening to news, first of all, they're like, OK, you're right. You haven't cried this entire year. You cry all the time. You cry, baby. And my prayers are ugly. It was. The cry you might expect to have if you won the lottery.

I don't even know if my family even today understands what just happened with me over the last year.

If I were to call them about 90 percent efficacy results, they'd be like, OK, was that actually has still haven't communicated with my family about the efficacy results at all.

I talk to them all the time. I just talk to my dad this morning about fixing a dishwasher in my rental properties to talk to them all the time.

But I better go. Yeah, it feels. Oh, God, it's it's actually working now, so it's really going to save a lot of people. So I think I'm proud of it and it's great.

Like that little thing you made my, like, fix the global economy. It could save like millions of lives. It could help, you know, everything get back to normal, like that little thing. Yeah, that's what I hope. Yeah, what do your parents say? My parents actually, they don't know what I was doing. They just know, oh, you developed a vaccine. That's great. That's their thinking. They don't know how much contribution I did.

Yeah, actually, yeah. My mom got stroke several years ago. I mean, she may never know what I was, what I'm doing now, so. I'm sorry about your mom. Uh, yeah, I'm a little sad about that, but I had to encourage a lot of. In the past, I will always remember those things. Yeah. It can be hard, I think, when you're in deep with something complicated to explain that thing to someone on the outside, particularly with science.

There's this version that often makes it out into the world of a single person having a clear, dramatic breakthrough, Jonas Salk polio vaccine, the Nobel Prize is always given to one or a few people, but a lot of science isn't like that. I think most of it isn't. When I asked Jason McClellan, the other scientist in the story about his contribution to this, he started listing names, all the people whose work went before or whose ideas they adapted.

Because Mikio, when she gives talks, her last slides are just lists of names. It's never just one person pushing the rock up a hill. David Kestenbaum is senior editor of our show, The NIH Madona vaccine protected 94 percent of the people who got it in clinical trial.

It was just this week approved for emergency use. The government has arranged to purchase 200 million doses.

One foot in front of the other foot in front of the. Foot in front of the foot in front of the one foot in front of the other foot in front of the one foot.

My program was produced today by Lily Sullivan. The people who put a show together today include Dana Chevis of Cornfeld, Noah Gill, Holly Elkins, Damien Graves Sutherlin, Miki Meeks, Don Nelson, Catherine Reymundo, Nottie Raymond, Robert Semih. And it was a ship, Christopher Satava, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker and Diane Wu. Managing Editor Sara Abderrahmane are senior editors. David Kestenbaum, our executive editor. Manuell Barry, special thanks to Derek Lowe, Daniel Patterson, Pedro Moran in Luna, Chuck Ramirez, Ryan Mendoza General says J.B. Bontempi, the Miguel Diaz, Gebre Mendoza, Francisco Marino, Forest Lamp, Jonquiere Clearwater and Christina Crawford, our website, where we set up a special page to honor our show's 25th year on the air with a list of favorite shows from over the years have written little blurbs explaining why each of the shows made the list, plus award winning shows and spinoff shows.

That's this American Life dog slash 25 years again, this American Life dog slash 25 years as American Life is a bit of public radio stations by parks.

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Thanks as always for the program's cofounder, Mr Troy Malathy. You know, we are arguing over the greatest daytime TV talk shows of all time. I personally have always been a fan of Oprah.

Tauri disagreed. The View is great. And I'm IRA Glass, back next week with more stories of this American Life on.

Next week on the podcast of This American Life, when Adam was a kid, Christmas was magical in his family's house. He and his siblings could hear but never see Jepko the elf. They made a mysterious Christmassy figure named Clough's, Haffa and Kris Kringle. He broke out one bone and he said, this is one of the bones from the, you know, the original Rudolph. You know, I use it to call the reindeer lights, camera Christmas next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.