have to implement Harbour’s plan.

The call runs nearly an hour. Harbour spends most of the time listening. He stands and paces. He sits with his face in his hands and then his hands on the desk. He slowly rolls his pen over his fingers. For Harbour, the parachute decision is a particularly close one. In 2011 his son, a Forest Service smokejumper, crash-landed in New Mexico’s vast Gila Wilderness because he was unable to steer his chute into a better landing zone. He fractured his pelvis, a femur, and an ankle and busted up his knee. When he healed months later, he insisted on returning to work, and when he did, he strapped back into the same type of parachute he’d been injured in. While Harbour rationalizes his2,300 lightning strikes into the drought-parched forests and foothills of Northern California. Two days later, smoke was rising from 250 new wildfires, Governor Jerry Brown called a state of emergency, and almost 10,000 firefighters from at least a dozen different fire agencies poured into Northern California. On Aug. 3, Harbour joined them.

To contend with California’s regular fires, the Forest Service set up two command centers, with one, in Redding, called North Ops. Redding sits in a bowl in the Sacramento Valley, and as Harbour arrives, the wind is filling that bowl with eye-stinging smoke. On the grounds, a long-haired smokejumper in flip-flops pedals a cruiser bike around the base while air tankers loaded with fire retardant take off from the runway. The mood isn’t festive, but one feels