Triangle of Fire is a novel by Joseph Tomlinson set in the Santa Barbara area, featuring the Los Prietos hotshots crew.
The novel follows one of the LP hotshots, Curtis Browning, a 20-year-old who earns his way through UC Santa Barbara by working during the fire season and attending classes during off season.
On the surface, the group seems to be a motley crew but in reality the hotshots are highly seasoned and well trained firefighters whose job is to go “direct” on the fire line, putting their lives in the way of the advancing flames, to cut the fire off, and keep it from moving into new fuel.
They go by a host of odd-sounding names like Lumpy, Pillsbury, Killer, Corndog and Cracker. To have a nickname, no matter how crazy sounding means you’ve been accepted into the crew and are now a part of the family.
Curtis, one of the newer members of the crew, has a life similar to many local college students. He surfs, drinks a little too much, and seems to fit into the Isla Vista lifestyle.
Known as “Lightning,” Curtis is named for his work style, which was affectionately called “something like old people having sex.”
Soop and Bonehead
In the book, the crew is lead by the “Soop” who Tomlinson, a former hotshot himself, describes as like “a real life character in a Louis L’Amour novel — tough as nails and salty as hell.”
His second in command is the crew foreman, Stewart or “Stew,” equally as tough as Soop, a Kirk Gibson-like character with a grip and forearms like Popeye, who is capable of hiking the steepest of hills at an unyielding death march while leading his crew into battle.
The two are based on Tomlinson’s respect and deep love for characters in real life: Mark Linane (Soop) and Stan Stewart (AKA Bonehead).
My own memories of Stan and Mark date back to the Paint Fire in 1990, when I interviewed both for my book, Santa Barbara Wildfires. At the time, the LP Crew crew was under Linane’s supervision and considered one of the best in the nation.
The Los Prietos Hotshots date back to 1949 and are patterned after infantry smokejumpers who made a name for themselves during World War II. In the 1950s, the “Shots,” the abbreviation the Los Prietos team has for itself, become the primary ground attack force in the Los Padres National Forest, and by the 1960s, with the development of heliattack, could be lifted quickly into any terrain to fight under any conditions.
By the early 1970s they are being used regionally throughout Southern California to fight wildfires. Eventually, the Shots become one of the first national strike teams, capable of flying anywhere in the United States, and prepared to be in the air with less than five minute’s notice.
Lost Years
At the same time Curtis is moving from fire to fire with his crew before UCSB classes begin in the fall, he is a young man searching for something more than what the college life offers, perhaps a result of tragedies early in his life.
Both of his parents are gone: his dad, formerly a smoke jumper in McCall, Idaho has died in a car accident; his mom from an incurable blood disease a bit later. After this Curtis lives with his grandmother, not quite understanding how life could have done this to him.
“First god took my dad away and now was hurting my mom,” he thinks to himself. “The world was not fair. People breeze through without a care, not knowing what a mess we were in.”
The sense of uncertainty grew even more when his grandmother died just before his high school graduation. Knowing she would not be around too much longer, she urged Curtis to look at fighting fires. “Your dad earned nice money doing that work,” she told him. “I think it would be good for you.”
Though he doesn’t know it at the time, Curtis’s time with the LP hotshots will become a turning point in his search for meaning, for a sense of who he is and what he stands for.
While his grandmother knew the money was good, what those seasons on the fire line also represented was a coming of age of sorts, much of that due to the influence of his hotshot team leaders, a growing sense of purpose and adherence to a code of conduct that they instilled in him.
If there is one reason the team is so good, Soop is it. He is a quiet, self-assured man who choses to let his actions speak rather than his words. “I kind of believe in going, and going hard, as long as need be,” he says with a pinch of tobacco in his cheek, “and until I get the job done.”
Neither he nor Stan expects any less of their kids. “You take pride in your work. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be,” Soop continues. “We don’t talk a lot of sh—, we just show it.”
For both Tomlinson and Curtis Browning, this is exactly what both are looking for: The Code. In providing both with a standard of excellence and a way of living their lives while on the crew, they were also helping to build the pillars upon which they could live the rest of their lives.
When I asked Tomlinson what was the most important part of his hotshot years he told me simply, “I got a code for life.”
Living in Two Worlds
While the book begins with the LP Crew on a wildfire in Joshua Tree National Park, and much of the book is about the crew out on the fire line, it is also just as much about Curtis’s life back on campus.
In Isla Vista there is the party life, the nearby beaches, and surfing. Pedaling lazily down Del Playa late one night, the sound of Johnny Cash playing from an open window, he stops to listen for a bit, Cash’s distinctive voice caught in a sad love song, when a beautiful young woman stops him. Though she’s just asking for directions, he’s caught completely off guard.
“When her eyes locked on mine, I may as well been hit with a thunderbolt,” Curtis remembers later. “My brain froze. Time skipped and paused before a jumble of sounds formed words and sentences.”
Finally, he discovers her name is Janine and it appears love is in the air and being the romantic I am, at this point in the book I’m thinking that everything is going to turn out really great. But though she rides back to his place on the handlebars of his bike, spends the night and begins what seems like a very promising romance, it doesn’t quite turn out that way.
The summer romance is tested when Curtis leaves to fight fires and is gone for weeks and months on end. Although she loves him, the separation proves too much and she drifts on, eventually dating others.
Holy Trinity
Soon thereafter, Curtis finds himself at a crisis point after a night of hard drinking. As he pedals his bike down Trigo Road the next day, he decides to stop at the Holy Trinity Parrish Church.
Though his past his relationship with God has been complicated and often a source of pain, it hasn’t stifled his belief in Jesus, the majesty and beauty of our world and the universe that Jesus represented to him.
Sitting in a pew near the front of the church, he reflects back on the tragedies in his life and his mom, who had placed a terrible burden on herself for her husband’s death. He realizes the corrosive influence of this burden played a major role in her illness. “Mom,” he said, “died of a broken heart disguised as a blood disease.”
At this point Curtis feels a weight has been lifted as he realizes that no matter how much her husband’s death shattered her life, “she never gave up on me. She loved me.”
Perhaps a divine force intervened to reconnect Curtis with his own sense of self. More likely, the author leads you to believe, it has as much been those years spent on the fire line with his second family, the Los Prietos Crew, living The Code.
Tomlinson’s Experience Writing the Book
“I’d wanted to write this book since I was 24, fresh off the crew and heading out for his first job as a distributor for a major wine company,” Tomlinson told me in a phone interview.
“I had this dream,” he explained to me, “that I could fight fires on my days on and write the book in my days off.
“After taking the test with 25,000 other candidates and securing a highly coveted spot with LA County Fire, I was excited to make the dream a reality. My ex-wife worried about it being dangerous and wasn’t on board with this at all. She wore me down and eventually I decided not to take the spot. Which was really the beginning of the end for us.”
After 22 years with the wine company, Tomlinson was fired in a management shake up after simply being told, “we’re changing direction.” Now remarried and living in Napa with three kids, his new wife gave him the green light to take a year off to work on the book.
“My wife Christine is incredible and couldn’t have been more supportive,” he said.
After completing the first draft just as their savings ran out, Tomlinson returned to the wine business and continued rewriting and editing in spurts until November 2017, when he learned that his revered crew boss Stan Stewart had died after a long battle with cancer.
Stewart’s death hit him hard. “He was such a force,” Tomlinson told me in a hushed voice, “and I regret never telling him how much he meant to me.”
Rededicating himself to completing the book in Stewart’s honor, Triangle of Fire was completed in 2018. It may be purchased at Chaucer’s or online via amazon.com as a paperback ($19.80) or as an e-book ($9.99).
What’s Next for Curtis?
Immersed in school, self-medicating with a few hours of surfing whenever the blues hit him, Curtis slowly recovers from the pain that breaking up with Janine has caused. Near Thanksgiving he comes to an amazing realization that many of us have experienced: time heals and a strong sense of self helps one prevail.
“For the first time in forever, I was not running from the memory of Janine or trying to bury the idea of her deep inside …”
Will Curtis join the Los Prietos crew for the next season? Will the romance with Janine spark again?
Though this is his first novel, Tomlinson promises that this is not the last of what we’ll see of Curtis Browning.
The author is looking to make this a trilogy, with more of Curtis and the crew in the field fighting fires, a bit more of the relationships and the drama that the LP crew goes through season after season.
I remember Mark Linane’s words in 1990 when he talked about the value and meaning of the Los Prietos family: “Every one of the crew is tight. I tell the kids when they start with me that they’ll probably develop lifetime friendships and become closer to some of the people on the crew than anywhere else — that they stand a very good chance of these being their lifetime friends and their best friends, probably closer than most of their family.”
I can’t wait to read more about the adventures of Curtis Browning.
— Noozhawk outdoors writer Ray Ford can be reached at rford@noozhawk.com. Click here for his website, SBoutdoors.com. Follow him on Twitter: @riveray. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.