Rising from the ashes: Belgrade author's wildfire book explores rites of passage for prisoners, self

One man in Deer Lodge was convicted of triple homicide. Many were locked up for what he described as “some bad sh*t”. And then he arrived at the criminal who most piqued his interest, a man who'd been behind bars for decades.

For those two weeks on that Swan Valley fire crew, Hohenstein had developed a special affinity for “an older gentlemen” who had the respect of the entire crew. He was, Hohenstein said, “kind, caring and hard-working.” He often asked, with sincerity, about his squad boss’ own life story.

“The kind of guy,” Hohenstein continued, “where I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way this guy committed a crime worthy of spending life in prison’.”

Hohenstein found the man’s name online. His jaw dropped upon finding a story from the early 2000s. The crime: Murder. The victim: A 2-year-old.

In recalling the moment, Hohenstein pauses in disbelief more than three years later.

“He’d killed a child,” he finally said with incredulity. “To me, I couldn’t imagine a worse crime. And yet, I still really liked him and still respected him ... I still liked them all.”

For Hohenstein, who grew up in Belgrade and joined fire crews after high school graduation as a “rite of passage”, the moment was revelatory.

He had warily accepted the invitation to battle the Whitetail Creek Fire. As squad boss, he would be second in command. Naturally, he had assumptions about prisoners and perhaps even the three prison guards. He couldn’t help but project villainy before ever meeting any of them.

Then he watched them work. He listened to their stories. He got to know each in-depth — though he never, ever broke the cardinal rule of asking why they were incarcerated. He found them “incredibly hard-working, caring, curious and unbelievably funny — very sensitive kinds of guys.”

Hohenstein spent the winter processing the experience and grappling with their motivation to be on a fire crew, which they earned with model conduct behind prison walls.

Then he learned of their crimes.

“The contradictions I felt, I didn’t know the answer to it,” he said. “Can you like somebody who’s done terrible things? So I spent 343 pages trying to find out.

“I just knew in my soul this was a story that needed to be told.”

Hohenstein shares the story in “Who Tames The Flames?”, a self-published novel patterned after the iconic works of Norman Maclean, notably “Young Men And Fire”. The line between fact and fiction is blurred, and it has the feel of an autobiography.

“Who Tames The Flames?” is about a prison crew fighting a wildfire, albeit with 12 men instead of 20 for background simplicity. Hohenstein describes the book’s central theme as “the interplay between the redemptive destruction of wildfires and how the prisoners find their own arc of redemption amongst the flames.”

It’s also about the coming of age of a protagonist, both the lead character and himself.

“The main character’s name is Gully, my name is Canyon,” Hohenstein explained. “They’re both holes in the ground but still their own different geographic locations. There’s a lot of me in him but he’s still his own individual.”

Hohenstein’s journey to the firelines was less complex than Gully’s. He was 18, had spent his entire life in Belgrade, and felt an urge for adventure. He was talked out of the Marines by his mother, who suggested following in his uncle’s boots as a firefighter. One thing led to another, and in 2015 he secured an annual seasonal job with DNRC in Lincoln.

Gully’s path wasn’t so clean. Hohenstein opens the book by describing him as “listless, hopeless and with a meaningless-ness he is experiencing.” Gully’s father, also a firefighter, had perished in the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Gully, Hohenstein said, was “on the cusp of suicide” and came to firefighting because it was the only place he’d found meaning.

The suicide reference is acutely intentional.

“The main audience of the book is wildland firefighters and young men like me, and both of those groups have tragic statistics around suicide,” Hohenstein said. “For me, I couldn’t start any other place other than that tragic reality.”

“Who Tames The Flames?” goes on to chase even higher meaning, though. For Hohenstein, it means circling back to rites of passage.

Most cultures, he points out, have rites from childhood to manhood. Plains Indians, for instance, have vision quests and count coup.

“(Western cultures) have no real challenge where society can say you have gone through this process and now you’re a man,” he said. “We just say to young men, ‘You’re 18 now. You can get a license, you can smoke, whatever’.”

For Hohenstein, whose mother had taken care of his laundry and meals until he was 18, firefighting was an initiation. He had to prove he belonged, that he could be relied upon in highly incendiary conditions, that he could earn respect.

“It wasn’t about the arriving,” he said, “it was about the striving.”

Hohenstein’s subsequent striving has lured him around the globe. He did HIV testing in Uganda. He was mugged in Nairobi. He now splits his time between Belgrade and Madrid, Spain, his fiance’s hometown. He’s earned a political science degree from the University of Montana.

Likewise, as he describes both in real life and “Who Tames The Flames?”, the prisoners, whom both he and Gully grew to admire despite heinous crimes, also were experiencing rites of passage.

Hohenstein writes in one of his later chapters about a “burnout”, where Gully’s crew of 12 fights fire with fire.

“It was the prisoners’ way to create chaos and recognize their own hands did this,” he said. “It was an initiation for these guys from incarceration to freedom — maybe not physical freedom but unshackling themselves from the pain and wrongs of their past. For the first time they could claim self-agency.

“They’re not just serving time, they’re serving a purpose.”

By the end, Hohenstein returns to the very question that led to “Who Tames The Flames?”

“Can you learn to like and love somebody who’s done terrible things to you? Because that’s a whole ‘nother level.”

It’s a question he’s still sorting out, for both Gully and himself.