SMOKE JUMPER : ‘It’s always a challenge to be able to fly out in that wild country, and get down safely, do your job, and get back safely.’

Smokejumping was always a summer job for farm boys--leaping out of airplanes into flaming forests. Bill Yensen had grown up on farms in Nebraska and Idaho, milking cows from the age of 8 to 18. He qualified.

So sophomore year at the University of Redlands when he needed money, Yensen wrote to the U.S. Forest Service. Then in June, 1953, he loaded up his ’41 Ford and headed for the McCall, Idaho, smokejumper base.

“I remember going up there,” recalled Yensen, a man with a musical twang in his voice and a knack for spinning tales. “I was driving through Nevada about 4 o’clock in the morning. Whole world lit up like a big flashbulb. You know, they’d shot an A-bomb back behind me!”

It was an auspicious beginning. Quite a send-off.

Wild Bill Yensen is a U.S. Forest Service legend: For 33 summers he fought fire in the impenetrable mountain forests of the West. He reached places with names like Disappointment and Starvation creeks. He climbed canyon walls so steep “you can actually spit a hundred yards!”

Once, a boulder the size of a refrigerator barreled past him in the dead of night. Once, Yensen brought a man back from the lip of a 200-foot cliff.

He has grilled grouse on green sticks near the Salmon River. He has fried bacon on a shovel in the mosquito capital of the world.

Once, Yensen swears, he saw a UFO.

Now Wild Bill Yensen is retiring, a high-school math teacher from Bonita who no longer needs $8,000 in summer cash. His children are grown, his daughter is marrying. Yensen wants to play golf, catch up on time with his wife, “do those sorts of things.”

But he’s not leaving smokejumping without regret.

“Oh, it’s hard to pull the plug on something that’s been that much of your life,” Yensen said last week, the sudden tightness in his throat telling maybe half how hard. “But everything works. I survived. So I figure I probably shouldn’t press my luck any more.”

Yensen is a compact, muscular man. He earned his honorific, Wild Bill, back in high school when he pitched four games in a row without walking anyone. At age 53, he weighs just five pounds more than he weighed at 20. At 5-foot-8 1/2, he has shrunk a half-inch.

He grew up close to the land, on farms. “Corn, potatoes, the usual stuff.” Back in Homedale, Idaho, his sisters’ boyfriends started smokejumping the year they graduated from high school. Yensen was following their lead.

“Of course, it’s always been fascinating,” he said. “It’s always a challenge to be able to fly out in that wild country, and get down safely, do your job, and get back safely. That’s where it’s at.”

Yensen started out in McCall leaping off a 40-foot tower, hitched to a harness and a hemp rope that jerked you up, yo-yo-style, just before you kissed the dirt. He and other greenhorns learned how to hit the ground, roll and get out of trees.

Then came the real thing.

“We took off about 7:30 in the morning and the sun’s just comin’ up good,” Yensen said. “And I can see the shadow of the plane gettin’ smaller and smaller. What am I doin’ here? Then we got up there, couple other guys jumped, so it came my turn, so I got in the door and this guy says, ‘Hit ‘er, Billy!’ And I took off and jumped.

“And it worked!

“Boy, then you’re just sittin’ there, just like sittin’ in a swing. And the plane’s gone, and it’s quiet. Just unbelievable. You just drive the thing down.”

The smokejumpers’ role in fighting forest fires is “initial attack”: In roadless areas, they suppress a fire before it gets out of hand. They jump in twos, the number depending on the size of the fire: say, a two-man-er, four-man-er, eight-man-er or “a gobbler.”

Smokejumpers jump in daylight but often work best at night, when humidity is up and temperature down. They begin by digging a shallow ring around the fire to stop the spreading. Then they cut down burned and burning trees and smother them with dirt.

Their tools are collapsible shovels, axes, hand saws and chain saws--a small arsenal that drops out of the sky on a chute of its own. Pumping water on a fire is a rare luxury. Along with the tools come domestic supplies--sleeping bags, food, drinking water.

After that first year, Bill Yensen got himself a camera. The land was so beautiful, he learned photography and later taught it. Often he carried a movie camera, and a chess set, in his personal gear box. Smokejumpers like cribbage; it’s a good two-man game.

After all, a man might be out on a fire for as long as a week. When they’re done, smokejumpers usually load their equipment on their backs, pack out to the nearest road, and wait. Yensen remembers packing 16 miles once, carrying 110 pounds of equipment.

Fire jumps begin at 1,500 feet up. Look for a clearing near the fire, drop crepe paper streamers to measure the pull of the wind, then step out into the ether. It’s usually about 90 seconds to the ground. And the ground can feel awfully hard when you’re landing on a mountain 9,000 feet up, when it’s hot and the air is thin.

“Oh, I have one on Disappointment Creek,” said Yensen, remembering one of what he calls his extraordinary jumps. “It’s neat country out there: There’s Disappointment Creek, Dismal Creek, Hungry Creek, Starvation Creek. It’s real neat country!”

The streamers said the wind was blowing along the ridgetop. But Yensen got out over the ridgetop and it changed direction. Suddenly he was blowing out over a 4,000-foot-deep canyon. For every foot he blew out, he would have to climb three feet back up the other way.

“So I did what you call a slip,” he said. “I grabbed three lines in front and just climbed ‘em up and grabbed my canopy and dumped all the air out of it. And I got out of the air in about 10 seconds. I just dumped all the air out of my chute so I would drop straight down.”

But his jump partner, Mouse Warner, was 150 yards farther out when he followed suit. “He was so far down in the canyon, I hollered loudly, ‘YOU OK, MOUSE?’ ” The answer came back like a peep: “Yeah.”

“He had all that junk he had to carry up the mountain. When he got up there, he was outta gas. I didn’t see him for about three hours.”

Of course, more dangerous than jumping is fighting fires, Yensen said. There are smoldering trees to be chopped down and flames to be quelled. There are fields of dry white grass that burn like gasoline, and thunderstorms that play weird tricks with fire.

Summer before last, Yensen was on a fire in the Boise forest, 12 men on three acres of fire in “real dense stuff.” They were cutting “snags,” dead trees, when the top of one broke off in a big Alpine fir. The bottom part came crashing down. Then the top started coming.

“I looked up just in time to see it, and I ducked my hard hat into it, took a lick right on my head,” Yensen said. “If I hadn’t had my hard hat on, I’d be dead. Because it would have brained me. I mean, it put a dent about, oh, that big in my hard hat. And it knocked me silly, and down the hill about 25 yards. So I got up and I had a bloody head. But it was still there because I wore that tin hat.

“I’m more or less the official engraver, so I whipped out my engraving tools and I put 7-7-85 in my hard hat. And took a rock and beat it out so I could wear it, and put it on, and had to fight the fire another day and a half.”

Once, Yensen was on a fire in Salmon River country, where most of the land is better than 100% slope. Suddenly someone up above hollered “Rock!”--a chilling cry in the dark. Yensen dove behind a tree. A refrigerator-sized rock careened by just 20 yards away.

Another time, he was chain-sawing when a hard hat scudded by--a silent warning from someone up-slope. Suddenly, his log bolted and went hurtling down the mountain. A two-ton rogue log had got away from someone above, snagged Yensen’s log, and missed him by six inches.

Other fires were memorable for quieter reasons.

One summer night on a fire in Alaska, jumping when there was perpetual daylight, Yensen jumped on July 18 and landed July 19. Because it was near midnight, he was looking at his watch when the tap came to jump: 23:59 and 45 seconds. He landed 90 seconds later.

Another year he spent 36 hours on a small two-man-er. The whole time, two bighorn sheep looked on. That night, they watched lightning strike another fire a few miles away. The next morning, Yensen shot a grouse and roasted it. The bighorn sheep were still there.

Yensen has seen bear, cougar, deer, elk, moose, badger and rattlesnake. He’s seen a porcupine burn, the only creature he ever saw die in a fire. Once he watched a rabbit run out of a fire with two burned paws. He shot it in the head, he said; “he was beyond repair.”

And once, Yensen said, he saved his partner’s life.

It was on that murderous 16-mile pack-out. They were following Sheep Creek and the brush was so dense they kept detouring repeatedly over ridges. Finally, they came to a decomposed granite slope of about 45 degrees, with a 200-foot cliff at the bottom and rocks beyond that. If they could cross it, they could save two miles.

“So I tippy-toed across and made it,” Yensen said. “My jump partner gets right out in the middle and slipped. And he fell. And he’s got this hundred-pound pack on his back. All he did was spread eagle and dig in with his fingertips and just spread out as much as he could. He took all the skin off the end of his fingers, diggin’ into the rock as he slid down towards this cliff and gradually comes to a stop. He’s about three feet from the cliff.

“I said, ‘Don’t breathe, Barney!’ So I dug into my pack real quick, got out my rope, made a lariat out of it. And I roped him and snubbed him off to a tree and reeled him in. . . . Just like a cowboy. Maybe that’s why they wanted farm boys.”

Last week, Wild Bill Yensen was back teaching at Sweetwater High School in National City, a job with something less than the wild glory of smokejumping. Next summer, he figures he and his wife will tour the West--maybe the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone.

“Tired o’ workin’ all the time,” he explained simply. “And, I figure I’ve spun the wheel enough times, taken my chances enough times. . . . I’ve got a lot of golf to play, and I’ve got to catch up a little time with my wife. Do a few of those things.”

But the end of smokejumping, it seems, leaves a small hole in Yensen’s heart.

“The thing about it is, smokejumpers are absolutely real,” he said softly, his voice becoming high and thin. “There’s no phonies. No phonies. If you’re out there in the woods with somebody, your ass is in his hands. If you get hurt, he’s got to take care of you.”

And the UFO?

Yensen was telling the story in his living room in Bonita, curtains pulled, sitting next to a clattering movie projector. Silent film of smokejumpers was shimmering on a small screen. Whisps of white smoke climbed out of dark green forests. Men shovelled dirt onto smoldering logs.

“OK,” he began. “We’ve worked all day, ate our supper, the bugs are out tryin’ to eat us, got nothin’ to do, so we just crawl into our

sleepin’ bags. Pull ‘em up and we’re just lookin’ up and the stars are just startin’ to come out. Well, you know, just at dark when the stars are startin’ to come out is when you’re gonna see satellites. We see this satellite comin’ out of the east.

“ ‘See that satellite?’

“ ‘Yeah?’

“There’s three of us there. There’s me and Dave Butler and Jim Firestone. We’re watchin’ this satellite goin’ through the stars. That damn thing got straight overhead, did a 90 and went south! No change in velocity. A 90-degree, square-corner change in direction. It went south till it went out of sight.”

And you believe it was a UFO? he was asked.

“What else? You don’t have airplanes that turn square corners. I don’t know what it was. . . . Hey. All the things I’ve read. Plus seein’ that. You know. Gotta be. We’re not alone.”