Kelly Ramsey’s memoir, “Wildfire Days”, follows her rookie seasons as a wildland firefighter on an elite hotshot crew in the Pacific Northwest. She was the only woman on the team and one of the oldest firefighters. Her story is one of physical endurance, belonging and personal reckoning, all set against the backdrop of some of the West’s biggest wildfires.

OPB’s “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic interviewed her.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Lillian Karabaic: You have a very interesting career path. You studied poetry writing and then you have an MFA in fiction, but then years later, you became a Forest Service employee and a hotshot firefighter. Tell me about the path between these two things.

Kelly Ramsey: Yeah, it was completely circuitous, and one time I actually used that word in front of my crew to describe it. I was like, “I’ve had a circuitous route through life,” and it was like, record scratch, and everybody stared at me and then repeated that and made fun of me for the rest of the season. But yeah, it was not a straight path I had gotten to the outdoors.

I just got into really extreme punishing hikes, solo backpacking, the bouldering gym, all that outdoor stuff. And I started to get so into it that I was like, how could I do this all the time and maybe get paid even like a pittance.

Karabaic: Which is good because wildland firefighting does not pay that well.

Ramsey: And trails, which is what I started in, pays even worse. So yeah, I found this volunteer job on a trail crew in Happy Camp, California, a place I knew nothing about. I was living in Austin.

And I just saved my money, put my stuff in storage and moved out there to do this volunteer job initially. And then it became a paying job as a wilderness ranger the following summer. And that’s when I started to get curious about fire. All my roommates were female firefighters, and there’s a lot of fire on the Klamath National Forest, so you see a lot of smoke, a lot of [the] apparatus of fire. And I got really curious about what was happening and about the strength and empowerment of these women. And I was like, “I want to try this.”

Karabaic: Your book is not just about fire, we kind of flip back and forth between fire, but also your family, your relationships and patterns that you’re working to break. How did being on the fire line change the way you saw yourself and your past?

Ramsey: I would say that being on the fire line showed me how much I could handle and showed me that I was stronger than I had thought I was. So I think in my personal life, especially after two years on the job, things would come up or I’d be working through some emotional trauma, some childhood wound, something like that, and I would be like, “You know what? I’ve been a hotshot. I can handle anything, figure this out.”

And it also made me sort of more bold about other things I wanted to do in my life. I’m like, “I’d like to run ultramarathons.” And I have total confidence that, despite being really out of shape with running right now, I can do that. I can go and do that.

Karabaic: There felt like there was a metaphor running throughout the book about what to fight and what to let burn. How did you view that in your own life? Because you kind of burned down some of your life while you were out on fire.

Ramsey: Oh, 100 percent. Yeah. And it wasn’t the first time either. Well, definitely it relates to my father and his alcoholism. So if you’re the relative or the child of an alcoholic, a lot of the work that you do is about letting go. It’s about acceptance and it’s also about not trying to change that person, fix them, get them sober, whatever it is.

I feel like I already was doing that work in my life and then seeing fire ... there’s some of it that you can fight and control or contain, and there’s some of it that you can’t do much about at all. So yeah, it became this metaphor for everything in my life. And there were some things that, through the process of those two years that, yeah, I either burned down or let go in my personal life. It’s so funny though now because it’s like having done that, having let all that go, I’ve found a lot more stability since, and I think I’m not a person who burns down her life so much anymore.

Karabaic: Freezes in federal funding and cuts to various departments have put a ton of questions on the staffing and the funding for wildfire funding this season. And in Oregon, there’s been a lot of conversations in the legislative session about how to get more money to fight wildfires. What are your thoughts about how we ought to be thinking as a country about paying for firefighting?

Ramsey: Obviously, I’m not an expert on all the cuts, but I know that they’re causing chaos and that definitely they’re creating a dangerous situation for this summer. Fires are going to be understaffed. There’s almost no doubt about that. I would say the way we need to be thinking about firefighting is that we need to put more resources and money into paying the people who are there doing the job, particularly federal firefighters are underpaid, but I’m sure at the state level, there are issues as well.

But we also really need to be putting money into prevention. So we need to be creating fuels, crews, prescribed burning crews, basically people who are going to be dealing with trying to treat the forest and do landscape like mass level deliberate burning and indigenous cultural burning in order to prevent these high-severity wildfires.

I think too often we have kind of a blank check for fire suppression and for an emergency response, which in many cases is necessary, but we have almost no check — a very small check — for the preventative work that needs to be done, so we’re not getting ahead of it. We’re falling farther and farther behind every year. And of course, what’s happening currently with staffing is not helping.

Kelly Ramsey is reading in Bend on June 27 and in Corvallis on June 28.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/28/wildfire-days-book-kelly-ramsey-literary-memoir-wildland-firefighting-hotshot/