You probably haven’t heard of Titus’s hometown unless you’re a golf fanatic and know about its Resort Golf Course’s 14th hole—the world’s only movable floating green—or unless you’ve made a fast break from Boise to Canada. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho has about 50,000 residents, 1,521 of which attend Titus’s high school.
Dynamics at the school could not be more stereotypical. Jocks call the Goths and punks freak shows. Band geeks stick to themselves and play their instruments. Members of the football team move as a pack. Wrestlers do their own thing. Preppy girls go for 27-year-old dudes, and the jocks that desire preppy chicks get frustrated and date underclassmen. Everyone inevitably falls into stereotype. But despite their typical school trappings, many students have goals for the future that are anything but traditional. Titus, for example, wants to be a smoke jumper who jumps out of planes to fight wildfires.
“I’m an adrenaline junkie,” Titus said. Since seventh grade, wrestling has been his extreme and source of adrenaline. But as his wrestling career nears its end, he’s looking for another rush. “I want to try to do some smoke jumping,” Titus said. If the idea of smoke junking seems extreme to you, it’s probably because it is. “You’re at the station, and you throw on your parachute gear and your backpack full of stuff. You jump near or on top of the fire, and you parachute down to the fire and control it.” Years of intense physical conditioning during wrestling season will be valuable in his desired profession.
The minimum smokejumper physical standards of the U.S. Forest Service are:
1. 7 pull-ups or 7 chin-ups.
2. 45 sit-ups
3. 25 push-ups
4. 1 l/2 run in 11 minutes or less.
5. Pack out –110 pound pack for 3 miles in 90 minutes or less.
6. Standard firefighting pack test for U.S. Forest Service.
For someone with Titus’s attitude that “anything that involves me getting hurt is an adrenaline rush,” smokejumping is a natural next step from high school. But what is the likelihood that he will get hurt? Despite the seeming inherent risks associated with parachuting into an inferno, smokejumping is statistically no more dangerous than ground fire fighting.
But the demands are different. Smokejumpers work in much smaller groups than traditional crews of firefighters. They jump often in more remote areas, working to stamp out small wildfires before they spread to more populated areas. Because smokejumpers are often needed in heavily forested, unpopulated areas, countries and states with few people often rely on them, some of the most extreme uninhabited areas of the world rely on them. Russia maintains one of the largest fleets in the world, with thousands on call. Canada, Mongolia, and the Northwest U.S. are home to the rest of the world’s known fleets.
For a teen in Idaho, smokejumping is not a remote possibility. Boise, Idaho City, McCall and Grangeville all have operating bases. And for Titus practical considerations like working season come into play. “It’d be cool…I’d do smoke jumping for a while, and in the winter there are no fires. So you just take it easy and get a different job,” he said. While some people teach so they can have the summers off, others like Titus parachute to fight fires so they can have the winters off. So what does make a wrestler jump out of airplane? Well, adrenaline, yeah, but free time to make snowmen might have something to do with it—proving that even though jocks fit stereotypes in many ways, in a lot of aspects they just don’t.
DISCUSSION:
What do you do for an adrenaline rush?
