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(upbeat music ending) (upbeat music) - On the front lines of wildfire, where most people are forced to flee, Kelly Ramsey stood her ground, time and time again.

One of the few women to fight multiple California wildfires as an elite hotshot crew member, she battled California's largest wildfire in modern history, The August Complex fire, burning more than a million acres in 2020.

But the fiercest battle wasn't only in the flames, it was inside herself.

Her story is next.

(upbeat music ending) (upbeat music) - And now "Rob on the Road", exploring Northern California.

- Joining me now is author of "Wildfire Days", Kelly Ramsey.

Kelly, it's great to see you.

Thank you for joining us from Northern California.

- Thank you so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

- What a book.

It is such a riveting memoir of your experiences with fire in many ways, I will say, I know the one thing that everybody wants to know is what fires have you worked on?

- Okay, so probably the biggest fire, no, actually, technically the biggest fire would be the August Complex, which was the first million-acre-fire in California history in 2020.

But I also worked on the Dixie Fire, which you might know, listeners might know, which was close to a million acres, as well.

It was 900-some thousand, and that was in 2021.

I was on a bunch of other fires that were also over 100,000 acres, so the Slater fire, the North Complex, the Red Salmon Complex, yeah, we just went to fire after fire after fire in the two seasons that I was on a hotshot crew.

So while you know names like the August might be names that people know and they are, you know, making the news, we also went to 100,000-acre fires that you've never heard of.

- Mm-hmm.

You know, when we talk about such massive fires, and California is such a ...

It's just such a big deal when we talk about fire.

- Yeah.

- And it is something that everybody has a story with, but not like you, (Kelly laughing) because on the front lines of fighting something so invasive, I cannot imagine.

Can you describe to me what it's like?

- Yeah.

So I think the thing that people might not know is that we are sometimes right up in front of the flames.

It depends on how big the fire is, and how big sort of the flaming front, the head of the fire is.

If it's, you know, as tall as two stories, if it's like taller than houses, and it's racing through the forest, we're obviously not right in front of that.

It's far too dangerous, but we might be across the road from that.

- Wow.

You've been right there in the middle of all of that, and hearing you talk about how close it is, you know, I've been miles and miles away, and you feel like you're in it.

- Yeah.

- But when you're in it, with the hotshot crew, I mean, first of all, tell me about the hotshot crew.

That's a big deal.

- Yeah, I mean they're very intense crews that are specialized to handle the toughest assignments, the most remote assignments on a fire, sometimes a more dangerous part of the fire perimeter, and to do that, we train at a high level, so there's a lot of physical training involved, hiking up super steep slopes, carrying 45 to 70 pounds, you're running, you're running sprints, you're doing weight training, calisthenics, it's kind of like this training montage of becoming physically strong, and building your endurance, more than anything else.

But then hotshot crews also train in a classroom, and we do a lot of studying the fire itself, and we study how to burn effectively, in order to, you know, pre-burn the landscape in advance of an oncoming fire.

And we do a lot of training also in safety and medical drills to try to, you know, 'cause there are incidents on the fire line, there are injuries, and you wanna be able to, you know, evacuate somebody, remove them from the hillside as quickly as possible.

So we do a lot of training for that.

So yeah, people will say that hotshot crews are like the "special forces" of wildland fire, and I say that in quotes, because obviously, we aren't military, but a lot of people make that comparison, because it's kind of this elite set of crews.

- I've heard you compare it to the Navy Seals.

- Yeah, I've heard that, as well.

I think there are similarities, although obviously, you know, combat is different than fire.

- You are walking into places that people run from, you know?

You're running to what everyone's running away from.

And in many cases, people have died running away from it, and you're running into it.

- Yeah.

- Where'd you get that call, that power?

- I don't know.

You know, somebody told me recently that they did a study, and they found that people who choose to fight fire often have a smaller amygdala in their brain than people who don't, so people who choose to fight fire might actually biologically have less fear than others, which I found very interesting.

So I was like, "Maybe it's just my brain was just made that way."

But yeah, from the first time that I saw fire, I had this response that was kind of a mixture of fear and awe, you know, of sort of like almost admiration or just respect.

And I had this sense of wanting to be there, wanting to be a part of the response, wanting to be a part of the solution.

But the first time, way, way back that I saw fire, I was a volunteer firefighter on this small island off the coast of Connecticut, and we did a prescribed burn of a meadow.

So we intentionally burned this meadow every winter.

And I remember seeing, you know, these flames, they seemed huge to me at the time.

They were probably 10, 15 feet, which now seems kind of small to me almost, but these flames just licked through this grass, and covered this whole meadow, erased the meadow, basically, in seconds.

And I remembered being like, "Wow, like that is so powerful."

And in this case, you know, I was coming to understand that fire could regenerate that landscape, that the burn was necessary, you know, in order to sort of clean out that meadow, and help it regrow.

And that I think is a really good metaphor for California, and for the United States in general, because we have a real problem with a lack of intentional burning, and we need to do a lot more prescribed burning and Indigenous cultural burning in order to, you know, clear and clean the landscape, and prevent these catastrophic fires, so it's interesting, just like the very first experience I had a fire was that good fire, what we call good fire.

And then it was only later that I saw wildfire, catastrophic bad fire.

And so for me, I've always kind of understood that balance of the good and the bad, and wanted to do what I could to, you know, change that balance.

- With your training, did you know these wildfires would be this bad, that they would go so far, and so quickly, that the embers would travel distance, and just ignite homes as if they were bombs?

- Yeah.

- And wipe out entire towns?

I mean, did you foresee this, Kelly?

- When I started the job, definitely not.

But at the end of two seasons, and it just so happens that the two seasons I fought fire were two of the worst in California history, at the end of those two seasons, yeah, I reached this point, where I really felt like almost nothing would surprise me from wildfire, and I started to understand how the destruction is just getting worse, you know, we aren't doing the prevention that we need to do, so the problem is just compounding, year after year.

And you know, I saw those embers carried out of the forest into communities, even into cities, and the way that fire can burn in this patchwork through a community, even if you aren't anywhere close to a tree.

You know, I'd seen that enough that, for example, when you had, you know, in 2025, the Los Angeles wildfires that came in the winter, and were so destructive, and so heartbreaking, I was, I am heartbroken for the people of Los Angeles, but I was not surprised.

And it was something that a lot of us in fire were talking about that there was this sort of like sense of indignation, like "How could this happen?

This is so unforeseen", and those of us who fight fire were like, "This is not unforeseen at all.

Like, this is how everything has been trending."

- You hold so much evidence inside of you, and so much is documented in your book about this is that this is here, and we have a lot to do.

- Yeah.

This is the reality that we're living.

I know it feels shocking when it's happening, but yeah, once you've seen a number of really destructive wildfires, it becomes less shocking, and it becomes more a question of "When are we going to do what we need to do in order to turn this ship around?"

You know?

- Are we doing any of that?

Are you seeing any of that done at a level that will, like using your words, "turn the ship around?"

- I am seeing positive signs, so I don't wanna be totally a downer, you know, doomsayer here, definitely, there is more emphasis on prescribed burning, and fuel reduction, and everything that we need to do to try -- - Emphasis or action?

- Yeah, I think there's more talk, and there is some action, but I think that action is happening thus far on this kind of small, local level, you know, you'll see some nonprofits, or some partnerships between nonprofits, and the federal government doing more prescribed burning, but like say, in California, for example, we need to burn, a study in 2020 discovered that we would need to burn 20 million acres intentionally in order to have a significant impact in reducing the severity of wildfires.

So 20 million acres.

- Across the state.

- Yes.

- Mm-hmm.

- Each summer, I don't know the exact statistics, but we burn some sort of acreage in the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, so we are nowhere close to doing the level of prescribed burning that we need to do, and it's gonna require sort of a massive shift, both in how we spend money, and how we allocate resources, you know, we need to put staffing towards doing that fuels reduction work, and that prescribed burning work, but it's also gonna require shift on the part of the public, because you're gonna have to see fire and live with smoke maybe in the winter, or the spring, you know, in a time where you're used to not having to live with smoke, there might be more smoke, because we're doing this burning.

- All the wildfire season is becoming -- - Year round.

- Year round.

- Yeah.

- If not already.

- So we're kind of already there, but I think we're gonna have to go there on purpose, and people will have to wrap their heads around like, "Oh, you know, there might be a big prescribed burn in December near your community, and you just need to think like, 'This is for the good.

This is to prevent all that same landscape from burning unintentionally, and a lot more severely.'"

- I do want to say that I did hear inspiration in what you had to say about, "Here's what needs to be done, here's what can be done", so we do have the knowledge -- - Yes.

- Of what needs to be done.

- Yeah.

- But when we know better, we do better.

And so that's the call to action that we have to do something about it.

And your book is doing such a good job of putting the heat on this issue, it really does, because it's such a story of your experience.

Before we move into the personal side of this, I wanna ask you, because you know, I just have to ask, did you ever think you weren't gonna make it through one of the fires?

- There were a couple of moments that got a little scary, where in hindsight I thought, "Oh, man, that could have been really bad."

In the moment, you don't always quite realize, so, you know, I think this doesn't spoil the book, but a tree fell on one of my colleagues at one point during a fire in 2021, and he was right next to me.

And the tree just, you know, they burn out at the base, and they fall kind of out of nowhere, often they fall like silently until they land, you don't really even hear it coming.

So this tree hit him on the head, he falls down, for several minutes, we thought that he might be paralyzed.

This is a spoiler alert, but he ends up being okay.

I don't want people to be worried.

- But your description of it in the book is riveting.

- Oh, thank you so much.

It was a really, really terrifying moment, I get chills when I think about it, 'cause you know, it's a guy that is a great friend, you work with these people day in, day out, for half a year, so you become really close, almost like siblings, they felt like my brothers, and so there's my brother lying on the ground, and afterwards, you know, I thought, first of all, he could have died, and then second, I thought, that was a couple feet away from me, like, what if it had landed differently?

What if it had hit me?

What if I hadn't had my hard hat?

Well, you always have your hard hat on, but what if it knocked my hard hat off, and, you know.

That's a way that a lot of firefighters die is from a tree strike.

So definitely there were some moments where I thought, "Oh wow, I could die out here.

I could have died in that moment.

And I just got lucky."

- I thank you for sharing that, 'cause I know that it takes you into a scary area, which is not unfamiliar territory for you.

- No.

- You have been through a lot of scary areas in your life, you write about them in your book, and I have to ask you psychologically that is there a parallel with tackling and wanting to tackle something that seems so huge and unsolvable, right?

Like a massive wildfire.

Is there a parallel there with battling in your own life with another situation that was burning out of control that you could not fix, and that was an alcoholic father?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think, you know -- - Forgive me if that's not accurately said, but I'm curious if mentally there's a parallel.

- Though, you're totally, you're on the right track, there absolutely is.

- Okay.

- I think for a lot of people, like myself, who have an alcoholic parent, you go through these stages, you know, first, you wanna save their life, then you try to convince them to get help, then maybe you start to give up on that, but you try to enact that saving elsewhere, you know, as opposed to turning and saving yourself, you think, "I'm gonna save my partner, I'm gonna save the rest of my family, I'm gonna save the world."

And so I think that impulse to fight, for lack of a better word, you know, to fight the fire, to go out there and try to save something is really about, you know, so many of us, we can't save our parents, or even if something improves later, we can't really go back and redo our childhood, right?

Like, you don't get the parent that you didn't have, you can't ever really get them back.

So I think when you have something like that happen to you, you can go into your life always fighting, like always trying to fix everything, and to a certain extent, some of it is unfixable.

And so, yeah, I think part of that is what drove me to fight wildfires, and what might drive a lot of other people too, I had a stunning number of colleagues, who had, you know, alcoholic parents, or they'd lost a parent early, or something like that, and maybe that's just all of us, or maybe there's something about having that difficult kind of background that makes you wanna be a firefighter.

I'm not sure.

Totally spectacular.

- And there also is a tremendous amount of scarring.

- For those people who do the work to work through those traumas, you know, if they have some sort of coping mechanism, or if they have therapy, as I did, or write a book about it, for example, (Kelly laughing) if you do something to work through it, then the trauma can actually be, in some ways, constructive, I mean, I'm not saying it always is, in many cases, it's destructive, but ... - But the process of going through the recovery can be constructive.

- Exactly, and so, you know, there's, as much as people talk about PTSD, post-traumatic stress, there's also a phenomenon known as post-traumatic growth.

And what they've seen is that people who go through something absolutely awful, a war, a catastrophic wildfire, some people really go downhill afterwards.

Some people have this huge surge of personal growth and development, following that trauma.

So I think either one of those paths is an option, and it's up to you to choose, you know, how you get help, how you transform yourself.

But it is, in so many ways, just really like a forest that's been through a fire, in some cases, there's -- - Yes.

- Destruction, and in almost every case, there is some level of renewal and regrowth.

- So this journey in your life of post-traumatic growth, when did you feel that?

- Well, it's ongoing, right?

But ... (Kelly laughing) I think there's been a number of times, you know, there was sort of a time back in 2017, 18 is the last time I saw my father, and I just sort of said to myself after that time, I was like, "I'm letting go."

You know, he's still alive, but he was really going downhill, he was on his path to becoming homeless, and had burned a lot of bridges with his drinking, and I was like, "I can love him, and let go, and I need to move on with my life."

And so that was like a huge moment of growth and freedom for me on one level.

And then I would say again, after fighting fire for a couple seasons, I had kind of a down moment, and a real reckoning with who I was, and who I gonna be, if I didn't do this job anymore, and then through the process I think of writing the book, and processing all my feelings about fire, and writing my way through the experience of fighting fire, I really healed again.

And I, you know, wrote the story of my father, and in so many ways, writing all of these things, writing about fire, writing about my dad was kind of like a putting down.

Like, so I feel like I'd been carrying these burdens on my back for many years, and I put them into the book, and then suddenly they're like in this physical object now that gets sent out into the world, and I'm not carrying them anymore in the same way, I have other burdens and things I'm working through, of course, but, you know, we're always in process.

But those particular burdens that I had been just schlepping around for so many years, I do not feel weighed down by them anymore.

- And did that, because I have to tell you, I feel like in reading your book, that you did not write from a place of brokenness.

- Hmm.

- You wrote from a place, you wrote about a time of feeling broken, but from a place of healing.

So it was clear you'd put the work in.

If this interview ended today, and there was something you had not shared that you wanted to share, what is it that, any burning desire on your heart, that must be shared before our time comes to a close?

- One of the things I'd like people to know, particularly listeners, who may be, you know, women, non-binary, trans people, all that is that this book is really a story about being in the minority, being kind of out of your element in a female body in the world.

And I think so many people have experienced that, maybe not even just women, but so many people have experienced kind of being the odd person out, and feeling exposed, and vulnerable physically and emotionally.

So I think in that sense, I just really wanna emphasize that it's a story that's about so much more than fire, it's just about living a vulnerable life as a person who has been through it, and goes out there to try something really hard, you know, and I think that is so, so many of us, I think, so many of us are kind of up against the odds, especially right now, trying to figure out how to make our way through life, so ... - Wow, that is beautifully said.

And I can tell you that as someone who has with your book, that experience with me, when I was finished with it, I wouldn't even have said it was about fire.

- Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for saying -- - Even with the illustrations, (Participants laughing) because it really, you know, there are always times in life, where we feel like everybody sees in us what our biggest fears are about ourselves that actually were true.

- Yeah.

- And I know I've had that lived experience, and that is an evolution we all go through, as well.

But your book touches that spot in the soul that says, "I see you, I value you, and you can get through this just as you are.

That whoever you are, you are who you're supposed to be, and that you can turn your scars into your greatest trophies."

That's what I take from your book.

- Wow.

Thank you so much.

I could not have said it as well as you did.

It's so beautiful.

- That's how I feel about it, really.

And that's how I feel about you.

So I thank you for all of the hard hours for writing this book, because just as one person here saying to you, you know, I just, I am a life changed by it.

And "Wildfire Days" is something that everybody needs to read.

We normally don't say that, but I can say that in this case.

(Participants laughing) - Thank you so much.

Yeah, that's everything that I hope for is that people would feel seen by reading it.

So that is so beautiful to me.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

And that the fire in your life is worth addressing, because you can help put it out by however you handle it.

It's the tools that will get you there, and this book is one of those.

So Kelly Ramsey, thank you so much, author joining us.

It is such a treat to have you here on PBS.

- Thank you so much.

This has been an honor.

- Thank you.

(upbeat music) Thanks for joining us.

You can watch when you want at robontheroad.org.

(upbeat music ending) (upbeat music) - Murphy Austin Adams Schoenfeld LLP, focusing on business law and commercial litigation is proud to support "Rob on the Road: Region Rising."

More information available at murphyaustin.com.

(upbeat music ending)