From early spring to late summer, Brett Bittenbender of McCall, Idaho, commutes via parachute, leaping out of planes at 1,500 feet to land in clearings adjacent to raging forest fires. On the ground, the lanky 42-year-old subsists on Spam and coffee and sleeps on bare earth, often for just a few hours a night.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Asian Longhorned Beetle Cooperative Eradication Project, established in 1996, puts the smoke jumpers at the service of local governments. With their tree-climbing skills, the smoke jumpers are able to inspect trees or parts of trees that crews with bucket trucks can’t. Between September and December about 20 smoke jumpers come to Chicago to scale between 5,000 and 6,000 trees. They’re a supplement to the small army employed by city, state, federal, and private agencies to conduct 80,000 tree inspections in the area each year.
“I can’t say we’ve halted the beetle, but the numbers are really going down,” says Chris Caris, local director of the beetle project. Between 1998 and 2000, 1,419 trees were diagnosed and destroyed, but last year only 19 cases were found. The count so far this year is 6, and only a single live beetle has been sighted. A citizen spotted it on a light pole at the corner of Webster and Lincoln, near Oz Park, and called the project’s hotline at 312-74BEETL.
“We go to a lot of concerts together,” says Bittenbender. “We’ve seen Greg Brown, Government Mule, Phil Lesh, Yonder Mountain String Band. For Halloween, Frank and I got dressed up and went to the Congress Theater to see Rusted Root. We’ve hit all the museums more than once, and Second City too. We go out drinking at a club occasionally. Lots of people go running down by the lake and join a gym. There’s this bunch of guys who go up to the top of the parking towers and skateboard to the bottom–they did the one at the House of Blues recently. People go to the movies a lot. Right now Nan Floyd and I are taking a stained glass class together. I’m doing a Tiffany-type lamp.”
