“I’m surprised when I walk out of the video store and it’s raining ash.”
First published 2018 in Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing
The night of the fire I missed two calls from my friend Holly, who had family on the mountain that was burning.
No one could get ahold of her uncle, and for an hour or so it was looking like Holly would have to drive up and find him—he was probably running heavy machinery, deaf to phone calls and flames alike—but by the time I called her back, Scot had been accounted for. The only thing left for us to do was to brainstorm activities for the evening.
“We could drive out and look at the fire,” Holly said, “but there’s not much to see.”
The next morning in class a professor of mine who lived on the mountain said there were “three-hundred-year-old trees shooting flames thirty feet into the air.”
He said the fire shone like city lights in the pines as he stood in the yard hosing his roof.
♦
I’m surprised when I walk out of the video store and it’s raining ash.
So complete is the apparent lack of concern among the Montanans, you’d never guess that just five miles outside of town two thousand acres of land are burning.
I’ve lived here almost two years but am still an easterner at heart. I still long for the mountains to turn Appalachian green in the springtime, am still surprised when I wake in the morning and the air smells like campfire smoke.
The city of Missoula, Montana sits in a valley that was once the bottom of a glacial lake.
Sometimes, as I walk along the river, I imagine myself walking underwater, stirring up sediment, but then I look up at the mountains and the sky and I can’t imagine enough water to turn those ridges into shorelines.
My eyes won’t adjust to the mountains. They are the same shape as the Pennsylvania hills I grew up in but much larger. They throw off my depth perception—always bigger and farther off than I would guess.
Two thousand acres of land: that’s three square miles of fire and you’d never know it, not by the looks on their faces.
This lack of concern, it’s strange to me because fire so often draws our eyes. We arrange furniture around our TVs the way our ancestors once arranged themselves around hearths and campfires.
Even the smallest flame: that milky flicker of the candle in my hands at church on Christmas Eve always arrests my gaze, a light come into the darkness, God like a flame—in, but not of, this world.
My advisor, who was a ranch wife before she became a writer, tells me the reason: Montanans know the difference between close and too close.
♦
Among the first to spot the smoke on the mountain was a seven-year-old girl playing on her porch.
“I heard a ‘poof’ like a firework,” she told a reporter from The Missoulian. “Then I saw smoke.”
After class, I asked Holly to drive me out to where the fire was—I wanted to see it for myself, wanted to grasp the magnitude of it—and she agreed, on the condition that we drive through without stopping. She wasn’t going to be one of those “gawkers.”
Out the car window I saw pines glittering orange, whole mountains shrouded in smoke, and more around each bend.
The road kept winding and the smoke grew thicker.
Along the side of the road were signs that said “NO STOPPING,” but at every pull-off we passed there were crowds of people—gawkers—watching the forest service helicopters swooping buckets into the river and then flying up the mountain to drop their load.
At one point the road we were driving ran along a ridge that sits above the water, and we saw a helicopter—gigantic up close—dive past the car and below the surface of the road.
Down in the river, where the helicopters were filling their buckets, people floated through the smoke on fat black inner tubes, and I thought of a schoolyard legend Holly once told me about scuba diver bones in the woods surrounding Whitefish Lake.
Weeks later I will learn that the Clark Fork was closed to floaters the very next day, and when I recount the story about the floaters to my freshmen writing students, one of them will raise his hand and grin. “That was me.”
♦
“The human body,” writes the poet Kazim Ali, “is a bundle of sticks in a chemical process similar to combustion,” and so much hinges on those words similar to. They are the distance between the hand of a child and the burner on a stove, the space between the earth and the sun.
The stars, each one of them a fire that could consume our planet, are beautiful because they’re far off.
The night of the fire my professor wandered down the road past the truck stop where the deer and sheep driven from the mountain were milling about.
He stopped at a church parking lot, where a group of people had assembled with lawn chairs and beer. They were watching a house up on the ridge, waiting to see if it would burn, and my professor—whose own home was dangerously close to the fire—watched them watch the flames.
“Nobody was rooting for the fire,” he said, “but nobody was rooting against it either.”
♦
A year later I visit a friend, a Montanan, who is stationed as a lookout for the forest service. I count 80 steps from the top of the mountain to the top of his watchtower. Beyond us, below, the tops of pines are whipping in the breeze.
Was all this once underwater?
Once an hour he takes up his binoculars and scans the horizon for smoke, of which there’s plenty, but none worth radioing in. It’s drifting over from fires far off in Idaho.
He sets the binoculars aside. If you look too much, he says, it’ll drive you crazy.
But there are perks. He talks about the stars as if they’re an event. He mentions them casually, speculates about what the smoke will do to their visibility, half-jokes that he would like to buy a tower of his own one day.
His favorite time is sunset, but today there is no sun. The sun is an orange smudge that doesn’t set so much as it burns out and disappears. No stars either, so we look northwest to Helena and watch the city lights flicker like candles through the smoke. ♦
Ryan Rickrode 