Part Four
[See Parts One, Two, and Three below]
Science tells me that in the winter, the days are shorter, and I know that. But they seem longer. In the winter, the sun doesn’t simply set. It angles in. It skips - ripples of clouds coloring the sky for miles - over the mountains and the afternoons last for hours. Besides, if you’ve been skiing since eight in the morning (you must carve first tracks), come four o’clock, you’re whupped. In the summer, just when you want the sun - really need it - it plunges into the earth. The evening, full of the fourth quarter or riding on the back of Shawn’s motorbike or Ace of Aces or looking for fossils in the shale, collapses.
It was during one of those summer evenings when the fire happened. As you can probably imagine, it gets dry up over 9000 feet. Your skin gets all scaly, and your breath bites in your lungs, and when you sweat, pfft, it evaporates just like that. And, of course, there’s a lot to burn. The Arapahoe National Forest, the White River National Forest, are really nothing but a bunch of matchsticks standing on end. We don’t get a whole bunch of rain in the summer, and when we don’t get snow in the winter to feed the runoff, and when that happens for two, three, four years in a row, let me just say that all the snowmaking in the world won’t help. There’s crackling.
It’s not as if Summit County is a desert, or anything. We have this huge lake, a big reservoir to water the flatlanders’ insatiable lawns in Denver, even. Lake Dillon, you could say, is at the heart of the county right where Ten Mile Creek and Snake River (no not that Snake River) join up with the Blue River. Several decades back, they dammed up the resulting triple valley and relocated Dillon up onto a hill. One building, the Old Dillon Inn, they relocated down to Silverthorne, which is just under the dam. It’s a smoke-filled dive with balding pool tables and questionable Mexican food and a neon sign that’s been missing the “R” for twenty years, so it flashes “BA… BA… BA.” I guess it’s kind of a landmark, but it’s an eyesore, too. Now, they didn’t even repaint the “R” behind the neon letters, so during the day it just says “BA.” Anyway, back at the lake, some jokers claimed that when the water level dropped that year, thirty, forty, fifty feet and more, that you could see a church steeple from Old Dillon coming out of the lake like in some Arthurian legend. It was bogus, of course. But we could walk out onto the lakebed a half-mile or so. It was creepy, I’ve got to say, like some sci-fi landscape, all cracked mud and long-drowned rusted Coors cans with the old tabs you pulled off.
---
Shawn drove that AARP-mobile back east when he got his dream job at a Washington think-tank. Funny, I knew him when he was inventing war games based on military logistics in the conference room above the library. Here was this skinny little snot-nosed twelve-year-old kid with maps and charts and World War II statistics strewn all over the table in the town hall meeting room, while Van checked out romance novels to ski bums below. Now he’s got his Ph.D. and doing the same damn thing for war in Iraq, maps and charts and stats and all. Sometimes you don’t grow up as much as grow old.
He’s met a charming woman - she might be the one with the smoke in her eyes - and would like to bring her back to Colorado and to Summit County and to Silverthorne and to Rainbow Lakes and to the house and grandfather clock and the too-green patch of grass. I wonder how that’ll go. He’ll say, “Mom and Dad, this is Barbara,” and they’ll say “What a pleasure it is to meet you,” and then she’ll say something like “What a beautiful sunset.” And she’ll meet Scott, now grown up and married with his own Subaru in the driveway, and the new baby, and they’ll maybe sit down to Christmas dinner without, sad to say, the splendid and abominable Gucci light, which is now, too, history. And I imagine Shawn telling Barbara everything and nothing. How could he possibly tell her that this wasn’t just a basement wall, no, this was the place he found out you could put out a match with gasoline, and that that was no mere road, no, that was where he taught his best friend not to lean into the turn on the motorbike, and that on the roof of that school we sat and drank Slurpees in Big Gulp cups during drama class, and that on that field was the soccer goal that fell over and crushed Clark Robinson’s head, and that up that valley was the house in which Troy Frieze’s brother hanged himself from the banister, and that on that mountain was the cabin in which Vince’s mother drank herself into a stupor and froze to death?
---
Someplaces you leave, but they never leave you. You come back, and all the places are the same, the Pizza Hut is where the Pizza Hut was, and even though you won’t see a face you recognize, still the faces are the same, if you know what I mean. The mountains are still in generally the same shape, although the trees may be rearranged a bit by the occasional avalanche. Tourists, however, don’t quite get it. Some flatlander may come back to the same condo, maybe they own a timeshare and return every winter for twenty years, and they’ll say they know the place, every stoplight, and they’ll even say “I remember when they put in that stoplight” or even “I remember when the first stoplight in the county went in at Farmer’s Korners,” but the fact remains that as much as they know the place, the place will never know them.
I bet I know what you’re thinking. I bet you’re thinking, this is where the fire comes in. The fire creeps or bursts or skitters out of the ground, waiting as it has, patiently, for a hundred years. The fire blasts down the mountain behind the Woodfords’ house, maybe at night, or maybe it’s a pale imitation of the sunset over the Gore Range. It comes down the mountain in a rush, perhaps, too quickly to get the fire brigade, too fast to save anything but a couple of photographs, much too fast to save some old grandfather clock. Maybe the fire doesn’t choose the Woodford’s house, it has a sense of justice and it takes our old house up on Buffalo Mountain instead. Does it matter that the new people have replaced the carpet and fixed the windows, that they’ve installed a new Viking range or hot tub, that they only spend two weeks a year up there and can be counted on to reliably attend the progressive dinner?
People say that a fire is nature’s way of renewal, that it burns out all the tangled undergrowth and refertilizes the soil and allows the forest to replenish itself. They say that nature needs the occasional fire, like some sort of cosmic five-year plan. These people never talked to the scorched deer or the singed racoon or the homeless bear. They never talked to the family of the firefighter that flew in from Montana to cut the firestop to keep the fire from jumping a ridge. They never saw their childhood wafting around, thin evanescent ash that leaves nothing more than a smudge on your fingertips when you reach for it.
Snow renews.
---
It’s the way of things that when the forest fires came to Summit County, it was because some careless tourist dropped a measly cigarette up by the lake. This wasn’t some hundred-year fire that finally burned its way to daylight, all full of poetry and meaning. No, when the fires came to Summit County, you could barely see the smoke from a half mile away at the Factory Stores they put up under the dam by the interstate. They called up some airplanes out of Grand Junction that flew in from the north, roared up the Blue River valley like Pappy Boyington, over the Woodfords’ house and the Old Dillon Inn (BA, BA, BA) and snuffed that penny-ante inferno in a splash of red jelly. Out like a match. Pfft. It’s the way of things, I’ve found, not to be poetic. In this world, there would be no melancholy homecoming with Barbara to weep over the charred hulk of a boy’s home, no forever-lost essence of a previous life, no tragic and overwhelming irony, no poignant mewling of a homeless cat. This world doesn’t much care to time catastrophe to coincide with personal calamity. In this world, the fire usually burns someone else’s home.
---
I understand the Woodfords are thinking of moving to Grand Junction.
Science tells me that in the winter, the days are shorter, and I know that. But they seem longer. In the winter, the sun doesn’t simply set. It angles in. It skips - ripples of clouds coloring the sky for miles - over the mountains and the afternoons last for hours. Besides, if you’ve been skiing since eight in the morning (you must carve first tracks), come four o’clock, you’re whupped. In the summer, just when you want the sun - really need it - it plunges into the earth. The evening, full of the fourth quarter or riding on the back of Shawn’s motorbike or Ace of Aces or looking for fossils in the shale, collapses.
It was during one of those summer evenings when the fire happened. As you can probably imagine, it gets dry up over 9000 feet. Your skin gets all scaly, and your breath bites in your lungs, and when you sweat, pfft, it evaporates just like that. And, of course, there’s a lot to burn. The Arapahoe National Forest, the White River National Forest, are really nothing but a bunch of matchsticks standing on end. We don’t get a whole bunch of rain in the summer, and when we don’t get snow in the winter to feed the runoff, and when that happens for two, three, four years in a row, let me just say that all the snowmaking in the world won’t help. There’s crackling.
It’s not as if Summit County is a desert, or anything. We have this huge lake, a big reservoir to water the flatlanders’ insatiable lawns in Denver, even. Lake Dillon, you could say, is at the heart of the county right where Ten Mile Creek and Snake River (no not that Snake River) join up with the Blue River. Several decades back, they dammed up the resulting triple valley and relocated Dillon up onto a hill. One building, the Old Dillon Inn, they relocated down to Silverthorne, which is just under the dam. It’s a smoke-filled dive with balding pool tables and questionable Mexican food and a neon sign that’s been missing the “R” for twenty years, so it flashes “BA… BA… BA.” I guess it’s kind of a landmark, but it’s an eyesore, too. Now, they didn’t even repaint the “R” behind the neon letters, so during the day it just says “BA.” Anyway, back at the lake, some jokers claimed that when the water level dropped that year, thirty, forty, fifty feet and more, that you could see a church steeple from Old Dillon coming out of the lake like in some Arthurian legend. It was bogus, of course. But we could walk out onto the lakebed a half-mile or so. It was creepy, I’ve got to say, like some sci-fi landscape, all cracked mud and long-drowned rusted Coors cans with the old tabs you pulled off.
---
Shawn drove that AARP-mobile back east when he got his dream job at a Washington think-tank. Funny, I knew him when he was inventing war games based on military logistics in the conference room above the library. Here was this skinny little snot-nosed twelve-year-old kid with maps and charts and World War II statistics strewn all over the table in the town hall meeting room, while Van checked out romance novels to ski bums below. Now he’s got his Ph.D. and doing the same damn thing for war in Iraq, maps and charts and stats and all. Sometimes you don’t grow up as much as grow old.
He’s met a charming woman - she might be the one with the smoke in her eyes - and would like to bring her back to Colorado and to Summit County and to Silverthorne and to Rainbow Lakes and to the house and grandfather clock and the too-green patch of grass. I wonder how that’ll go. He’ll say, “Mom and Dad, this is Barbara,” and they’ll say “What a pleasure it is to meet you,” and then she’ll say something like “What a beautiful sunset.” And she’ll meet Scott, now grown up and married with his own Subaru in the driveway, and the new baby, and they’ll maybe sit down to Christmas dinner without, sad to say, the splendid and abominable Gucci light, which is now, too, history. And I imagine Shawn telling Barbara everything and nothing. How could he possibly tell her that this wasn’t just a basement wall, no, this was the place he found out you could put out a match with gasoline, and that that was no mere road, no, that was where he taught his best friend not to lean into the turn on the motorbike, and that on the roof of that school we sat and drank Slurpees in Big Gulp cups during drama class, and that on that field was the soccer goal that fell over and crushed Clark Robinson’s head, and that up that valley was the house in which Troy Frieze’s brother hanged himself from the banister, and that on that mountain was the cabin in which Vince’s mother drank herself into a stupor and froze to death?
---
Someplaces you leave, but they never leave you. You come back, and all the places are the same, the Pizza Hut is where the Pizza Hut was, and even though you won’t see a face you recognize, still the faces are the same, if you know what I mean. The mountains are still in generally the same shape, although the trees may be rearranged a bit by the occasional avalanche. Tourists, however, don’t quite get it. Some flatlander may come back to the same condo, maybe they own a timeshare and return every winter for twenty years, and they’ll say they know the place, every stoplight, and they’ll even say “I remember when they put in that stoplight” or even “I remember when the first stoplight in the county went in at Farmer’s Korners,” but the fact remains that as much as they know the place, the place will never know them.
I bet I know what you’re thinking. I bet you’re thinking, this is where the fire comes in. The fire creeps or bursts or skitters out of the ground, waiting as it has, patiently, for a hundred years. The fire blasts down the mountain behind the Woodfords’ house, maybe at night, or maybe it’s a pale imitation of the sunset over the Gore Range. It comes down the mountain in a rush, perhaps, too quickly to get the fire brigade, too fast to save anything but a couple of photographs, much too fast to save some old grandfather clock. Maybe the fire doesn’t choose the Woodford’s house, it has a sense of justice and it takes our old house up on Buffalo Mountain instead. Does it matter that the new people have replaced the carpet and fixed the windows, that they’ve installed a new Viking range or hot tub, that they only spend two weeks a year up there and can be counted on to reliably attend the progressive dinner?
People say that a fire is nature’s way of renewal, that it burns out all the tangled undergrowth and refertilizes the soil and allows the forest to replenish itself. They say that nature needs the occasional fire, like some sort of cosmic five-year plan. These people never talked to the scorched deer or the singed racoon or the homeless bear. They never talked to the family of the firefighter that flew in from Montana to cut the firestop to keep the fire from jumping a ridge. They never saw their childhood wafting around, thin evanescent ash that leaves nothing more than a smudge on your fingertips when you reach for it.
Snow renews.
---
It’s the way of things that when the forest fires came to Summit County, it was because some careless tourist dropped a measly cigarette up by the lake. This wasn’t some hundred-year fire that finally burned its way to daylight, all full of poetry and meaning. No, when the fires came to Summit County, you could barely see the smoke from a half mile away at the Factory Stores they put up under the dam by the interstate. They called up some airplanes out of Grand Junction that flew in from the north, roared up the Blue River valley like Pappy Boyington, over the Woodfords’ house and the Old Dillon Inn (BA, BA, BA) and snuffed that penny-ante inferno in a splash of red jelly. Out like a match. Pfft. It’s the way of things, I’ve found, not to be poetic. In this world, there would be no melancholy homecoming with Barbara to weep over the charred hulk of a boy’s home, no forever-lost essence of a previous life, no tragic and overwhelming irony, no poignant mewling of a homeless cat. This world doesn’t much care to time catastrophe to coincide with personal calamity. In this world, the fire usually burns someone else’s home.
---
I understand the Woodfords are thinking of moving to Grand Junction.