Burning Meredith Read online

  The pair performed a one-size-fits-all ceremony which emphasized the Lord’s blessings and the comfort of prayer. The pastor often threw in a wedding ceremony and two or three baptisms after the regular service. All the celebrants piled into The Bakery after church to fortify themselves for the journey home, people perching on beer kegs and cases of toilet paper if they ran out of chairs.

  The other enterprise that brought traffic to Hastings was the Owl Creek Pottery. A talented and energetic potter named Oscar, last name too long and complex to ever be remembered, had found a clay pit by the creek. He installed a couple of wheels and a kiln, and began to produce vibrant colors by crushing rocks from the mine tailings. He had an elegant touch, which allowed him to produce bowls and pitchers of great refinement. Word had long since spread among collectors with taste, and Oscar’s pots sold well, not just to Montanans but all over the country.

  When the incident commander saw they couldn’t keep the fire out of Grizzly Gulch, he told Sheriff Tasker, whose job it was to organize evacuations. The few citizens still toughing it out in Hastings were gone within the hour. They had lived for years with a bag packed, knowing nothing would stop a fire if it ever got into this steep-sided canyon. The only resident left was Oscar who, when Tasker told him it was time to go, shook his head and said quietly, ‘Thanks, Sheriff, but everything I have is here. I could never leave this place.’

  In the end, the sheriff brought in his three biggest deputies and threatened to carry him out. Oscar’s dignity would not allow that to happen, so he picked up his favorite covered dish and climbed in the pumper truck with tears glistening in his beard.

  Alice phoned her sister Betsy when she heard that the town of Hastings was doomed, and they cried together over the phone. But in the newsroom that day, there was not much time for mourning, for as the ancient wooden buildings of Hastings crumbled in the flames, the wind picked up and changed direction suddenly.

  ‘Thirty degrees to the north,’ read Stuart’s dispatch. ‘Wind’s coming straight out of the west now, and they’re afraid it’s trapped half the hotshot crew in a draw on Baker’s Gulch. We just got assigned a helicopter crew and the incident commander’s trying to get one geared up to come to the rescue. But there’s a lot of equipment that goes along to support a helicopter package; it takes time to put it all together.’

  The crew at the Guardian office endured two hours of sweaty dread before the story of the heroic rescue came down. The hotshot crew’s own chief risked his life to run through flames and find a back way out to a ledge. When he got his firefighters out there he called for help, and the assigned helicopter fueled up in a hurry and picked them off the ledge.

  ‘That story almost stopped my heart,’ Alice said, over dinner at Betsy’s house. ‘But I couldn’t pass out – I had to add the punctuation.’

  ‘How come Stuart needs you to help with punctuation, all of a sudden?’ Betsy said, ignoring the good news and annoyed by the perceived slight. ‘He’s been doing that for himself since fourth grade.’

  ‘Come on, he’s working one jump ahead of a forest fire,’ Alice said. ‘It’s Joe Friday rules now, just get the facts.’

  ‘So this big reputation he’s building, most of that is you?’

  ‘Stuart’s doing the hard part,’ Alice said, ‘chasing after fire crews, taking the pictures.’ Betsy’s getting sick of feeding me, she thought. ‘Please don’t blow my cover, Bets.’

  ‘Oh, blow your cover, my, my,’ Betsy said, putting a bowl of stew on the table. ‘You’re having fun at this job, aren’t you? You look ten years younger.’

  ‘Than what? I feel about halfway destroyed,’ Alice said. ‘We’re living on snack food all day at the paper and I’m too tired to cook. I’d have starved this week if it hadn’t been for you.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Betsy said. She had always been the family refuge in times of stress and she knew they all took advantage of her, but was equally sure this was not the week to rebel.

  Alice took a bag of her sister’s prize-winning date-nut cookies to work with her on Monday morning, and the newsroom crew snarfed them down before lunch. They needed all the comfort food they could get, because the wind shift had turned the fire story personal. It was a great, omnivorous beast now, consuming most of three counties, too hot in some spots for ground crews to fight. It had turned due east and begun to eat its way toward Clark’s Fort.

  Stuart sent a flurry of short bulletins about the changing fire behavior, and then a quick series of details about the helicopter crews assembling to battle it. He described the support package that came with the ‘big and little birds, the nimble Hueys and the behemoth called a Chinook.’

  Around five o’clock, he found a high spot where his cell phone would work and called the paper. Mort put it on speaker so they all could hear. ‘The fire’s still thirty miles away but it’s coming straight at you and moving fast,’ he said. ‘Has anybody said anything about evacuating?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Mort said. ‘We’ve all been wondering.’

  ‘Well, they plan to make a stand at Benson Creek,’ Stuart said. ‘They’ll put all their best resources there, between the fire and the town, and they’re cutting a fire break in front of the creek and the gravel road. By morning, if the wind goes down a while, they’ll start a backfire.’

  ‘I thought about putting an alert in tonight’s paper,’ Mort said. ‘But the sheriff will give us plenty of warning, won’t he?’

  ‘He’s probably thinking about it right now. This wind shift caught everybody by surprise, and it may not hold. But I think you should tell your readers to pack a grab-and-go bag and get ready to move in a hurry. If the crews can’t stop the fire at Benson Creek, that’s when you should put the pets in the car and get out. There’s only two roads going east out of Clark’s Fort and one is a gravel two-lane. They’ll fill up fast.’

  Benson Creek was a small stream nobody thought much about, usually, too shallow to swim in and home only to small bait fish. But today it looked good to everybody because it flowed right across the path of the oncoming fire.

  Alice could feel her heart beating against her ribs that day. She wasn’t the only one getting ready to run, she noticed – Mort answered the phone quickly every time it rang. But they all worked steadily – no coffee breaks – getting a six-page insert ready to go to the printer. Stuart sent pictures of the thrilling spectacle the helicopters made, filling tanks in a nearby reservoir and dropping their loads into the flames. Mort put in a print order three times the usual size – the Guardian had new readers in bookstores and supermarkets all over the state and several cities on the west coast.

  Mort puzzled over a couple of shots of red-tail hawks floating on thermals. ‘Beautiful, but I wonder why …?’ he said. Then he read the attached caption aloud: ‘Raptors work the fire’s edges, ready to dive on small animals fleeing the flames.’

  ‘Guess I won’t be taking any more pictures of red-tails for a while,’ Alice heard Sven mutter. But the story worked for Stuart; the hawks got a lot of mail.

  The helicopters dumped all their loads on the eastern front of the fire, to hold it at bay while ground crews cut the fire break. Alice went to bed that night thinking about tired men felling trees in the dark along Benson Creek. She got to work early and found Sven already there, reading Stuart’s latest dispatches. She heard him mutter, ‘Jeez …’ as she came in, and leaned over his shoulder to read. Immediately captivated, she pulled warm pages from the printer and revised sentences for half an hour before she remembered to take off her coat.

  Dawn broke while the crew was still clearing underbrush, she filed, late morning. Sunrise on Meredith Mountain was just an ominous red glow through the smoke. But the air changed – the wind direction stayed the same but dropped to barely a breeze. The crew chief got very picky about his break area, and insisted his men clean out every one of the little junk seedlings and throw them into the forest. When he was satisfied, he handed out surveyors’ ribbons, which the crew tied to
small saplings on the side of the break toward the fire.

  When the wind rose again, it lifted the tails of the ribbons and blew them straight out toward the crew. They stayed like that, pointing at the brave workmen, who stood with tools in hand as the three-story inferno raced toward them. But when the fire got a few yards closer, the crew saw an amazing sight: the ribbons were caught in a calm between the prevailing wind blowing east and the air being sucked west into the mouth of the fire as it consumed oxygen. For a few moments, the tails dangled lifelessly, as if they had been magically transported to a far-off quiet place. Then, with a roar like a tornado, the approaching fire sucked the dangling ribbons back toward itself.

  When the chief saw the ribbons pulled back toward the fire, he yelled, ‘Now!’ and the crew torched the underbrush in front of the ribbons. Superheated by then, the beribboned line ignited with a whoosh. The big fire sucked the little one into its giant maw and the fire ate itself to death.

  In front of its blackened front line now lay a firebreak, a gravel road and a flowing stream. Having no fuel, the east edge of the fire guttered and died.

  Helicopters are already hard at work dousing flames on the other three sides of the Meredith Mountain fire. If the crews are lucky, if the easterly wind doesn’t blow any harder today and the spot fires ahead of the line prove manageable, we might be reporting estimates about containment soon.

  Alice ate lunch ravenously, amazed by how many calories it took to put Stuart’s awestruck notes into acceptable English. Soothing her abraded nerves with comfort food, she noshed through the afternoon on Betsy’s good cookies and an apple Sven offered. She was glad she had packed on extra energy when, at three o’clock, she got another big story to work on.

  Like a bonus for a job well done, Clark’s Fort got a second freaky dose of luck. A surprise deflection in the polar vortex brought cold, moist air and a drastic dip in air pressure down across Canada and pouring into Montana. Towering black clouds dropped freezing rain and sleet on the Northern Rockies, and were still loaded with moisture when they got sucked into the roiling thermals above the Meredith Mountain fire.

  Stuart described the flurry of tarping up, tucking in and battening down as the storm swept over the fire. A big gust made the sparks fly up and then out. Spot fires sprang up for miles ahead. Then, with a giant hissing noise, the water hit the fire. Stuart got some gorgeous pictures of fat drops bouncing off the skin of incredibly dirty firefighters – the best shot showed five ecstatic workmen with their tongues out, fire-blackened faces turned up to the rain. Tuesday night’s edition was even bigger than Sunday’s.

  Even an eight-hour downpour could not completely stifle a fire the size of Rhode Island. But essentially, by Wednesday, the crews were mopping up hotspots. The skies over Clark’s Fort began to clear. Tons of soggy gear began snaking down mountain two-tracks and Stuart came home.

  He appeared in the newsroom looking like a weirdly joyous vagrant, with a huge smile gleaming through a disgustingly dirty beard. Mort revealed the existence of a bottle of bourbon in his lower right desk drawer, Sven ran out and bought a twelve-pack, and the newsroom held an unprecedented Wednesday afternoon office party. Mort put a notice on the website that the Guardian would publish its usual Thursday edition on Friday this week and then resume its regular publication schedule, and everybody went home early.

  Stuart stood in the yard at the Campbell place and hollered, and his father, Jamie, came out and hosed off his boots. When they got those off, Jamie helped him out of his caked and crusty clothing, wrinkling his nose as he emptied the pockets and carried each piece to the backyard trash can. Betsy had tucked a note in her last package of cookies: Take those clothes off before you come back in this house. When Stuart was down to his ruined shorts, he walked straight into the downstairs bathroom and took a very long, hot shower.

  ‘When he came out,’ Betsy told Alice, ‘I went in and gave the shower a long, hot shower.’

  After a huge cheese omelet with mounds of toast and a quarter pound of bacon, Stuart slept for ten hours. But he was back at work Thursday morning, downloading the last of his pictures and writing up his notes for follow-up stories about the storm.

  It got harder for him to work as the day went along, because the phone calls started coming. Most of them came from TV networks, wanting interviews, and from an assortment of opportunists offering to be his agent for magazine articles, his ghost writer for a book, his stockbroker for the riches surely coming his way. By lunchtime, he had persuaded Mort to take his phone messages, and Mort enjoyed the rest of that day a lot.

  Alice spent most of Thursday taking orders for the ads Stuart normally sold. Nobody had to solicit them that week – every merchant in town, including the president of the bank, marched into the newspaper office to demand space in the celebratory edition coming out the next day. It ran two pages longer than usual, with a record ad sale and a banner headline on the front page that read: DELUGE SAVES CLARK’S FORT!

  They played the threat up big now that it was gone. It was easy to believe, since a skyscraper-sized plume of smoke, visible for miles, rose from Meredith Mountain for most of a week. While it hung there, the staff of the paper did some noisy back-of-the-envelope estimating and ran a sidebar with estimates of the dollars that might have been lost if the fire had come all the way into town. Local merchants enjoyed sounding impressive for a couple of days before they settled down to the drudgery of filling out insurance forms for items actually lost in outlying areas.

  The manager of the liquor store had more than once remarked that you could fire a cannon down the main street of Clark’s Fort without hitting a champagne drinker. But most loyal citizens agreed that the town’s deliverance merited a shot or two of bourbon with a beer chaser. The serious drinkers repeated those sentiments. The liquor store put a rush order on beer and bourbon Wednesday afternoon, and had to re-supply on Thursday. There was a lot of hugging and the occasional slurred reference to the Lord’s will.

  The celebration quieted down fast on Friday morning, when Sheriff Tasker got a call from a mop-up crew putting out hot spots on Meredith Mountain.

  He loaded his staff onto a pumper truck – the quickest way, he figured, to get them close to the trouble spot. When the truck stalled out and wouldn’t go any higher, they all got out and labored on foot up the steep slope above Owl Creek, Tasker saying over and over, to the mop-up crew waiting there, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, don’t touch it.’

  Soon he had two deputies stringing crime-scene tape around the smoking remains of lodgepole pines. Inside the circle they created, he put his sweating photographer to work taking multiple shots of a burned body under a fallen log.

  TWO

  ‘Come on, Undie,’ Crow-Bait said with a snicker, ‘you gonna smoke that thing or lick it to death?’

  ‘Just being careful,’ Jason Underwood said. ‘Damn stuff costs enough – I don’t want to spill any.’ He had a love-hate relationship with his new pot habit – he loved the sleepy drift of the afternoon but hated all the planning and subterfuge it involved. He had always been the furtive, silent one in his household – had never had the nerve for bold moves. He wanted his Saturdays with the gang desperately, but he dreaded getting caught.

  He had told his family – actually his mother, the only one who asked – that he was watching the game at Ed Cronin’s house because they had a giant TV screen and subscribed to every known channel. That was true as far as it went, but he hated to think what his parents would do if they learned he was actually zoning on beer and pot in Brad Naughton’s old barn. Jason’s father had a punitive streak – not only would Game Day be gone forever, but his weekends would be filled with chores and remedial courses in – shit, who knew? There was plenty to remedy. He was a math nerd and good at science but indifferent to all other subjects.

  Cronin was the only one in the loft he had known before this month. A quiet boy with few friends, he had put his lunch tray down beside Cronin’s for no reason –
there was an empty spot – and Cronin had started a conversation about a game on X-Box that wandered off onto math puzzles. In the end they never went back to class at all that day, but sidled out the emergency exit and went to the package store where Cronin could buy beer and cigarettes because he looked older and had fake ID. After that they walked down to the river, where they blew off an afternoon talking about computer games and old movies. At the end of it, Cronin invited him to join the Gamers.

  Jason had come to the first Saturday expecting beer and cigarettes, which was enough to hold his interest, since he had no means of getting them by himself. He was only fifteen, and looked younger. But Naughton, who was a couple of years older, had brought marijuana and papers, and showed him how to roll a joint.

  There were half-a-dozen boys in the loft, and they all seemed to enjoy inducting Undie into their rituals. His quick embrace of the pleasure of pot amused them all – he glowed after the first puff. He loved having a gang, too – buddies to hang with, and these kids were all a couple of years older and one or two vices ahead of him.

  They met in the loft of Naughton’s barn, a cleared space above horse stalls where the hay had already been used. It didn’t belong to Naughton, of course – he did chores on the place to pay the rent on the dilapidated farmhouse where he lived with his wife Tammy and their baby.

  On Saturday, Naughton’s wife took the baby and the week’s laundry to her mother’s house in town. Her mother had a TIVO on her TV set and saved a couple of serials and Dancing With the Stars for Tammy to watch while the laundry whirled in her mother’s big new machines.

  So Saturday was the one day when the whole Naughton family was happy at the same time, if not together. Tammy loved her day in town, in a warm, clean house where she got coddled. Her mother enjoyed taking care of the baby, a girl named Mary Jo who drank milk and napped and smiled and cooed for Grandma. And Naughton was free to enjoy his afternoon of pot and dirty jokes with his buds, assured that his wife would not come home until six o’clock.