Yet she must’ve believed at the time that this was a normal life she was living, moving, and working when she could, having a husband and a son, and that it was fine.

The summer of that year was a time of forest fires. Great Falls is where the plains begin, but south and west and east of there are mountains. You could see mountains on clear days from the streets of town–sixty miles away the high eastern front of the Rocky Mountains themselves, blue and clear-cut, running to Canada. In early July, fires started in the timber canyons beyond Augusta and Choteau, towns that were insignificant to me but that were endangered. Fires began by mysterious causes. They burned on and on through July and August and into September when it was thought that an early fall would bring rains and possibly snow, though that is not what happened.

Spring had been a dry season and lasted dry into summer. I was a city boy and knew nothing about crops or timber, but we all heard that farmers believed dryness forecasted dryness, and read in the paper that standing timber was drier than wood put in a kiln, and that if farmers were smart they would cut their wheat early to save losses. Even the Missouri River dropped to a low stage, and fish died, and dry mud flats opened between the banks and the slow stream, and no one boated there.

My father taught golf every day to groups of airmen and their girlfriends, and at the Wheatland Club he played foursomes with ranchers and oilmen and bankers and their wives, whose games he was paid to improve upon and tried to. In the evenings through that summer he would sit at the kitchen table after work, listening to a ball game from the East and drinking a beer, and read the paper while my mother fixed dinner and I did schoolwork in the living room. He would talk about people at the club. ‘They’re all good enough fellows,’ he said to my mother. ‘We won’t get rich working for rich men, but we might get lucky hanging around them.’ He laughed about that. He liked Great Falls. He thought it was wide open and undiscovered, and no one had time to hold you back, and that it was a good time to live there. I don’t know what his ideas for himself were then, but he was a man, more than most, who liked to be happy. And it must’ve seemed as though, just for that time, he had finally come to his right place.

By the first of August the timber fires to the west of us had not been put out, and a haze was in the air so that you could sometimes not see the mountains or where the land met the sky. It was a haze you wouldn’t detect if you were inside of it, only if you were on a mountain or in an airplane and could see Great Falls from above. At night, when I stood at the window and looked west up the valley of the Sun River toward the mountains that were blazing, I would taste smoke and smell it, and believe that I saw flames and hills on fire and men moving, though I couldn’t see that, could only see a brightening, wide and red and deep above the darkness between the fire and all of us. Twice I even dreamed our house had caught fire, a spark traveling miles on a wind and catching in our roof, consuming everything. Though I knew even in this dream that the world would spin on and we would survive, and the fire did not matter so much. I did not understand, of course, what it meant not to survive.

Such a fire could not help changing things, and there was a feeling in Great Falls, some attitude in general, that was like discouragement. There were stories in the paper, wild stories. Indians were said to have set fires to get the jobs putting them out. A man was seen driving a loggers’ road throwing flaming sticks out his truck window. Poachers were to blame. A peak far back in the Marshall Mountains was said to have been struck by lightning a hundred times in an hour. My father heard on the golf course that criminals were fighting the fire, murderers and rapists from Deer Lodge, men who’d volunteered but then slipped away and back to civilized life.

No one, I think, thought Great Falls would burn. Too many miles separated us from the fire, too many other towns would have to go first–too much bad luck falling one way. But people wet the roofs of their houses, and no one was allowed to burn ditches. Planes took off every day carrying men to jump into the flames, and west of us smoke rose like thunderheads, as if the fire itself could make rain.