When the wind stiffened in the afternoons, we all knew that the fire had jumped a trench line or rushed forward or exploded into some untouched place, and that we were all affected, even if we never saw flames or felt the heat.

I was then beginning the eleventh grade in Great Falls High School and was trying to play football, a game I did not like and wasn’t good at, and tried to play only because my father thought I could make friends by playing. There were days, though, that we sat out football practice because the doctor said smoke would scar our lungs and we wouldn’t feel it. I would go on those days and meet my father at the Wheatland Club–the base course having closed because of the fire danger–and hit practice balls with him late in the day. My father began to work fewer days as the summer went on, and was home more. People did not come to the club because of the smoke and the dryness. He taught fewer lessons, saw fewer of the members he had met and made friends with the spring before. He worked more in the pro shop, sold golf equipment and clothes and magazines, rented carts, spent more time collecting balls along the edge of the river by the willows where the driving range ended.

On an afternoon in late September, two weeks after I had started school and the fires in the mountains west of us seemed to be lasting forever, I went with my father out on the driving range with wire baskets. One man was hitting balls off the practice tee far away and to the left of us. I could hear the thwock of the club, then the hiss as the balls arched out into the twilight and bounced toward us. At home, the night before, he and my mother had talked about the election that was coming. They were Democrats. Both their families had been. But my father said on that night that he was considering the Republicans now. Nixon, he said, was a good lawyer. He was not a personable man, but he would stand up to the labor unions.

My mother laughed at him and put her hands over her eyes as if she didn’t want to see him. ‘Oh, not you, too, Jerry,’ she said. ‘Are you becoming a right-to-work advocate?’ She was joking. I don’t think she cared who he voted for, and they did not talk about politics. We were in the kitchen and food was already set out on the table.

‘Things feel like they’ve gone too far in one direction,’ my father said. He put his hands on either side of his plate. I heard him breathe. He still had on his golf clothes, green pants and a yellow nylon shirt with a red club emblem on it. There had been a railroad strike during that summer, but he had not talked about unions, and I didn’t think it had affected us.

My mother was standing and drying her hands at the sink. ‘You’re a working man, I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’ll just remind you of that, though.’

‘I wish we had a Roosevelt to vote for,’ my father said. ‘He had a feel for the country.’

‘That was just a different time then,’ my mother said, and sat down across the metal table from him. She was wearing a blue and white checked dress and an apron. ‘Everyone was afraid then, including us. Everything’s better now. You forget that.’

‘I haven’t forgotten anything,’ my father said.