One more fire season family portrait from July 20th at the end of a 3 week roll.
July 21, 2020 by
We Ride Out
July 9, 2018 by
We ride out beneath a filthy, wildfire sky. He walks beneath me like a drunken sailor, buddy sour and unwilling to leave Resero without brattish behavior, without an attitude. I calmly correct him, urge him forward, flick his shoulder with the tail of a rein and he walks straighter, falling into his fast, flat walk so the horizon bobs between his pricked ears. We ride closer and closer to the setting sun, to a sky strewn with smoke-tarnished clouds, rising and falling our way up the drainage like water in reverse. I feel guilty for taking this time to ride when there’s something, so many somethings, to play slave to at home. We ride on. I hunch in the saddle, my spine remembering its position at my studio bench where I’ve been flicking and feathering flame for days. I’m unable to shift my hips with his gait, crippled by my craft, tortured by tensions. I’m too tightly coiled.
At the top, it’s gold spilling in every direction, the breath of the Spirit falling soundlessly and gloriously all around. Gold on sky on grass on cloud on my own skin and bright light, shaking and streaming in all directions. I am molten, precious metal — poured out and flowing and curling with smoke as impurities burn out of me. I take a breath. I take another. I feel my body expand and contract, busy with the simple act of consuming wind and sky…like a wildflower. My shoulders drop. My spine softens. Finally. I kiss the air and we run. I crouch down and his mane whips my face. We go that way, exhilarated, gasping, intoxicated by freedom, by each other.
We drift back down to earth and into a smooth, fast walk. I drop the reins across his neck and set my palms to rest on my thighs. He knows the way. An owl hunts the edge of dusk. Nighthawks do their gleaning, twisting and turning on their trajectories with sharp wings, slicing invisible things into smaller pieces.
Two coyotes move through the sage, deep in the distance where the land curls up again in a soft wave. They stop to look over their shoulders at us. He pricks an ear, his gait grows choppy, he looks back to the path and we smooth out together and cover ground. Behind us the sunset flares, the sky grows red as a woman scorned. We turn down the canyon rim towards home.
One hundred yards down the road he spooks, long legs scrambling in every direction, eyes wide and wild, nostrils snorting air like a boiling kettle and a rattlesnake shoots off the path while shaking his snare drum at us. I reach my free hand to grab the horn of my saddle and painfully jam it as directions are reversed beneath me. My wrist yelps as it shifts into an awkward angle against the horn and my ring finger turns against itself. We’re running uphill. I sit deep, drop my heels in the stirrups and slow him. Stop him. I run a hand beneath his mane. I let him breathe. I whisper to him that it’s ok, I’m here, I’ve got him, I’ll take care of him, he’s safe. I work through his shivering, white-eyed flight instinct and he settles beneath me.
We turn and make our way carefully down the trail again. I make him stand. Spooled up tightly beneath the sage the snake shakes, rattles and rolls. His tail is thunder and there is lighting in his fangs. I see his diamonds shining bright black in the shadows. I hear him rambling like a sun-stroked prophet. We move past, careful, slowly, we move past. Two miles from home, I pull my phone from my saddle bag and call Robbie. I tell him all the things I couldn’t tell him the day before because I was angry and frustrated and overwhelmed:
I love you. It’s too much for me. I don’t want to live this dream on my own, it’s our dream. Your job is killing me. We need to take our leap of faith.
I hear him echo all my words. It’s going to be ok. We say goodnight.
The moon comes up, filtering down through smoke and ash, shining dimly on my back as we ride the last mile home. We spook once more as an irrigation sprinkler hisses at our passing. I hear the metallic clank of an iron shoe pulling free and landing on gravel. I sigh aloud. He hops and limps beneath me, suddenly tender of foot in the quiet of the gloaming. The farrier is already scheduled for Monday, that’s something. In the distance, Resero whinnies, his voice is like a star in the night to guide us safely home.
June 7, 2018 by
Every day I look around at this blooming, lush oasis of a farm and I feel shocked that I get to spend my time, my life, tending to it. I know exactly how we wound up here and I’m so thankful we made the decisions we made that led us to this place. When immersed in a luscious, thriving environment, one can’t help but do the same.
It’s amazing how distracting a garden can be. I have three. Well…I might have four…I just started a large plot of earth that is committed solely to iris varieties. Gardens, shrubs, perennials are a kind of infrastructure. I’ll see the magic of my efforts next year, and all the years to follow. Each time I stroll past one of my garden spaces I accidentally linger, find myself weeding, deadheading, or simply enjoying blossoms or leaf and stalk details. My growing spaces draw me in, draw me near, draw me out of myself, draw me into the essence of green — tranquility and quiet — like floating on a lake surface or being carried bodily by a gentle, fizzing rapid on a wide river.
I made a run to the city for provisions yesterday and wound up picking up eight new roses and another bevy of aforementioned iris. I drove the Tacoma which is experiencing a permanent lapse in air conditioning and I chose to wear cowboy boots and 100% cotton jeans which made wrestling and wrangling eight thorny roses into the back of my truck in 90F heat utterly miserable. On the drive home from the city I kept looking at my merry roses, bobbing their heads in the breeze in the back of the truck and I felt I was with friends on the drive home and George Strait was on the radio so everything was swell.
I have been feeling lonesome this week which is a different feeling for me than being lonely — one feels like an ache and the other feels like being isolated.
I’ve also been feeling worried. Let me tell you something! I’ve never fretted for Robert in his work. This is his tenth year in fire and his eighth year smokejumping and I’ve never been the wife who sits at home wringing her hands wondering about the fate of my man in the wee dark hours of the night. But this summer I feel worried. Robbie has jumped a round canopy parachute for the duration of his smokejumping career. This year he is going through the transition training for Ram Air parachutes which has been extremely intensive — this new parachute flys and operates differently. In the past two weeks, there has been a cut-away in his class (someone had a main chute malfunction and had to cut away the shoot and deploy a reserve all while hurtling towards the earth — it’s a rare occurrence in the smokejumping program and there was an inquisition) and there have been two crashes, one resulting in injury and the other miraculously resulting in no injuries. This stuff happened NOT because there’s something high risk about this new parachute, it’s just a matter of statistics and bad luck and maybe a combination of the two. Anytime there’s a parachute malfunction or an injury or death due to parachuting in the smokejumping program there’s a full on investigation that goes on and to be perfectly clear on the matter, the smokejumping safety record is incredible. They do an awesome job of training jumpers so that when these guys leap out of a plane, they’re almost flying with muscle memory, all the details of how to fly and when to pull a rip cord have been so deeply impressed into their bodies and minds their bodies go through the motions with sureness and steadiness.
That said, after the craziness of the past couple of weeks and Robbie’s reports of injuries and the terrible cut-away, I have had this niggling sense that Robert’s number is up. I don’t need anyone to tell me that it’s not or that I shouldn’t even put such thoughts out into the “universe” and tempt fate. It’s just a feeling I have and the feeling might be right or it might be wrong.
One of our favorite movies is “Always”. It’s a fire movie with Richard Dryfus and Holly Hunter in lead roles. Here’s the run down, he flys tankers for the forest service and she’s a dispatch girl. He flys like a cowboy and takes unnecessary risks that make her supremely anxious. One night, in their wee cabin, she tells him she needs him to ground himself, she can’t handle the stress anymore and she feels like his number is up. After a long, heartbreaking conversation about it, he agrees, because he loves her. She practically faints into his arms with relief. Early the next morning, he gets a call that the forest service needs a tanker to drop retardant on some insane wild fire and they can’t find anyone else to do it and they’re in a pinch. He agrees, he’ll do this one last job. She looks at him and says, “Don’t go. Don’t fly. Your number’s up.” He goes anyway…
If you haven’t seen the movie I won’t spoil it for you. I love that movie and this week, I relate, and it’s hard on me. All I can do is trust that Robbie is putting maximum effort into flying the way he was trained to fly and that he’s pairing that technical skill with his intuition and survival instinct when he’s in the air. The rest is out of my control.
In the meanwhile, I have eight new roses that need planting today, two fat and sassy horses that need riding, bird dogs that need running, gardens that need weeding, meals that need cooking and a huge batch of jewelry that requires finishing. The sun will set and when Robbie phones in for the night I’ll feel relief and we’ll end our conversation with “I love you” and another day will be done.
Fifty Bucks
September 9, 2017 by
I wouldn’t call myself a slave to the work, because the work has brought me joy, but I have been galloping since May while working on a big project and on the fifth of September I suddenly felt my world slow down. I was eating dinner with a film crew on the edge of the lake in McCall and I let myself relax. I felt it in my bones, in my neck muscles and shoulders — something easy passed over me and my work-hardened spirit softened. At some point, after our table had been cleared, I looked out into the night where a floating trampoline sits in the lake and I asked the crew (who are my real life friends) and Robert (he was there, too) what it would cost them to swim out to the trampoline and do a backflip.
Someone said, “A thousand dollars!”
Some other numbers were tossed out and we mulled it over for a time and I spoke the words, “Fifty bucks.”
One of the guys reached into his wallet and pulled out a wad of cash, set it on the the table and we all sat there and looked at the money for a moment.
Then I stood up, climbed over the stone wall that separates the dining patio from the beach and I took off my corduroy pants and button down shirt and waded out into the lake in my underwear beneath the night sky. When I was hip deep, I submerged myself and began to swim, thrilled by the feeling that comes with being in water in darkness in the summertime. When I reached the trampoline, I climbed up the ladder and jumped around for a bit while my friends laughed with delight from shore.
The water was warm. The act felt young and true and free of the responsibilities and seriousness that comes with being thirty-five years old. I swam back to the restaurant, stood dripping on the patio, wrapped in a down jacket, smiling and shivering and Robert said, “Well guys, I guess we’re going swimming.” They, too, left the table, stripped down to their underwear and swam out, eventually doing backflips off the trampoline into the lake.
I never did pocket the fifty dollars that my friend set on the table. The money wasn’t my reason for swimming. Nor did I do it for attention. I did it to make a memory with the hopes that my friends would choose to make a memory, too. I did it to feel young and free and wild. I did it because I knew should not, because it’s not considered ladylike to publicly take off your clothing and swim around in your undies while people eating in a nice restaurant are watching. I did it with the hope that others would follow in my mildly outrageous footsteps and find themselves ageless for a moment. I did it so we could all swim out and feel the night surround us, paddling with childlike strokes towards distant lights.
September 9, 2017 by
I hear water pushing past granitic forms like antlers cutting past snow ladened wind — elemental and musical, tooth and nail. Pine and fir are rusting in a smoky breeze. I smell the rot of dead salmon.
Closer to the lake, the kokanee are running. I stand on a cut bank, look out over their neon bodies and watch them stack up in a deep pool, ritualistic, mildly pissy and faithful to their ancestry. I, too, must make my journey, pass upward against the current, be cut down by wind, whittled by water and refined by flame.
Two boulders down, I see a sipper surface. I open my fly box and choose again.