“We saw a hiker sitting under the cottonwood tree,” Margaret, the crane, said.
“Male or female?”
“Female. A young blond woman.”
“How young?”
“Forty-five?” Emily asked.
“Fifty,” Margaret replied.
“Was she alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did she have a pack with her?”
“I didn’t see one,” Margaret answered.
“Did you see any cars in the parking lot?”
“A red compact.”
“And we saw the brown truck,” Emily said.
“That’s right. Driving like a bat out of hell. We’ve seen vehicles before on the old logging road. After Thunder Mountain was declared a wilderness area, all vehicles were banned from entering the forest and from ever using the logging road. They should have bulldozed it shut, but they never got around to doing it. If the Forest Service catches a vehicle in a wilderness area, the owner has to disassemble it and have it towed out by horses. Technically, even flying the firefighters in was a violation, but we didn’t say anything about that, did we, Em?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“What kind of license plate did the truck have? Did you notice?” I asked.
“Colorado,” Margaret said.
“Was the person driving it a man or a woman?”
“Couldn’t tell. Could you?”
“No, but he or she wore a cowboy hat,” Emily said.
The Kid was looking longingly down the lonesome trail. I only had one more question and that was “How do you feel about the spotted owl?”
“We believe in the preservation of species through the preservation of habitat,” Emily said.
“Absolutely,” Margaret agreed. “We’re members of Forest Sentinels. We monitor the Forest Service to make sure they uphold the Endangered Species Act.”
“Go for it,” I said.
“See you later,” said the Kid.
A squirrel bitched as we continued down the sun-dappled path. We were intruders on its turf, but we left it behind, following a yellow butterfly that darted in and out of the shadows like a flying flicker of flame. The trees began to show char on their northern side. I stopped to examine the thick, scaly bark of an alligator juniper. When I touched the bark it crumbled and tinged my fingers black. Some fluke of fuel, wind, or fusees had kept the fire here from burning with the intensity it had higher up. Green trees mingled with black snags and trees that had partially burned. A tiny pink flower bloomed at the base of a half-dead piñon. The yellow butterfly flew as far as an upended cottonwood, fluttered around the root system, and turned back. We kept going until there were no flowers blooming, until we were surrounded by char and ashes, by good black, safe black, black without the potential to reburn—except in my memory and my dreams. My heart skipped a beat. All the oxygen seemed to have been depleted from the air. I was getting light-headed. We were stepping on ashes, stirring up ghosts. I’d gone about as far as I wanted to go.
“You want to continue, Chiquita?” the Kid asked.
“No. Let’s get out of here.”
When we reached the parking lot, the big sky opened up. I watched the clouds drifting into the shapes of fingers and mouths. One cloud formed an S curve, reminding me that, for a firefighter, lightning can be dollar signs in the sky. But firefighters, I knew, weren’t the only ones with the potential to profit from fire.
“Let’s drive up the mountain. There was a house there and I’d like to see what’s left.”
“Okay,” said the Kid.
16
WE TURNED NORTH as we left the parking lot, driving through the green area, then the burn. After about a mile the road swung east, leaving the drainage and climbing uphill. I figured this was the place where a wilderness gate had prohibited motorbikes from entering and where the sign marked the area as forbidden to all motorized vehicles, but the gate and the sign had gone up in smoke. Somewhere around here the old logging road had cut through the forest, but that path was hidden by fallen trees and ash. Would an arsonist have driven in and taken the risk of a severe penalty? Why not just hide the truck beside the road, walk in, and run out? But that was assuming the person in the cowboy hat who drove the brown truck like a bat out of hell was an arsonist. The driver could just as well have been a witness or someone trying to escape from the blaze and report it to the Forest Service.
The road up to the house, which crossed private land, had been cleared of dead trees. It was well maintained but steep, and the Kid had to downshift to climb around the curves. The fire had been ruinous to this portion of the forest. The trunks left standing belonged to ponderosa pines, and it was easy to imagine fire jumping from crown to crown to cedar-shake roof. It was harder to imagine fire engines chugging their way up here like the little engine that could. Anyone who lived on this steep, remote road expecting to be safe from fire was California dreaming.
We came around a curve and upon the remains of the trophy house. The pile of black beams and ashes was a sight to drive a stake through any homeowner’s heart.
Even the Kid was taken aback. “What a disaster!” he said.
The only thing left standing was a massive stone fireplace with a chimney pointing up. The foundation could have easily accommodated most of the houses on my block. I tried to visualize how this place had been furnished before it burned down. Big leather sofas, I figured, Navajo rugs, and wooden coyotes with scarves tied round their necks. The privacy was complete, the view had to have been magnificent before it got scarred by the burn. A black Bronco was parked in the driveway and a tall, skinny man stood beside it staring at the remains of his multi-thousand-square-foot trophy. He wore Reeboks and Ray-Bans. His gray hair was slicked back into a ponytail. A silver ear cuff was wrapped around the edge of one ear. I would have guessed Santa Fe if I hadn’t known California. I’d seen this dude before on Nancy Barker’s tape of the Kyle Johnson interview. He was the guy who’d mouthed off about the government’s responsibility to protect private property.
The Kid was already looking in the rearview mirror. “What do you want to do?” he asked me.
“Talk to him,” I said.
“Okay, I wait here.”
“Okay,” I said, stepping out of the truck.
The property owner approached to within a few feet of us. He raised his Ray-Bans and I could see that his eyes were the same brittle blue as the turquoise in his ear cuff. “This is private property,” he said.
“Are you Ken Roland?” I asked.
“How did you know that?”
“I saw you on TV,” I said, figuring that would soften him up. Anybody who’d build a house this large would have to have an ego to match.
“Channel 7 or 12?” he asked.
“Twelve,” I said. “Kyle Johnson.”
“Asshole,” he mumbled.
“Excuse me?”
“The guy’s an asshole. He was on my case about the urban/wildland interface. I’m sorry those firefighters died, but hey, it wasn’t my fault.”
“You did build kind of close to a wilderness area. I hear the local property owners put a lot of pressure on the Forest Service to put that fire out.”
“Would you just sit back and watch your house burn?”
“Probably not.” But I couldn’t afford to live at the edge of the wilderness either. I had a job and an office to get to most days.
“I’m on a county road. I pay taxes. I believe that entitles me to fire protection,” Roland said.
In theory, maybe, but in reality the nearest fire engine had to be twenty miles away. He’d built a house with a wooden roof at the edge of a vast and frequently bone-dry forest, and wildland firefighters are not trained to put out house fires. He wasn’t the first western settler to want all the privileges of owning private property with none of the obligations.
“The Forest Service wouldn’t let me back in until today.”
“They were conducting an investigation,” I
said.
“So I’ve been told. Great site here, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“It was.” Until he began looking at charred trees. “How far down the mountain did the first fire burn?” I asked him.
“About a third of the way.”
“That must have spoiled your view.”
“It did. I used to like to sit out on the deck in my hot tub and watch the sunset. It’s no fun to be looking at destruction. This place developed a bad vibe for me after the firefighters died.”
How inconsiderate of them, I thought. “Are you planning to rebuild?”
“I doubt it. It’ll be a long time before this canyon grows back to what it was. I loved this place, but it was isolated. I’m thinking of moving closer to town.”
“Oro?”
“Telluride,” he said, where the median house goes for a cool million. A large insurance settlement would help if he intended to buy there.
“Did you come here from California?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“A native?”
“How’d you know that?”
“An educated guess.” Some Californians are always ready to move on, always searching for the perfect place. That type wouldn’t sit around waiting for the trees to grow.
“What’d you say your name was?” Ken Roland’s eyes narrowed like they were seeing me for the first time. He’d been too busy talking about himself to pay any attention to whom he was talking.
“Neil Hamel,” I said. A cough was crawling up the back of my throat. I tried to suppress it, but I didn’t succeed.
“What brings you up here?”
“I’m thinking about buying at Mountain View,” I said, proving to myself that I could lie and cough at the same time. “I’m worried about the forest fire danger and I wanted to prepare myself for the worst. It’s got to be agonizing to watch your house burn down.” But when you think about it, maybe less agonizing to a native Californian. It happens all the time there. Roland himself seemed more annoyed than agonized about the loss of his trophy.
“It helps to have good insurance, but I wouldn’t build at Mountain View if I were you. That’s a retirement community. You’re too young for Mountain View,” he said, sizing me up from dusty running shoes to messy hair.
“Not that young,” I said, and coughed to prove it.
“You ought to quit smoking.”
“Right,” I replied. “I’ll be needing a good policy if I do build at Mountain View. Could you recommend an insurance agent?”
“Sure. His name is Jim Capshaw; Capshaw Insurance in Oro. He’s done all right by me.”
A woman had stepped out from behind the fireplace and was picking her way carefully across the fallen beams. Her hair was very long and very blond. She wore shorts, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots.
“This is Karen,” Roland said. “Karen, Neil. Neil, Karen.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” I said.
“Hi,” said Karen. Her eyes were red and mascara was running down her cheeks.
“It’s just a house, Karen,” Roland said. “I can build another one.”
“I loved it here.” She sobbed. “It was so peaceful and quiet. The deer would practically eat out of my hand.”
“Karen is an animal lover,” Roland said.
“It was horrible when the fire burned,” she continued. “The hawks were circling overhead waiting for the animals to escape from the flames. I watched it from the deck.”
“She wouldn’t leave till the last minute,” Roland said. “She stood on the deck with the garden hose spraying down the roof.”
“You were here when the fire started?” I asked Karen.
She nodded. “I was sick and I came home early from work. I’m a waitress at Winter’s. Ken was in town. The fire was a wall of flame and it came up so fast. It was terrifying. I tried to save the house.”
Ken put his arm around her and began rubbing his hand up and down her bare arm.
“I love it here. I love the woods.” Karen said.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Kansas. Ken and I met when I was ski-bumming at Aspen.”
The Kid’s patience had run out and he started the engine. “I gotta go,” I said.
“Adios,” Ken Roland said.
17
WE SPENT THE night in a motel on the highway outside Oro where the tractor trailers barrel through all night. It could have been New Mexico, it could have been New Jersey. The bedspread was shiny and smooth. The rust-colored carpet was so shaggy you’d need a Weedwacker to level it. The drinking glasses were wrapped tight in plastic, the ice bucket made of Styrofoam. It was the kind of room that some people find sterile and stifling but I used to call home. You could be anywhere in a room like this. You could be anybody. The TV was at the foot of the bed and the remote was on the end table. The Kid lay down on the bed and clicked the TV on.
I went to the bathroom and when I came back the Kid was watching baseball, which I find about as exciting as watching a praying mantis climb the wall.
“Good game?” I asked.
“It’s okay.”
“Who’s winning?”
“Braves.”
It took about five minutes for the ball game to put me to sleep. Some time after that it put the Kid out, too. The game was followed by news and later by snow. I know that because I woke up a couple of times looking for the remote to turn the thing off but it had gotten lost among the sheets. The screen was a change from what I’d been dreaming about anyway—fire and smoke.
In the morning we had breakfast at the McDonald’s in Oro. The Kid let me off downtown, took the truck, and went looking for Oscar Ribera, a guy he’d known in Mexico who was working the Colorado ski business. I walked down Main Street looking for Jim Capshaw.
There’s a kind of surreal clarity in these Rocky Mountain high towns. Oro has the solid brick buildings and busy main street of an old western town and the latte bars of a new tourist town. The small towns in this part of Colorado are isolated enough to still have independent bookstores. Oro has Maria’s. It looked interesting, but it wasn’t open yet, and besides, I had work to do. I found Capshaw’s office in a brick building with a half-moon window looking down on Main Street. He had a large oak desk, wooden file cabinets, and a musty antlered deer head mounted on the wall. There was probably a time when you wouldn’t have been able to get an insurance policy in Oro in hunting season, but that was before the Old West became the new and the big money started moving in. It took me a while to figure out where Jim Capshaw figured in the old/new scheme. He was a burly guy with dark hair forming spirals on his arms and whirlpools on his chest. He wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt open at the collar, cowboy boots, and Wranglers, known in New Mexico as big-ass jeans. Levi’s are popular with new Westerners, but Wranglers are the jeans old cowboys wear; there’s more room in the butt. Were the Wranglers a calculated move on Capshaw’s part or had he grown up among cowboys? He had the kind of folksiness you’d expect from a small-town insurance agent, but he didn’t overdo it.
“Jim Capshaw,” he said, extending his arm across the pool-table-sized desk.
I reached over and shook his hand. “Neil Hamel,” I said.
“I had an uncle named Neil.”
“So did I.”
“What can I do you for?” he asked.
“I’m thinking about buying a lot in Mountain View,” I told him.
“Great development,” he answered with an enthusiasm that made me wonder if he wasn’t a partner.
“It’s a beautiful spot.”
“Sure is.”
“But I’m worried about the danger of forest fires.”
“Well, we’ve had two this summer and Mountain View escaped both of ’em. We couldn’t be unlucky enough to have another for a long time. The next time lightning strikes, it’ll hit someplace else.”
“I took a ride up to see Ken Roland’s place. It’s nothing but a pile of ashes. I’d hate to see my house end up like that.”
“It’s a tragedy, all right,” Capshaw agreed, “but Ken wasn’t hurt and he did have good coverage.”
“He recommended you.”
“That was neighborly of him.”
“Do you live near Thunder Mountain?”
“No, but I like to think of everybody in the county as my neighbor. It’s getting harder these days, but I keep trying.”
“Does Ken intend to rebuild?” I asked.
“Far as I know.”
“I hope he’ll use a metal roof the next time.”
“It would be better from an insurance standpoint,” Capshaw concurred. “When you get a fire of that magnitude, being in the next county could have saved Ken’s house but a metal roof wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“Are wildland firefighters available to protect houses?”
“That depends on the BLM and the Forest Service. Their firefighters aren’t really trained to fight house fires and the Feds won’t be so quick to call ’em out after the South Canyon incident, but you won’t have to worry about that at Mountain View. Those houses aren’t in the woods and, like I said, I don’t think we’re gonna get another fire in this area for a long while.”
“Would I get a better rate if I cleared out the brush and used a metal roof? You do better where I live in Albuquerque if you install a burglar alarm.”
“We may be headed in that direction,” Capshaw said, “but it hasn’t happened yet. You wouldn’t be able to use a metal roof at Mountain View anyway. The restrictive covenants limit the roofing to cedar shake.”
“I’ve heard rumors that the fire that burned Ken Roland’s house down was caused by arson.”
Light darted from one of Capshaw’s eyes to the other like lightning jumping from cloud to cloud. Small towns are always full of rumors and I figured he’d heard every one of them. Fire, after all, was his business. He paused for a moment to consider what was good for that business, whether Oro’s expansion would be threatened more by a natural disaster or one that was man-made. He came down on the side of the natural. Man-made disasters were what everybody was moving here to get away from. “Arson? That’s news to me,” he said.
“Karen told me that Ken insured his truck through you, too. Maybe you could handle my Nissan.”
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