Fires Over the Mountain

Here in Northwestern Montana, it's fire season, and at the moment there are more forest fires burning here than in any other state. We are to the west of the tallest mountains, in a beautiful flat valley where rains do fall from time to time through the summer. This is a place where agriculture is being displaced by a kind of sprawling urban development, though farming far from gone. I walk borrowed dogs, waving at people driving their pickup trucks to work. It's possible to forget about the fires, mostly, though not for the families of smoke jumpers and other fire workers who are all away, doing what they have to do in the summer.

In our valley, it's really hot in the afternoon, then cool at night and very pleasant through the morning. And the weather is really all we need to know about, because this is a family with a new baby, just seven weeks old. I'm with them to get to know my new granddaughter, Melody Rose, who is a healthy, hungry, baby, determined to teach her new parents how to care for her. They are all doing fine, but no one has slept more than a few hours at a time for the last seven weeks.

The fires are far over the mountain, out of sight, out of mind. Then comes the news that one of them has closed the main east-west highway, U.S. Route 2. And with that news, the thought that my departure on the train might be at risk, since the tracks run very close to the highway. The Amtrak computer advisory line assures me everything is fine; the local Amtrak's official voice recording assures me the same. But the fires suddenly have a presence for me that they had lacked in the days before, and today for the first time, I notice the light haze in the air and the slight smell of smoke.

Fires, actual and metaphorical, are with us all the time. It's worth taking some time to be aware of them. But we had important living to do, being Melody's family, so it would have been silly to spend much time attending to them. What's the moral of the story? Something about balance, I'm guessing, and developing the judgment to be sure what the right balance is between paying attention to the larger realities and the more intimate ones. Not the one right balance that is true for everyone, but the individual right balance that is true from within.