Fire and Rain

The landscapes and lifestyles of Montana are shaped by fire and rain.  This holds true for the mountainous western half and the eastern plains.  This year has been brutal for eastern Montana.  Lightning sparked wildfires have forced the evacuation of two towns.  Fires in the Ash Creek Complex have, to date, rampaged through some 246,500 acres, killing hundreds of cattle and burning many homes in the process.  The Rosebud Complex is approaching 173,000 acres.  My cousin who lives there had one of the fires in the Ash Creek Complex, driven by 60 mile-per-hour winds, burn right up to her flowerbeds.  Only the efforts of the local fire department saved the structures.

We have our own fires here in the mountains of western Montana.  The whole state was pressed into a haze of blue smoke for most of last week.  Yesterday, as we picked huckleberries near the hick peaks, planes and choppers flew fire-fighting missions directly above us as they tried to tamp down a blaze only five miles away near the Bob Marshall Wilderness.  Thus far, that fire has tended to rage a little by day and then fall back at night.

Our huckleberry places have so far been spared.

You cannot drive much of any distance in Montana without seeing a spot near the road where a wildfire has blackened part of the landscape.  The mountainsides and sky-washed rolls of more open country often have sections that look like a bed of giant nails—patterned with the upright trunks of dead trees—victims of a fire long ago.  Just as often, new young and healthy trees grow in the places where wildfires once raged through.    

If you live here, you live by juggling fire.

Today, I have posted two photographs taken from the same place at roughly the same time of the morning.  One, taken two weeks ago, shows how fire alters our skies.  The other, taken just yesterday, is a manifestation of rain.

--Mitchell Hegman