Short Folk #11: Great Loop Fire of 1972

He had a ‘58 T-bird parked in an old barn. It was cherry red, with whitewall tires and a cream leather interior.  He had owned it 51 years. Since 1958. It was his pride and joy—his one extravagance in an otherwise simple, patterned, farm owner’s life. He almost never drove it around. At his age, it was too much car for his frayed reflexes.  But then again, he never let anyone else drive it.

Just last year the barn collapsed in a bad blizzard. The cross beam that was the peak of the roof crushed the T-bird. Right down it’s axis, a near clinical vivisection. No one wanted to talk to him after that, afraid of what state of mind he might be in, afraid that the crushing of the T-bird might also have crushed him.  

But he went right on as if everything was OK, that is, he kept doing the things he had always done. As independent as ever, he planted his garden in the spring. He went and decorated his late wife’s grave. He got in his truck to drive the 100 or so miles to visit his grown children and grand children.  

He decided against the straight roads and took the scenic route through the mountains of northern Montana. Thin roads, tight curves, a drive he used to love to take in the T-bird.  This time he took his time, stopping at scenic turn-outs, reminiscing. At a switchback loop he came across a bronze plaque he hadn’t seen before, a new monument dedicated to explaining the great loop fire of 1972. All around the road you could see the half tall new growth of pine, with a few blackened trunks rising like reminders high above the green. 

He got out of his truck. He read the plaque. He so cleanly remembered the fire. The smoke creeping through the windows of the T-bird. Him and his wife on the way to Missoula. Soot on the whitewall, and the last low flames moving over the burnt ground like colonies of insects, right outside the passenger window.  He remembered coming around a corner, where the road rose beyond the choking blanket of smoke, and the sun through the windshield and the clear air was a new birth. A clean-slate earth to live in. 

He went back to the truck and got a shotgun out of a toolbox in the bed. He stood at an angle and fired, peppering and denting the bronze and making the text unreadable. Then he got back in his car and drove carefully to his son’s house. If you would have asked him why he shot he would have said it was foolish for anyone to make a plaque for something people were still alive to tell you about.