Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 3-2

Tim had forgotten what a total pain-in-the-legs it was to get home. It was the sort of thing you did your best to block out, and he had succeeded. If he’d remembered, he might still be at the Doghouse.

He always had a kit bag behind the seat of the truck, so that had saved him driving back up to camp. An hour later he’d arrived at the Portland airport.

Smokejumper planes weren’t really made for guys who were six-foot-four, but they figured you had a lot of gear. As long as he watched his head there weren’t any real leg room problems.

The Alaska Airlines Dash-8 jet was made for people smaller than Akbar’s five-six. Twelve-year-old kids wouldn’t fit in these seats. He’d barely survived the forty minutes to Seattle. The leg up to Anchorage on a 787 had been at least tolerable, but scrunching himself up into another Dash-8 puddle jumper to Fairbanks for another hour-plus had him near suicidal. By the time he was faced with the broken seat adjuster on the last SUV on the rental lot, he’d downshifted to a stony resignation. They offered him a compact—no way his legs or his head would fit—or a mini-van. No way his pride would fit.

“That’s what coming home does to you,” he told his mangled legs as he drove out of the city and only took two wrong turns before finding the road out to Larch Creek; the new Goldhill subdivision threw him off and the small turn sign had gone missing as usual.

But as he climbed up over Liga Pass and Denali shone like a white fist punching into the sky out of the dark green that coated the mid-summer landscape, something shifted in him.

He rolled down the window and knew that smell. Not just the tall larch trees underlaid by a carpet of yellow daisy and bright fireweed, but also the bite on the air of the deep grasses going dry under the long summer days. The short Alaskan fire season was going to be brutal this year.

As a smokie, he followed weather reports the way couch potatoes followed sports scores. And Alaska was running for a hot-and-dry record this year. High eighties in the heartland didn’t feel hot like the nineties in Oregon, instead it felt dangerous.

Once he’d crested Liga Pass, the heat eased off to seventies and the grasses were greener. Even from sixty miles away Denali and the Alaska Range were making their influence felt.

He twisted back down off the pass and rolled through Heinrich’s barley fields and hoped that the old man had finally taken on an assistant. Carl brewed the best beer in the fifty states with Heinrich’s barley, but the old German had to be eighty if he was a day. The crop looked like it was off to a good start this year at least.

Town was on him before he expected. Not that there were new houses, but rather that there were so few outliers. When Denali was doing the other half of her job, the mid-winter half, a soul didn’t want to be too far out in the wind, except for folks like Clement who were all the way out in Tena.

He spotted Mom’s truck out in front of French Pete’s and pulled in. It was a bright blue Toyota pickup like almost everyone else’s in town—the blue theme was something he’d never quite understood. But the bumper stickers were the giveaway. On one it said, I kill people for a living, with “Mystery Writer” in small print. On the other there was a large picture of a bright red fish and it stated, This is a red herring.

Tim had left Hood River before lunch, traveled for too damn many hours and an extra time zone, and his stomach insisted that he needed to eat something more than a tiny bag of over-salted almonds and he needed to do it now. For a change his connections had been too good to hit a food court anywhere along the way.

French Pete’s looked exactly the same outside and in.

The Sunday g**g was at the big corner table and he headed straight over. His mom actually screamed when she spotted him. She was a small woman, taking after her own Vietnamese mother rather than granddad who was still a big Oklahoma boy even in his eighties, jumped up on her chair and gave him a big hug. Most of his looks came from her, except every inch of his height and then some had come from granddad and his own French-Canadian father.

He held her close.

This was what it felt like to be home.