Rudy Voss, 62, spent 28 years manning the Mount Ashland fire lookout tower before he retired in 2015, six months after his wife’s ovarian cancer diagnosis landed her in hospice. For eight years, he’d stuck to a rigid routine: chop wood at dawn, fix fence posts on his 12-acre property, eat a bologna sandwich for lunch, drink two IPAs while watching old westerns before bed. His only consistent company was his three-legged border collie, Mutt, and he’d turned down every invitation to town events, barbecues, even the annual fire crew reunions, convinced small-town pity was more trouble than it was worth. The only reason he’d dragged himself to the Ponderosa Taphouse’s fire awareness fundraiser that July evening was the vintage 1978 McCulloch chainsaw up for silent auction, the same model he’d carried on his first fire crew shift when he was 19.
He parked himself in the darkest booth in the back, flannel sleeves rolled up to show forearms crisscrossed with burn scars, work boots caked with pine sap and mud, nursing a cold IPA and pointedly ignoring the group of current fire crew kids yelling over a game of pool. When the emcee stepped up to the mic, he didn’t even look up, until he heard her voice: low, a little rough around the edges, like she spent half her time yelling over mountain wind. He glanced up. Clara Marlow, 58, the new Forest Service public outreach coordinator who’d moved to town three months prior, was leaning against the mic stand, wearing fitted dark jeans scuffed at the knees, a faded Forest Service polo, her salt-and-pepper hair braided down her back, a thin pale scar cutting across her left eyebrow. She made a joke about the old timers in town calling her a “desk jockey who couldn’t tell a Douglas fir from a Ponderosa pine” and the crowd laughed, Rudy included, before he caught himself and scowled into his beer.
She held his gaze from across the room for three full beats, a half-grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, before she finished her speech about new hiker fire safety rules. Ten minutes later, she was sliding into the booth across from him, setting down two shots of bourbon, the hem of her shirt brushing his knee when she leaned forward. “Heard you’re the guy who spotted the 2017 Rogue River fire three days before the satellite sensors picked it up,” she said, pushing one of the shots toward him. Her fingers brushed his when he reached for it, calloused, warm, not the soft, manicured hands he’d expected from an office admin.
He bristled at first, ready to argue with her about the new fire rules that banned backcountry campfires even in low-risk zones, the same rules he’d ranted about to Mutt every night for two weeks. But she didn’t defend the policies. She rolled her eyes, said the higher-ups in Portland made the rules without ever stepping foot in the Siskiyous, that she’d been fighting to get them amended for a month. She leaned in closer when the jukebox blared Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”, her shoulder pressing into his bicep, and he could smell pine-sol, coconut shampoo, and the faint, sharp tang of cedar smoke on her shirt. He found himself telling her about the hidden ravines on the west side of the mountain, the ones that didn’t show up on the new digital Forest Service maps, the ones where fires could smolder for three weeks under fallen logs before anyone noticed. She pulled out a beat-up leather-bound notebook, scribbled notes in messy, slanted handwriting, nodding like every word he said mattered.
The auction for the chainsaw went live an hour later. They bid against each other, grinning, Rudy pretending to be annoyed every time she upped the bid by five dollars, until the price hit $320 and she threw her hands up, laughing. He won it, hauled the heavy case over to the booth, and she leaned in, her breath warm against his ear, and said she’d let him buy her a burger and fries at the diner down the street if he agreed to take her up to his old lookout tower next weekend to show her all the gaps in the new maps.
For half a second, he almost said no. Almost made up an excuse about Mutt needing him, about fence posts he had to fix, about not wanting to waste a Saturday driving a stranger up a rutted dirt road. But then he looked at her, her eyes crinkled at the corners, her lower lip pulled between her teeth like she already knew what he was going to say, and he nodded.
They walked out to the parking lot together, the cool mountain air stinging his cheeks, the chainsaw case slung over his shoulder, Mutt’s old leash tied to his belt loop like he’d forgotten he brought it. She reached up to brush a pine needle off the collar of his flannel, her hand lingering on his chest for half a second before she pulled away. He unlocked the passenger door of his beat-up 2004 Ford F150, held it open for her, and she climbed in, already scrolling through her phone to pull up the digital map files she wanted him to review. He slid into the driver’s seat, and she handed him her phone to put his number in. He tapped in his contact info, thumb brushing over the scuffed Forest Service sticker on the back of her phone case, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel the urge to rush home to an empty cabin.
