Rafe Mendez, 53, spent 22 years on federal wildland fire crews before a blown knee forced him into early retirement, now he runs a small firewood delivery and forest stewardship operation out of his 22-acre property outside Missoula. His worst flaw, as his older sister never tires of telling him, is that he’s turned being guarded into a personality trait, shutting down any even casual romantic advance since his wife left him for a software salesman in Boise seven years prior. He’d told himself he didn’t need the mess, that the trees and his old crew and the occasional fishing trip up the Bitterroot were enough.
He’d only stopped at the downtown beer garden after the annual wildfire preparedness fair because his former crew boss had physically dragged him over, saying he’d spent too much time holed up on his land talking to pine trees. The air smelled like fried onion rings, pine smoke drifting in from a nearby prescribed burn, and the sharp, bright bite of IPA from the taps strung under a canvas awning. He was leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, peeling the label off a half-empty beer, when he recognized her.
Elara Voss was the new county forestry extension agent, 48, who’d given a talk on prescribed burn permitting an hour earlier. Rafe had sat in on the talk, half because he’d been pushing the county to loosen restrictions on small private burns for years, half because he’d noticed her leaning against a utility truck before the fair started, adjusting a chainsaw strap over her flannel shirt, a smudge of ash on her left cheek. She walked over now, boots thudding on the wood chip covered ground, holding a plastic cup of seltzer, and stopped a foot away, close enough that he could pick up the faint scent of lavender lotion mixed with pine resin.
“You’re the guy who ran the fire break demo earlier, right?” she said, tilting her head, eyes crinkling at the corners when he nodded. “That low-impact clearing trick you showed? I’ve been trying to convince the county board to adopt that for public land for six months. They keep saying it’s too labor intensive.”
Rafe grunted, his first instinct to shut the conversation down, assume she was just going to ask him to do free labor for the county. But she sat down on the picnic bench next to him, no invitation, and their knees brushed under the table, the rough canvas of her work pants scraping against the denim of his. He froze for half a second, suddenly hyper aware of the warmth of her leg against his, something he hadn’t felt in years. Part of him recoiled, disgusted with himself for even noticing, for letting a stranger get this close without putting up a wall. The other part of him leaned in, almost against his will, when she laughed at his offhand joke about the county board being made up of guys who couldn’t tell a Ponderosa pine from a Douglas fir.
She held eye contact for three beats longer than casual when he finished talking, no polite smile, just a sharp, interested glint in her eye, like she actually cared what he had to say. She told him she’d grown up on a cattle ranch outside Bozeman, had spent 10 years working on fire crews in Oregon before taking the extension job, that she’d bought a tiny house on 5 acres outside town three months prior and still hadn’t figured out how to clear the deadfall off the north slope without starting a wildfire.
A group of rowdy teen ATV riders roared past the edge of the beer garden then, going way faster than the posted 10 mile an hour limit, and she jolted forward, her hand landing flat on his forearm. The callus on her palm, right at the base of her index finger, matched the one on his arm from years of gripping chainsaw handles. He didn’t pull away. He just sat there, feeling the weight of her hand on his skin, the hum of the crowd around them fading to static for a second.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said, not moving her hand, “I’m doing a study on fire-adapted old growth Ponderosa in the valley, and I heard you have a 3 acre stand on your property that hasn’t been logged in 80 years. Would you be open to letting me come out and survey it? I’ll buy you breakfast after, whatever you want from that diner on Reserve Street.”
Rafe hesitated for half a second, the voice in his head screaming that this was a bad idea, that he was setting himself up to get burned again, that he didn’t need to let anyone into his space, into his life. But he looked at her, at the ash smudge still on her cheek, at the way her hand was still resting light on his arm like it belonged there, and he nodded. “7 a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “Wear work boots, not those fancy hiking shoes you had on for the fair. The trail up to the stand is muddy this time of year. I’ll make coffee. Strong enough to strip paint.”
She grinned, squeezing his forearm once before she pulled her hand away to stand up, slinging her canvas work bag over her shoulder. “Don’t be late,” she said, and turned to walk across the beer garden to where a group of her coworkers were waving her over. Rafe watched her go, noticed the smudge of ash on the back pocket of her work pants, the same kind he got on his every time he spent a day clearing brush. He took a sip of his warm beer, the bitter taste sitting sharp on his tongue, and realized he hadn’t felt this light, this eager to get up early in the morning, in almost a decade.
He pulled his beat up flip phone out of his flannel shirt pocket to set a 6 a.m. alarm, the screen glinting off the silver scar across his left knuckle from a 2019 fire line accident outside Kalispell.
