Rafe Marquez, 53, spent 22 years leading wildland fire crews across the Rockies before a 2021 blaze shattered his left ankle and pushed him into early retirement. Now he carves custom cedar and pine sculptures for Wyoming national park visitor centers, and he’s spent the last eight years avoiding anything that even resembles a romantic connection, convinced the sawdust permanently stuck under his nails and the scar splitting his left eyebrow make him too rough around the edges for anyone to bother with. He’s camped out at the far end of the bar at The Smoldering Pine on a frigid October Tuesday, nursing a neat bourbon, half-ignoring his old crewmates yelling stories about the 2018 Yellowstone blaze two stools down.
The bell above the door jingles, and he glances up out of habit. She’s got wind-chapped pink cheeks, snow caked in the laces of her work boots, and a leather-bound notebook tucked under one arm, and she doesn’t look like any of the regulars who frequent the bar. She orders a spiked spiced cider, sits two stools away, and pulls out a pen to scribble in her notebook, her tongue peeking out the corner of her mouth as she writes. The bartender is swamped with a group of ski bums who rolled in off the pass, and when she reaches across the bar for a stack of napkins at the exact same time Rafe does, their hands knock together. He flinches first, mumbles an apology, and goes to yank his hand back before he notices the small burn scar on her right knuckle, identical to the one he got back in 2017 from grabbing a hot ax handle mid-blaze.
She laughs, warm and low, and doesn’t pull her hand away right away. “Don’t sweat it. I’ve been bumping into everything since I moved here. Way more ice than Chicago had.” She says she’s Elara, the new park administrative director, six months in, still trying to learn every name and every backstory in the tiny town tucked between the mountains. He nods, gives her his first name only, and goes back to his bourbon, fully expecting the conversation to die there. But she leans in a little, her elbow brushing his flannel sleeve when a group of his old crew members hoot so loud the windows rattle, and asks about the sawdust caked in the cuff of his shirt.
He finds himself talking before he can stop himself, telling her about the bighorn sheep sculpture he’s halfway done with for the Jenny Lake visitor center, pulling out his beat-up flip phone to show her a blurry photo he took that morning. She leans even closer to see the screen, her shoulder pressed firm against his upper arm, and he can smell lavender lotion mixed with cold pine and the faint sweet tang of cider on her breath. A drunk ski bum stumbles between their stools a minute later, sloshing beer on the floor, and she has to shift even closer, her knee knocking against his under the bar. He’s torn so hard his chest aches: half of him wants to lean into the warmth of her, the first person who’s asked him about something other than old fire stories in months, and the other half wants to slam his bourbon down, pay his tab, and bolt back to his isolated cabin in the woods before he can get attached.
She asks him to walk her to her truck when she finishes her cider, says the parking lot is unlit and she’s already had one run-in with a stray moose out there after dark. He agrees without thinking, grabs his Carhartt coat off the back of the stool, and holds the door open for her. The snow is falling soft and thick now, crunches loud under their boots, and the only light comes from the neon beer sign in the bar window and the distant glow of the town square a half mile away. They stop by her beat-up Subaru, dusting snow off the windshield wipers, and she turns to him, tucking a strand of windblown hair behind her ear. She says she’s been asking around about him for weeks, first because she needs an artist to carve a memorial for the three crew members who died in the 2015 Wind River blaze, and second because she saw him at the farmers market a month prior carrying a stack of cedar slabs, and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him since.
She reaches up, brushes a fleck of sawdust out of his beard, her thumb brushing the corner of his mouth for half a second. He doesn’t flinch this time. He tells her he’d be honored to carve the memorial, and that he’s got a pot of green chile chili simmering on the stove at his cabin that’s probably still warm, if she doesn’t mind furniture covered in carving sketches and a hound dog that sheds enough fur to make a whole other dog. She grins, so bright it makes the snow look dull, and says she already saw his old fire crew bumper sticker on his beat-up Ford truck when she walked in, and planned on saying yes before he even asked. He holds the passenger door of his truck open for her, and she shoves a pile of carving templates and a half-empty bag of venison jerky to the floor before she sits down. He gets in the driver’s seat, turns the key, and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” crackles out of the busted speaker, and when he glances over at her, she’s brushing snow off her eyelashes, humming along to the chorus.
