Elias Voss, 59, spent 22 years as a smokejumper before a 2018 blaze outside Missoula left him with a jagged scar across his left eyebrow and a doctor’s order to stop jumping out of planes into wildfires. He now builds custom fly rods out of a cinder block workshop behind his cabin west of town, and his only consistent social interaction is a weekly 10 minute phone call with his older sister, who nags him to stop eating frozen burritos for every meal. He’s stubborn to a fault, has avoided anything resembling a date since his ex wife left him 12 years prior, convinced his habit of disappearing for weeks at a time during fire season (back when he still volunteered for ground crew shifts) made him unfit for any kind of partnership.
He only hits the weekly farmers market once a month, when his sister leaves a case of her pickled beets at a friend’s booth and makes him drive in to pick it up. He cuts through the back edge of the crowd to avoid the chatty craft vendors, boots crunching on loose gravel, when his hip catches the corner of a wooden table stacked with glass honey jars. One tips, and he grabs for it at the same time the woman behind the table does, their hands brushing mid-reach. His palm is calloused from decades of handling parachute cords and sanding rod blanks, hers rough with tiny scratches from climbing pine trees to harvest wild comb.
She doesn’t yank her hand away right away. She laughs, a low, gravelly sound edged with seasonal allergy congestion, and the late afternoon sun catches the silver streaks woven through her thick auburn braid. “Easy there, cowboy. Those jars are full of blackberry blossom honey I spent three weeks chasing bees for.” He smells pine resin and wild lavender on her, no fancy perfume, and when he meets her eyes—pale green, crinkled at the corners from sun and laughter—he feels his ears burn, a sensation he hasn’t had since he was a 17 year old kid messing up his first fire safety test.
He mumbles an apology, sets the jar back straight, and makes to leave, but she nods at the fly rod pin on the lapel of his faded canvas work jacket. “You build those, right? I’ve seen your stuff at the tackle shop on Main.” She says she’s got an old fiberglass rod her late husband left her, the line guide loose near the handle, and she’s been trying to fix it for months so she can fish the upper Blackfoot, where they used to go camping before he died of a heart attack 8 years prior.
Elias’s first instinct is to say no. He doesn’t let strangers into his workshop, doesn’t do favors, doesn’t invite any kind of mess into the rigid, quiet routine he’s built for himself. But he finds himself saying he can fix it, no charge, and tells her to bring it by his place Friday after 5, when the sun’s low enough that it doesn’t glare off his workbench. She grins, twists a silver bumblebee ring around her index finger, and writes his address on the back of a honey jar label, tucking it into her jeans pocket.
She shows up Friday 10 minutes early, holding the rod in a tattered cloth case and a jar of wild raspberry honey as a down payment. The workshop smells like cedar shavings and slow-curing epoxy, and she pauses by the wall of photos of his old smokejumper crew, pointing at a shot from the 2017 Lolo Peak fire. “That’s my little brother, Jax,” she says, tapping the guy in the back with the bushy red beard. Elias laughs, says Jax still owes him 20 bucks for a case of beer they bet on a football game that year.
They end up talking for two hours, leaning against the workbench, before he even touches the rod. When he does, he stands behind her to show her how to seat the new guide properly, his hand covering hers on the rod handle, and he can feel the faint tremor in her wrist when he leans in close enough that his shoulder brushes hers. The tension’s slow, easy, no rush, no pressure. When she tilts her head up to look at him, he kisses her, soft, and she tastes like the honey she’d been eating off a cracker 10 minutes earlier.
He fixes the rod while she sits on a stool by the space heater, telling him stories about chasing bees through the national forest, and when she leaves, he walks her out to her beat up 4Runner. They make plans to go fishing the next Sunday, 6 a.m., before the tourists crowd the upper river, and she hands him a second jar of honey, this one infused with huckleberry, for when he’s working late on rods.
He stands on his porch long after her taillights fade over the dirt road leading into town, twisting the jar’s ridged metal lid between his calloused fingers, the honey’s warm golden glow catching the last of the sunset through the screen door.
