Firefighters Barbecue, Garden Valley, Idaho
Sam Dufurrena, Garden Valley (Idaho) Helitack, Boise National Forest. The crew leader invited all the families to watch the crew finish their final rappelling practice before heading off into the real fire season.
Sam (on the right) sliding down 250 feet of rope, this time into a mountain meadow, but maybe next time into a blazing forest.
When you look back on the paths your children have chosen, sometimes you can see how they got where they are. There was a day in 1993 that Sam rode with the US Fish and Wildlife Helicopter pilot when they gathered wild horses from the Sheldon Refuge, and another few days in 1999 when our world seemed that it would be consumed by fire...
...and I wonder, as these firefighter kids watch their dads walk back across this beautiful Garden Valley meadow, where they'll be in twenty years.
To read about the Nevada fires of 1999, check out "Cherry Pie" in Sharing Fencelines:Three Friends Write from Nevada's Sagebrush Corner, University of Utah Press, 2002.