Missoula News | New West Network

Protecting a Memory

Waiting for the Ahorn Fire

By Courtney Lowery, 7-16-07

	The cabin, in better weather.

A few summers ago, my Dad drove up to our family’s cabin on the Rocky Mountain Front and packed a few boxes.

There isn’t anything worth much in the cabin’s two cramped rooms, but he wanted to make sure he at least grabbed some of the pictures, the antique rosaries, the old calendars filled with reports of family trips and a few other things—slippers, antlers, comic books.

A fire was just over the ridge and while it wasn’t posing immediate danger, the Benchmark road was being evacuated and Dad just wanted to be safe.

We waited and fall’s cool weather took care of the blaze. It stayed across the ridge and the next summer the pictures, including one of my brother’s first trip to the cabin, found their way back to the doorframe, as did the rosaries.

Right now, my Dad is headed back up to do it all over again. The Ahorn Fire, burning on the Lewis and Clark National Forest in northcentral Montana is at 5,000 acres. It’s just several miles to the northwest of the cabin and it’s growing quickly.

Losing the cabin, either to fire or flood or our lease being revoked, has long been one of my worst nightmares. If given the choice of my house burning down or the two-room run-down no-electricity no-running-water log shack burning down, I would gladly offer my house, with all my possessions in it. (In fact, I might even trade my house for the two-hole outhouse we dug and built a few years ago.)

It’s a Forest Service lease cabin, a holdover from policies almost 100 years old. We own the cabin, but lease the land from the Forest Service, a practice the agency has gotten away from in the last few decades. Our family never could have afforded the kind of “cabins” families buy today. The ownership of the cabins along the Benchmark road is mostly working-class families from Great Falls or Helena or farmers and ranchers from the surrounding counties.

Because the cabins are on public land, on leases that are grandfathered in, the area has largely been sheltered from the state’s new wealth and that has preserved the Montana of my youth there.

I’ve always appreciated that protection and we’ve counted ourselves lucky to have a place on the public’s land. We were reminded often as kids that we were on borrowed land and borrowed time. If a fire burns the cabin, there’s no getting it back. There’s no insurance payment, likely no rebuilding. And, if the Forest Service, i.e. the public, ever wants the land back, we’re at its mercy.

We’ve never been in control of the cabin—either nature or the Forest Service has been—but that has in some ways, been the exhilaration of being there—knowing that our days could be fleeting gave me an urgency to drink it all in.

It’s one of the reasons it’s my most sacred of sacred places. I tried to never take it for granted.

It’s where I spent my childhood summers, where my most poignant and precious memories were made. It’s where I learned to write—not just write, but write—by the bank of the creek, journal in hand, escaping my brother and his BB gun and the din of the adults chatting around the campfire.

It’s where I found my parents’ names carved into a plank near the bridge, evidence of their honeymoon spent at the cabin.

It’s where Jacob and I first carved our names together into wood and where he asked me to be his wife.

It’s where my brother taught me how to fly fish, screaming from down the creek: “You’re not in a damn movie! Keep your fly in the water!”

It’s where my Dad spent entire summers as a child, with some combination of the other seven children in his family. It’s where he learned to cook the best fried potatoes I’ve ever tasted, where he played Chinese checkers on the very same tin board I did, where he got the top bunk, because as the littlest, he wouldn’t wake anyone up if he fell off.

It’s where I got to share my Dad’s childhood and where I hope, someday, to share my childhood with my children.

It’s where, when I’m very relaxed, or just in my own daydreams, I can still see my Mom bounding through the woods reciting Robert Frost or Longfellow softly to herself.

It’s where I remember my parents the happiest.

Time stops at the cabin. But, I’ve learned over the last 10 years that it stops only for a few days, and then marches on once we leave the National Forest boundary—both for us and for the cabin.

After my parents’ divorce, I went back to the cabin often. When the farm sold, the cabin was the most “home” I could hang onto. But, it was also the place where the changes in our lives were most apparent. Even the cabin couldn’t hide them.

And so I held tight to the happy memories at the cabin, so tightly I thought the ebbs and flows of our lives would magically smooth in the shadows of the mountains. I thought somehow, the campfire smoke and the smell of wildflowers could erase the pain and bring us all back to those memories.

I’d spend days at the cabin, crying by the creek, in my old journaling spot, sitting on a knobby tree root I had discovered as a teen. It had made the perfect writing seat, nestled in a stand of pines under a small rock outcrop that my family calls “Church” because my Dad and his sisters used the rock ledge for an alter in their make-believe Sunday mass as kids.

I sat there, wondering how everything had changed so quickly and I decided to try to stop it.

And so I meticulously put everything back in the cabin where I thought it should be, where I remembered finding it with littler hands. I didn’t allow anyone to sleep in a different spot than I remembered. I guarded the stove and the cooking because as the new woman of the cabin, I felt I had to make sure all of it was done exactly how my Mom used to when we were all together. I wanted to at least make some things feel the same. It was exhausting.

So, a few summers ago, I just let go.

Jacob and I and my Dad went to the cabin for Memorial Day weekend and as I tramped through the woods to my writing spot, I noticed things had changed—dramatically. A tree had fallen onto my root seat and the branches covered the opening in the trees to the bend of the creek. Someone, likely the Forest Service doing some thinning, had cut down the big pine by the side of the stream and sawdust was scattered on the forest floor. The alter was just a mess of fallen branches, hardly visible at all.

I sat on the stump and cried. Why couldn’t just this one spot stay the same?

I pulled my journal to my lap and took out my pen and started to write. As the words came out, I felt more and more comfortable on the stump and the fallen tree nicely blocked the morning sun from my face, casting a dancing shadow across the creek.

I realized that what makes the cabin the cabin, what made my brother and I giddy, what made my Dad smile and what made my Mom recite poetry had nothing to do with the cabin itself. It had to do with the quietness of the woods, ripe for imagining. It had to do with the shared memories, born of time spent away from our busy lives: school, sports, family, a struggling farm. It had to do with the wildflowers, clutched in my hands as I hiked to the top of a lookout.

It had to do with feeling the power of something beyond me, something that would always be there to comfort me, something that could remind me that my life, in the scheme of things, was small and the world was beautiful, without us having anything to do with it.

And that was just it. This place was not beautiful because of us. We weren’t in control of those memories. That’s what made them so wonderful. For a few weeks out of the year, we got to be small in a landscape that was bigger, more powerful and more beautiful than anything we could ever create or in my case, re-create.

It was about surrendering to something that would go on, on its own schedule, with or without us.

It was my surrender to change and to the power of nature that helped me see the cabin in a new light that day and every time I’ve been back, I’ve been reminded of how freeing that feeling can be. Now, the cabin is something I savor when I can, as are the many stages of my life—knowing both can change at some point and it’s up to me to revel when I can and remember, but also look forward to making new memories.

And so, with the smell of wildfire season in the air, I breathe the smokiness in, knowing there are some things beyond my control, and that is healthy and good, for me and for nature.

As the Ahorn Fire creeps toward our cabin, I’ll pick up my journals, wildflowers pressed in between the writings of a younger me, and read back to remember what made my childhood memories so sweet: Family, friends and a reverence for a big, wild, natural world, fire and all.

Those are the things I can carry with me, cabin or not.

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By Courtney Lowery, 7-16-07 | comments (12) | email story | print story

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