Missoula Notebook

The Fire This Time

By Sutton Stokes, 7-10-08

I’ve always been suspicious of astronomers and calendar makers and anyone else who expects us to believe that summer doesn’t actually begin until June 21st, although here in Montana this claim is finally a little easier to accept. Back in equatorial Baltimore, where I come from, summer is in full stagnant squat over the city by no later than May. But here in big sky country, as we’ve seen this year, May apparently has more in common than not with cold, dark, rainy winter, and even in early June we are not safe from snowstorms.

However, summer has definitely arrived at last. Independence Day has come and gone, Splash Montana finally opened, and we even have a few 100-degree days under our belts. We also have our first fire: as I type, embers are still smoldering on Mt. Sentinel from a grass fire that started Wednesday evening and burned more than 450 acres overnight.

I noticed the smoke last night when I was setting out at around 7 p.m. for the weekly Free Cycles volunteer night. At the time, it was an isolated plume, about what you’d expect from a house fire, though — thinking back on it now — not black enough.

By the time we volunteers emerged from the Free Cycles warehouse around 9 p.m., however, the eastern horizon was thick with smoke. It was possible to pick out little orange tongues of flame uncomfortably close to the M, and a tiny white helicopter was busily flying back and forth from the Clark Fork River with a bucket on a rope.

I pedalled down to the Hip Strip, hoping for a better view, and paused on the sidewalk in front of Bathing Beauties Beads. A beader — or maybe just a bathing beauty — was coming out of the store. “Does anyone know what happened?” she asked. A passerby in a blue checkered shirt spoke up.

“Satan worshippers,” he proclaimed authoritatively. “They were trying to burn a pentagram in the grass, but the situation got out of hand. I heard they had a sacrificial victim with them, a virgin, but I think she got away.”

Of course, the official story is a little different. As everyone now knows, we are expected to believe that this fire was actually started by a child playing with a lighter, which seems to me exactly what they would say, if you know what I mean. What I have to ask is just how deeply have the Satan worshippers penetrated into our news media and civil authorities, and when will we learn the truth?

It’s not surprising that we can’t agree on the cause of this fire. As the little people in the television never tire of informing us, we are a deeply divided nation these days, polarized to the extreme and unable to agree on much. For example, is Barack Obama an undercover Black Panther or “a brie-loving snob”? (I mean, you can’t really have it both ways.) Is John McCain a doddering opportunist who’s never held a policy position he couldn’t reverse, or… well, actually, that’s clearly what John McCain is, no question about it, and I assume we can all agree on that, at least.

And we may have even more in common. For the last week, I’ve been engaged in an email back-and-forth with various of my in-laws (Amy’s parents, three of her brothers, one of their wives, an aunt, and a cousin), discussing some of our deeply held beliefs about politics and society. So far, we’ve touched on presidential politics, abortion, school choice, unions, and immigration.

In this group of people, I am one of only two or three Democrats. The rest are mainly libertarian Republicans (or Republican libertarians?). The popular wisdom, therefore, would hold that we should have ended up at each other’s throats within a few email exchanges. But the conversation has been striking for its friendliness and lack of snark.

Part of the reason for my relative calm may be that the majority of these people live in Maryland and New York, “safe” Democratic states where it doesn’t really matter who they vote for or — heresy! — whether they vote at all. (Still think the Electoral College is a good idea?)

But really, I’ve just been tickled to discover how much we actually believe in common. Some of us agree that unions aren’t necessarily a bad thing, although some unions can be a bit of a plague; some of us agree that it might be better to help a struggling family rather than put the children in foster care after a parent makes a mistake; some of us agree that it is hard to think of a stupider public policy than our so-called — and, so far, failed — “war on drugs” (37 years and counting, people — are we winning yet?); and some of us agree that this country is ailing when it comes to the health of families and communities.

Of course we don’t necessarily agree on the remedies to all of this, plus I can’t seem to convince any of these people of the threat posed to our country by bears. But it’s remarkable how much closer I feel to my wife’s family as a result of this conversation, a type of conversation I might have predicted would result in rancor and so might be better just avoided.

How many of you are avoiding conversations like this? As the fine print always warns, results may vary. It helps if, like me, you are talking to polite and cheerful folks of mid-western descent. And there are always some people with whom there is simply no point in discussing politics. I think it’s worth a try with most of the rest, though.

Except for the Satan worshippers, of course. To paraphrase the Strother Martin character in Cool Hand Luke, some people you just can’t reach.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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