June has been a month for homilies. Three have haunted and comforted me.

My friend Stessa has a plaque over her kitchen sink: "WE PLAN: GOD LAUGHS".

My friend Roxa, recently involved in the painful task of sorting through her mother's belongings found a scrap of paper dated 1930 or so, on which her mother had penned a quote from an author I haven't yet traced:
     "LIFE IS MOSTLY FROTH AND BAUBLE.
       TWO THINGS STAND AS STONE:
        KINDNESS IN ANOTHER'S TROUBLE,
        COURAGE IN YOUR OWN."

Tolkein, in one LORD OF THE RINGS book, eloquently explains it isn't our job to control the weather — it's our job to tend the fields we're given, in the climate in which we find ourselves living. (Tolkein said this much better than my pedestrian paraphrase, but hopefully, you get the point.)

On June 4, 2008, while I searched the basement of the historic Presbyterian Church  in Fort Davis for a fan ( this to prevent heat stroke from wiping out half the membership of the Wednesday Matinee Good Time Readers, who were upstairs, sweltering over FOR THE TIME BEING by Annie Dilliard) I got a call from my husband Jim. No need to worry, he explained, BUT the Fort Davis volunteer firefighters were being summoned to a grass fire near the Marfa highway, 10 miles or so from home. (Seems the Union Pacific Railroad had been cutting rails on a friend's ranch on a day posted as extreme fire danger. But that's another story. I detest negligence.)
The BUT part meant that my husband, the same man who received two new hips for Christmas, was seriously contemplating donning his newly issued brush gear and riding a fire truck to the scene of the conflagration.

Jim and I respect each other's passions in life, even when we don't share them. I wouldn't have signed a guy with two brand new, still sparkling titanium hip joints up as a firefighter, but then I'm the gal who once took up martial arts as therapy for the broken back I sustained while crashing an airplane. You gotta do what you gotta do. I think my mistake was in not believing there would ever be a fire. Not here at home.

We Readers got through Annie Dilliard before Jim called again. I'd started cleaning out the church basement with Linda Allen, who'd driven in from near Prude Ranch. We'd PLANNED this cleanup session for days. The fire was growing, Jim reported, reminding me his gear was in the truck I drove. He might need to report for duty, if it spread. (We're so far from town, by the time he makes it to the station, most fires are out. So he specializes in fires near home, where he can join up with the firetrucks on the highway.) Just let me know, I said. No hurry, he said. BUT.

Next call, he could see smoke. He calmly suggested that I might be more comfortable at home, with the animals, and said he needed to go firefight. So I left Linda in the basement, breathing the dust of ancient hymnals.

By the time I passed Blue Mountain, smoke blanketed half the sky. I could barely breathe for smoke. I sped the rest of the way home. Sped fast. We loaded up the dog and parrot. I drove Jim and his bag of brush gear out to highway 166, the scenic loop around the Davis Mountains. He  cautioned me not to stay way back in our canyon, not to get caught there. He jumped on the first firetruck to pass by, and the man I'd nursed only months before vanished up a smoke-obscured ranch road.

There are lots of stories from that point. How the animals and I parked upwind of the smoke, then saw chorus lines of flame leap across familar ridgelines; how I realized that one of those lines of flame was dancing straight toward neighboring artist Wayne Baize's lovely ranch home and studio; how I saw Tom and Bill Max bulldozing a firebreak around Eda's house. How I calmly (?) raced back to the studio for my pastel cases and the stack of unframed originals I've spent the last few months creating...
How I packed up our RV in half-a-dozen five-minute shifts, which I alternated with trips back out to the highway to check the status of the fire.
How I tried to console the animals. How I wondered if I could hook up our large RV, tow it out of the mountains, alone...
How Jim called next. "We just saved Wayne Baize's house. We petted his dog...the one that jumped out of the truck....Fire's heading for Boogie's now. Have you talked to her? Susan and Dick's place is burning up...Meet me on the highway and we'll get the RV out."
How Jim hitchhiked from crew to crew to get back out to the highway where I waited; how his fellow firefighters lining the highway shot him "thumbs up" as he towed us out of the smoke-filled canyon, past the fire line to safety in town.
Boogie still didn't answer her phone, but we saw her truck parked at the entrance to her ranch road. She was safe, somewhere. The landscape I painted in "LEAVING HOME" was burning. The fire, driven by forty to fifty mile an hour winds, ravaged the county now.

The ridgeline at Warbonnet, across the highway from Crows Nest.

We're pretty self-sufficient. That didn't mean we didn't weep tears of gratitude every time a friend called or e-mailed their concern or an offer of a place to stay. I didn't know there were so many spare bedrooms in the county. Larry and Beth offered their tranquil garden to just sit in. The manager of the RV park we evacuated to wouldn't take Jim's money. "Thank you," she said. "For all of us." My phone burned hot from calls.

We unhooked, immediately raced Jim the twenty miles back to the fireline, where it appeared our neighbors across the highway in Warbonnet, the Poindexters and the Fields in particular, were certainly about to lose their houses. Jim, separated now from his crew, drove food and water up to the fireline on the mountain. We drove the highway to spot and confirm new fires. We watched the flames spread. Our animals, still in the truck with us, watched in what must have been silent horror. I took comfort that we were all together again.

It was a long night. And the next day our neighborhood fire raged on, threatened historic Bloys campground with its hundreds of cabins and cook sheds and the wonderful old Skillman oak grove, named after the first colorful mail carrier out here. For a painfully long few hours, the fire raced straight toward town, sprinting before high winds blowing in exactly the wrong direction. Jim and Matt (also known as minister of our Presbyterian church and husband to Stessa of "God Laughs" fame) fought flames and set backfires around the vast perimeter of Bloys campground until the Forest Service relieved them at midnight. Hip surgery is no picnic. Jim has had two in the last six months. Jim. The rookie volunteer firefighter. My man. Out until midnight again, fighting fires in the mountains.


On Friday morning, the sky in town was clear. The weather we had to sow our fields in that day was, well, just better. The Forest Service tankers were dumping water from Balmorhea springs and from ranch tanks on the still vast backcountry fires sweeping Besa and Roy's land, Barrel Springs, the Hughes ranch, others. We remembered to eat breakfast. We drove to see what remained of home. We'd lost nothing. The hummingbirds were hungry.

Exhausted volunteer firefighters recovered while professional crews moped up. The Santa Fe Hotshots and Zuni Hotshots can pretty much write their own tickets with the citizens of Fort Davis—they came to the rescue, hiking back in the mountains to put out hotspots after everyone else was ready to drop.

Almost sixty thousand acres of some of the most spectacularly beautiful land in Texas burned to a crisp, a state of burned that makes charcoal in the bottom of a grill look medium rare. Thanks mainly to a handful of well-trained volunteers with a lot of guts and a devotion to their neighbors, no structures were lost. No lives were lost. There were no serious injuries.  Ranchers opened fences for each other, and there may be some mixed breed calves next spring, but there were no livestock losses, or none reported as of this writing.

Cowboy Artist of America Wayne Baize still has his studio filled with wonderful western art. And his five dogs. And the house full of memories where he and Ellen raised their four kids. Boogie sat on her porch a few nights after the fire and reported to Jim "it's kinda nice outside tonight". She didn't mention the scorched view where once was beauty. I just spread my pastel cases in the studio, so I'm ready to start a new painting in the morning. I'll find something here in these parched mountains to paint. Much survives out here. In fact, Bob and Rae Field have invited us to a gathering of "The Survivors of the Fire of 2008"; they promise food and wine will be provided. (Bring Your Own Tall Fire Tale.") The church basement has miraculously been cleansed of dusty hymnals, through no effort of mine, but I suspect Linda is still coughing up moldy paper. Jim is ready for the next fire, and I suppose I am, too. And the land? Some things are lost forever. But in the big scheme of life,  fire is good for the land. We'll will green up, first rain. And I can't even imagine the wildflowers we'll enjoy after the next wet spring. Already the cholla are blooming.

Jeff Davis is a big, beautiful, wild county with very few people in it. But they are good people. Strong people.
People here are a lot like the landscape. We'll all recover, and we'll recover sooner than anyone could've imagined back on June 4. Like the land, though, we won't be the same.
Too much kindess and courage has been passed around for that.
As for the weather?
It's my job to paint the fields I am given. The weather? The weather must take care of itself.