The man who would be my father was resting on the hill side, his back against the jigsaw bark of a big Ponderosa pine.   His fingers touched the surface of the thick layer of needles that had rained down on this spot for decades.  They were a soft buckskin tan on the surface, bleached by the sun, and smelling a little like tea.  He had grown up in Montana , but had never witnessed a scene like this before.  His fingers pushed a little deeper, just beneath the surface.  He felt, but did not see the moisture in soil, the moisture that had darkened the bed of needles a little.  His gaze was fixed across the South Fork of the Flathead River , which flowed transparent, clear and blue as a sapphire.  The spring runoff hadn’t yet begun to cloud its waters.  Absently, his fingers worked deeper into the duff, deep into the bed of needles.  Here, the needles were decomposing, reconverting to soil, preparing the nourishment to make the return journey out to the new growth at the tips of the branches.  The soil was cold, damp, but had that smell of spring about it, the earth mixed with pitch, rising in the tree.  Across the valley, on the north slope, snow still hung on the ground between the trees.  Late winter snow, hard, and dirtied by lichen and needles.  This, he thought, was the world as it should be.  Blue and green, cool, wet.  This was a beautiful world, alive, safe, calm and sheltering.  He picked up a jigsaw piece of bark, and turned the piece in his hand, then holding it against the trunk of the pine, he seemed to have found the very place it belonged.

It took three months of hard work after his arrival at the Spotted Bear CCC camp before they had a hard roof over their heads, and the men there were given a day off.  But a day off was more a figure of speech.  At 30 miles up a jeep trail from Hungry Horse, Montana , there really wasn’t any place to go, or any way to get there.  And what if he could have gotten down to that little stump town?  Every cent he’d earned, all $22 per month, had been sent home, to his mother and father, still laboring under the illusion that a living could be clawed from 320 acres on the high, windy short grass prairie of eastern Montana .  They were grateful for the money, of course.  It fended off the banker, and  Margaret, his little sister, never knew how close they came to being dispossessed as she finished her education at the Wild Rose School, and flirted with the cowboys, one of whom she’d soon marry.

Part of the crew had been building a trail to the top of Spotted Bear Mountain, and packing material in to build a lookout there.  The peak stood four and a half miles southeast and almost a mile above him, as the crow flies. It had rained last night, but this morning the sky was a faultless turquoise blue, and sitting in the mess hall, his friends could only talk about getting back to their bunks for a well earned rest.  A couple of them were going fishing up the South Fork in the afternoon.  But, as he gazed across the parade ground, he picked up the trail to that look out, bending around behind the big log stock barn they had just completed.  Today seemed like a good day to see what was around that bend.

It was late morning when the trail broke out of the timber into the scree and scattered clumps of sub-alpine fir.  Last night’s rain at the camp had left 2 or 3 inches of snow on the very tops of the peaks, not so unusual for early June in Montana .  The last four of five hundred vertical feet, a jumble of rock and new snow, stood in flinty contrast to the forests the trail had climbed through.  The lookout was nearly finished, except for the rail around the second floor deck.  Scrambling up the ladder, he sat down on the south side of the observation deck, and leaned back against the new clapboards of the lookout.  Sheltered from the wind, the sun was starting to burn off the new snow.  The icicles, which hung in every corrugation of the metal roof tilted at angles defying gravity as the snow slowly started to slide.

This was his world now, but there was still so much know, so much to remember from this height.  He once told me that he had heard that ancient people had reserved their awe for memory, and that must have been what impressed him at that moment—the memory laid out in every connection of the world at his feet.  The South Fork of the Flathead Fiver filled its vast glacier carved valley with its braided channel, tracing the pattern of past floods, recordings of high water, monumental snow packs and spring melts.  The forest traced the memory of decades of fires in the growth and re-growth of the forest curving up from the river banks.  These trees that he was beginning to love were interlocked like a mosaic in vast uniform stands, like puzzle pieces, like the bark of a Ponderosa.   Which fire was which?  1902? 1910? 1923?  It was all of them and many others unrecorded.  He knew he could figure it out someday.  A decade from now, he’d learn a lot more about this part of the Northern Rockies as a student at the University of Montana .  He’d have known that he was riding the crest of the Lewis overthrust, where rocks a billion years old overlaid a much more recent memory of life on earth.  He’d find out that those contorted rocks he passed five hundred feet below this summit were the fossilized remains of stromatolites, among the earliest forms of life on earth.  He’d be able to visualize a glacier 2000 feet thick, at his feet.

He knew that this was not his prairie home, where it seemed to him that the perspective curved up in every direction, making him feel as though he stood in shallow bowl, the horizon always only a few miles away—never further.  Every year the grass turned green for a month or two, then died.  There was no memory there, at least none that he could see---just a moment of clarity, and then the gaping emptiness of the landscape.

A big “whoomp” snapped him out of this reverie—the snow had slid off the roof en masse, and the icicles lay on the ground like shattered crystals, soon to be gone as the day warmed toward noon .  He had to look, to record this scene in his brain.  Those melting prisms, the blinding white, the blood red shale, the deep blue sapphire sky—now a memory, a stored pattern of connections between neurons in his brain.

He fished lunch out of his rucksack.  An apple, a piece of chocolate, and left over sausages from breakfast, with some bread.  Coffee in a government-issue thermos, and a couple of precious cigarettes.  He took his time with lunch—it was his day off after all, and as the day warmed into the high 50’s, it felt much warmer under the intense sunlight at this high altitude. It was June in Montana , 1941, and not a cloud in the sky.  The only flaw, perhaps that haze in the distance, far to the south—maybe a lightning  strike near Lincoln , maybe from the storm that had come through the night before.  A little fire, not a blowup.  Probably burning mostly in the rocks, with just a light covering of needles and grass.  He figured someone already had seen it—that the boys would be on it by the time he got back to Spotted Bear in two  hours.  He’d let them know about it, in any case.