Fire season in Montana: feeding firefighters, mobile catering, and what to do when your whole state is burning

The plume of smoke starting on the ridgeline above our 40 acres

Fire season in MT. 

July to September, every year, every single Montanan crosses their fingers that lightning doesn't strike the ridgeline in their backyard, and that whatever local forest fire fills the sky with smoke - because there always is one - starts on the opposite of the river.  Not theirs. 

This year a late-season fire started in our town.  It was early September.  We'd started to relax.  No rain in sight but it was September, after all - surely fire season was nearly over and we'd made it through another year unscathed.  Then a lightning storm came through on a Tuesday evening, with dozens - dozens - of lightning strikes on the surrounding peaks and dozens of ensuing fires smoldering by the next morning.  (A caveat: we have a small cabin on 11 acres, and 40 separate acres at the other end of the valley.  Nothing smoldered near our cabin.  So our home was never really in danger.)  But above our 40 acres, that plume of smoke pictured above was rising by Wednesday afternoon. 

Our crossed fingers had failed.  It spread fast.  My grandma picked this charred piece of pine branch off her back deck.  Fragments of incinerated trees were landing all over town:

By the next week, 10,000 acres had burned and trees were torching a mile uphill from our land.  I sat on the riverbank, with what felt like half the town, and took this photo as massive pines and spruces turned into columns of flame:

It felt like half the town was out there with me.  Cars lined the road, everyone watching the hill like a late-night movie.  I thought, this would make a great story.  Except the things that make great stories are so nerve-wracking in real life!  The next thing I thought was: I am so glad I live in a place where when you call for help, people answer.  This country.  This state.  This town.  A place with emergency responders, and fire crews in water trucks, and helicopter pilots dropping bucket after bucket of water from the river below, and someone always standing guard.  Politics aside, this summer I saw the inner workings of federal fire camps, and felt firsthand the gratitude of having strangers save your property.  This summer, the system did not fail us. 

I spent August and September working with a mobile caterer feeding hot shot crews at fire camps, anywhere from 50 to 350 people.  When I signed up for this I had no IDEA what was in store.  Baking cakes for 300 hungry men.  Cakes in 3-foot-long cake pans, sometimes 3 or 4 devoured in a night, pieces flying off the table as fast as you can dish them.

(I do love baking in quantities.  At home, I tend to make too much.  At fire camp I did not have this problem.)

  And the meat!  Federal regulations require about 6,000 calories a day for these hard-working firefighters.  Supper must include at least 10-12 ounces of protein (Or something like that.)  It meant... a lot of meat.  Dozens of pork tenderloins the size and weight of a small child:

So much pork.  Nightly cleanup, in our mobile kitchen in a semi truck

My job was tending the salad bar and desserts.  This was the early morning, the breakfast-fruit-oatmeal toppings with dawn illuminating the fog behind our camp:

For supper, that salad bar was stuffed with lettuce and pasta and vegetables.  And after a hot day the crews of hungry firefighters fell on that salad bar of cool, crunchy greens like a horde of locusts.  They were soot-stained.  They smelled like smoke.  I've heard that 'not showering until the fire is out' is sometimes a rite of passage, especially for the new initiates on their first job.  Some of these men and women's faces were blackened, just their eyes peering out.

Serving food has never been so satisfying. 

This summer I - like everyone else working fires - made good money while it lasted, and I felt like one tiny cog in a gigantic seasonal machine.  It was reassuring.  It was heartening. The fire crews and support staff were incredible -  so many interesting people living seasonal and present and non-traditional lives.  I met a man who works fire lookouts!  Another seasonal job!  Weeks and weeks alone on a mountaintop!  Writing time!  Fresh air!  Next summer, perhaps. 

In the end, our 40 acres did not burn.  The fire crews dug dozer lines and dumped water, but in the end it was mother nature who finished the job.  Nights fell below 50 degrees.  And then finally, finally, rain. 

Liquid gold

One of many similarly grateful business signs, throughout town:

Yup. 

Happy scribbling.  And may you, too, be rescued by strangers.

-mlj