north fork

In the summer of 1988, I was twelve years old. That's the summer our cabin burned down.

The Red Bench Fire was a monster of a wildfire that ate its way through northwest Montana, including a portion of Glacier National Park. At the time, this was an anomaly. The terrifying and widespread conflagrations that have been attributed to climate change were not yet a thing of the news.

Polebridge - a dot of a town - is just outside the park. Though it may be a little bit different by now, in the 80s the whole town consisted of an old mercantile store, a small restaurant, and a couple of gas pumps. In the mid-70s, my grandparents bought some land nearby and built our cabin there. Even now, there are fewer than 200 year-round residents but at the time, there couldn't have been more than fifty sturdy souls who braved the bitter winter months in Polebridge.

For most of my childhood years, I lived in Houston with my Mom and my brother but in the summertime, my Dad would fly us up to Montana. I don't remember a summer that we didn't drive from his house in Whitefish up to the cabin for a week or so, family coming together to float the river and fly fish.

I miss that cabin. When I was there, I felt like Laura from Little House on the Prairie (I loved those books, growing up!). The cabin didn't have electricity. In the evenings, a grown-up would have to light the kerosene lanterns that hung from the ceiling beams in the main room. A lit match under the wick, she would turn the valve that let the kerosene flow and when it caught, it made a strange smell and a soft, popping sound.

The cabin didn't have running water, either. There was a big, iron pump at the kitchen sink. A metal bucket of water and a metal ladle sat in the sink under the spout and if I wanted water, I had to prime the pump: Use the ladle to pour some water into the pump body, pumping the handle up and down the entire time. I still remember the sucking noise of the air pushing through the pipe until the water caught and was pulled up and out of the spout. It tasted like metal. There was a toilet, but it was for looks, perhaps. Or for emergencies only, because everyone went - night or day - down the dirt path past the storage shed to the outhouse. There was a Sears' catalog in the outhouse. Really.

I loved this cabin with my whole heart. I loved that there was a big iron stove my Grama cooked on, shoving cut wood into the body of that iron giant and somehow knowing when the temperature would be right for cooking, or drying sneakers, sneakers that me and my cousins were always getting wet, despite the fact that the river itself was a ten-minute walk from the cabin.

The cabin was two stories. The bottom floor held the common spaces and a bedroom for my Grama and Grampa; the second floor was jammed with beds that held everyone else. There was a double bed upstairs along with five single beds. Plywood propped across sawhorses made up the table in the center of the room. The roof sloped down on either side, which meant that even the smallest of kids couldn't stand up where the wall met the roof. The roof was metal, and the sound of rain falling on it was beautiful to me.

We all had little flashlights in case we needed to get around in the nighttime. There were a few huge RayOVac lanterns, as big as old-timey lunchboxes, with a white bulb on one side and a red flasher on the other. Sometimes, after dark, we took one of those heavy lights and scurried down the path to the outhouse hoping to avoid tripping over tree roots and anything else that might have crossed the path. There was also a chamber pot - iron, with white enamel - that we were to use if we woke in the night, just needing to pee. I used it, many times. It was glorious.

In the evenings, all of us kids would go to bed at the same time. The second floor of the cabin only covered one half of the building's footprint, like a loft, so all the adults were audible and somewhat visible to us from our perches in the upstairs beds. They sat down at the big picnic table playing cards or Yahtzee, drinking beers and talking. Of course, they could hear us too, and one evening we were really rambunctious.

Parents and grandparents yelled threats up the stairs about what would happen if we didn't quiet down and go to sleep. My brother - about six at the time - carried on singing, undaunted by the warnings hollered up from downstairs. He was dancing on the underside of the sloping roof, wooden slats thudding dully with the beat of his small feet. He used the flashlight like a Broadway spot, highlighting his dance moves.

We all heard my Dad come plodding up the stairs. We all quieted. All of us except for my brother, who kept waving his flashlight at his feet. My Dad slid his belt out of the loops that held it and asked, "Who wants a taste of the belt first?"

My brother sat up in bed, whirled around towards our Dad, and yelled, "Meeeee!"

I'm not sure if our Dad laughed - not out loud, of course - but nobody was spanked that night.

We ate what kept well and what was easy to transport. Well, that and river trout. The two fridges ran on propane. They were models from the 1960s, all curvy body and long, levered handle that lifted to open. They had tiny freezer compartments up top, almost always frozen over. I do believe that all that the freezers held was small metal ice trays, the ice uniquely reserved for my Grampa's afternoon gin martinis. He used to give me the gin-soaked green olives from the bottom of his squat rocks glass.

What kept well were non-perishables: anything canned, bottled, or bagged. For fresh foods, I remember cantaloupe, apples, maybe grapes. We must have had some kind of veggies, but I don't remember many. We ate Spam sandwiches on white bread with yellow mustard and drank Country Time lemonade, sweet granulated powder that we mixed into pitchers of well water and drank from small glasses with oranges printed on the sides.

I never much cared for fried river trout, but I wasn't a child to complain. I peeled back the skin and used the tines of my fork to pull the sparse, flaky meat from the myriad of tiny bones that make up a trout's ribs. It always tasted a bit like a wet rag, I thought, but I ate it.

In the mornings, my Grama made pancakes. Too many pancakes. I don't think there was ever a morning when there weren't leftover pancakes. All the kids could get the leftovers and take them out to the split-log fence that encircled the cabin, breaking them into small pieces and placing them in a line along the tops of the logs. After that, we would go back to the splintered porch steps and wait for the squirrels and the birds to come take them. It didn't take long.

Once in a while we would be allowed to walk along the path next to the woods and to the mercantile. We would bring our money - always coins, never paper - and buy candy at the store. The store was dusty and dimly lit inside, with big glass containers of penny candy. We would buy gummy Coke bottles, cinnamon bears, jawbreakers, Jolly Ranchers... I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.

The food of my favorite summers wasn't even good, it merely sustained me while playing in the backwaters, sitting obediently on the inner support of the inflatable Avon raft, reading by flashlight when, at nine p.m., the northern sun had finally faded, and all the other magical and irretrievable ways I spent those disappeared days.

Oh, but they were good, and I still have an abiding fondness for the memory of Jiffy Pop in the stove-top foil pan with a cool glass of Country Time lemonade.