A life-changing experience

I sat with Monty at the kitchen table, listening to a story I had been told once a few years ago, while we waited for his sauna to reach the desired temperature for the first steam.

“Well, first I should probably start with the kind of person I was in those days. I like to say that I’m the son and the nephew and the grandson of construction guys, all my family we built stuff,” he said.

At the time I first heard this story, I was acutely interested in hearing about those moments that change the direction of a person’s life, maybe because I was looking for a similar moment in my OWN life. Monty had just the story.

“So, when I got up on the morning of this story, I was a blue-collar guy. I thought I would be a carpenter for my whole life,” he said.

Monty explained, he had gone to work that day in Chattaroy, the same as he had for months, where he was working as a concrete carpenter building a large water tank. This day, though, was about to become more than unusual. They were using a crane to fly the large Efco steel forms into place, but then the winds picked up. The crew struggled for a while, eating dust as they worked then eventually, the day was called off and Monty began to head home to Athol.

The younger version of Monty was a little bit of a hot-head, in stark contrast to the man I know. So, when he hit the roadblock on his way home, he was already pissed. He waited through the line of cars, each one turning around and heading back toward Spokane after the occupants talked to the guy standing at the barrier across the road.

When Monty reached the barrier, he rolled down his window and was told the Blanchard Cutoff road was closed due to fire. If he wanted to get home, he would have to drive the long way around, through Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. But this young Monty had a bit of a temper, so when he was told he couldn’t drive home the way he wanted, well, he did so anyway.

He drove through the barrier and, laughing as the guy standing at the road block yelled, took the step forward that placed him in the path of an experience that derailed the course of his life.

Until that moment, Monty had never intended to be anything other than a carpenter, but what he saw as he drove over the mountains from Washington to Idaho changed the core of who Monty was.

Driving through the areas where the fire had passed, he saw cars that had simply MELTED. Homes which had been there that morning as he drove to work were simply gone, only remnants of a foundation and perhaps some random copper pipes sticking up at weird angles marking the place where a house had stood. A house where, perhaps, a family had slept the night before, unaware that everything they owned was about to be, simply, erased.

And then Monty came to the fire itself. He drove down the highway with flames on both sides. These weren’t the type of flames he would have expected, however. This was a wind-driven fire. These flames laid low and flowed across the ground, almost as if making a river of fire that coursed through the trees, devouring everything within its reach.

At some point, while driving through the remnants of the fire, Monty realized that all the work done by the generations of blue-collar workers in his family before him, the homes and structures they had built, which Monty believed to be his birthright, could be destroyed in just a few hours by the force he now encountered. He wanted to do something about that.

“When I drove up the Washington side of the Blanchard Cutoff road, I was a carpenter. But when I came down on the Idaho side, I was a firefighter,” he said.

Monty drove to the firehouse in Athol and talked to the captain, who was standing out front.

Monty simply asked how he could help. The captain responded that there wasn’t much he could do without the appropriate knowledge and training without being a danger to himself.

Monty took that to heart. After volunteering for eight years, he was hired on, full-time.

The Monty that I knew, the man that had become an important part of my life, recently retired from the fire service. He worked in the service for 20 years and then retired to his cabin in the woods. He spent summers walking the Pacific Crest Trail.

For Monty, his life changed the day he first witnessed the devastating force that would be the focus of his career for the next 27 years. A life that he never considered was thrust upon him, and, Monty heartily met the challenge.

Cheers to you, Pops.