Coming into what we hope is the end of fire season here in Montana, Fred Haefele’s excellent essay, “Fire on the Mountain,” is available free, for a limited time, to Kindle readers.
As excerpted from his book Extremophilia, this is the story of Fred’s final summer as a wildland fire fighter, working a blaze outside of Missoula. It’s an impactful, elegiac look at what it means to try to control the uncontrollable, even in the face of your own surprising (if inarguable) aging. If asked to read this one for a college class, you’d no doubt write, “Man v. Nature,” somewhere in the margin.
