From Our 2017 Outdoor Writing Contest
You still have a little time to get your own outdoor adventure submitted. In the meantime, the judges have unanimously awarded sets of sportsmen show tickets to two local writers, Dwight Bates and Ed Marshall. Each of their stories offers insight into the interweaving of human and nature.
Dwight Bates submitted “A B-17 Airplane Saved My Life.”
“On a fire in Wyoming in 1964, I was told by the fire leader to take my crew down into a canyon to put out hot spots. I told the inexperienced fire leader that the canyon was a death trap if the wind came up. (I had been on 40 fires by then.) The fire leader said, ‘Take your 30 men down there or I will send you home.’ I put my men in the canyon but climbed to the rim of the canyon to watch for the wind coming up – which it did.
“I ran down into the canyon and yelled to my men to throw down their tools and run for it. The fire crowned to about 100 foot flames and chased us all the way up to our vehicles. One guy was walking slowly until I told him to look behind him and see the flames. He then ran like hell to the top. At the vehicles, all 30 of my men panicked – one after the other. One guy even tried to drive off with people under the truck before we could grab the keys away. We called on the radio for any fire bomber in the area to drop fire retardant on us as it was our only chance; we were surrounded by fire.
“A B-17 said he was near us with a full load. We said drop in as soon as possible without a ‘bird dog’ guide airplane and gave him directions. Then I yelled for my men to take cover and looked up into the bomb bay as the retardant came out. It hit all of us but no one was hurt. It knocked a gap in the fire and we quickly drove out. You could later tell all my men in the food line because they had red backs.
“In 1992, I did the MRB Engineer work on a B-17 I was helping restore at Boeing. The stringers in the bomb bay were corroded so I knew it had been a fire bomber. I called the Greybull, Wyoming, firebase with the hull number but it was not the B-17 that saved me. They said that B-17 was in a museum in Chino, California. It would have been a good story if I was restoring the same one that saved me. (It saved me and now I was saving it!) But it was not to be. Find photos of the brick I put in the Wild Fire Fighter Memorial in Boise, Idaho, on Wikipedia. The brick says ‘A B-17 dropped on my crew saving us in the Wheatland, Wyoming Fire in 1964.’”
Ed Marshall’s introspective piece is “In Awe of Nature: Dog Ethics.”
“Quite a long while ago, I was walking out of the field, head down and empty handed except for my cold, unused over-and-under, following a weekend of bird hunting in Eastern Washington.
“Eastern Washington has a big sky and lots of public land. No houses or trailers or barns or anything but sage and marshland and crops within a 360° view of where I was taking my retriever for this late Sunday afternoon walk in the sage.
“It was getting close to the official daily end of shooting. I was alone with my dog and she clearly was finished hunting for this day. The sky was fading into dark blue as the sun had gone below the horizon. It was cold and totally silent, getting on into twilight. Everything below the horizon was dead, brown or tan, dry and still.
“Gently, a very subtle noise in the sky grew increasingly louder with occasional high bird voices and wing beats as a thin and twisting horizontal tornado of birds randomed its way over my head at about 500 feet. It was a migratory string of redwings that had lifted out of the thousands and thousands of acres of cattails and marshlands and crop lands long before I was aware of it. The black rope stretched from one horizon to the next and it was growing in size with redwings subtly lifting off in the distance – but within my view – from the enormous marshland all around me.
“I saw no beginning nor end to the bird tube for however long it took me to finally walk out of the field (maybe a half-hour or more) and back to my truck and on until dark. The tube of birds varied in thickness as it passed overhead but was never smaller than ten or fifteen feet in diameter. Stragglers or newcomers held together the occasional breaks in the uniform density of the serpentine.
“As the tube wiggled around and passed overhead many times, I could hear the bird droppings, like raindrops, following their wanderings.
“Pause. Reflect. Consider.
“No, I didn’t shoot at those birds. My dog would have disowned me.”
