Over the years, the slough filled with sawdust, and when I was five and six and seven, it was a wonderful place to play. The sawdust could be shaped into dams, the dams would fill with water and then break, and whatever had been placed below the dams—small towns made of sticks, roads full of toy trucks and cars, small figures of cowboys and Indians and soldiers—would all wash away in what was, to those cowboys and Indians and soldiers, a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Sometime in my adolescence I hauled in two forty-foot lodgepoles and placed them sideways in the bottom of the slough to start a permanent dam. With pick and shovel, I began to excavate above them and pile dirt around them.

Forty years later, the dam they lie under is four feet high. It’s made of rocks and yard debris and broken cinderblocks and it’s all been landscaped over with topsoil. The pond upstream of it is fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long. It has a level silt-sealed bottom. Every bit of it has been dug by my hands.

I’ve planted its bermed banks with aspen and spruce and lodgepole and Siberian pea. It has been a gorgeous small part of the world this spring, except for where a giant willow bush had grown over the dam and lowered its spindly half-dead branches over the water. It was part of a thicket that sits between the pond and the road, and every time I looked at it, it looked like it and its companions were growing and spreading.

I waited until one bright May morning when we awoke to fresh snow on the ground. I walked out to the willow with a gallon jug of diesel. I ran a hose from my mother’s outside faucet to the general area of the fire-to-be. Then I poured the diesel on the dead wood in the center of the willow and tossed in a match. The diesel flamed up, burned brightly for awhile, and went out.

I was on my second gallon of diesel when it all finally took off. At the same moment the wind also took off, gusting hard toward the rest of the willow thicket. More willows caught on fire. Flames started going thirty feet in the air, and the water I began spraying on them seemed to evaporate a few feet from the hose nozzle. One by one, downwind bushes were exploding into high singing fire, and a lodgepole fifty feet into the thicket—miraculously green in the middle of all those willows—began to rock back and forth in the gusts of heat, its needles whistling where the heat touched them. A spark fell on the bridge of my nose and I didn’t notice it until I smelled meat cooking.

I had cut a fireline with a chainsaw to the base of the lodgepole, thinking the lodgepole would be safe that way, and it was into this path I began spraying water. When it was soaked and steaming, I pulled the hose into the thicket and began hitting the gusting flame-front. I had a vision of the fire taking out the willow thicket, jumping the road, and then taking out a few hundred thousand acres of sagebrush and beetle-killed lodgepole. Even if I’d done the Forest Service a favor, they wouldn’t look at it that way.

For awhile the flames kept coming toward me, and I was about to retreat to the road when the wind slowed. The flames lowered and I hit them with water that finally seemed to have an effect. A few minutes later I was mopping up, spraying down smokers in the midst of the black bouquets of half-burned willows. I had added one more orange lodgepole to the valley’s collection, and a hole to the skin on my nose.

Where the big willow bush had been was only ashes. But in the midst of ashes I began finding toys that I had lost a half-century before, half-buried in sawdust that had turned to topsoil. They were mostly metal. Anything above ground that would burn or melt was gone. But I found recognizable things.

They were, for the most part, half-things. They were shovel and rake-heads, their handles long gone before any fire. They were bits of frost-broken piping I had used for waterworks, magnets from old crank telephones, and half-toys, broken little boats and wingless airplanes and bent cars, all of them sized for a child’s hands.

One of those broken things resurrected a small but complete memory: A pot-metal half-truck, almost unmelted because it was almost buried. As a three-year-old I had slammed it again and again down on the front porch until it broke, and had then started crying and delivered the pieces to my mother. She had told me that if I couldn’t take care of my things I’d have to live with the things I couldn’t take care of.