Harry Hill - age 80 - took a pull from his cigar and exhaled contentedly. From his living room, he could look out onto his quiet neighborhood in Anaconda, Montana. Nobody had walked by his front window in over an hour, and that was all right with him. Reflexively, his hand dropped to tip some ash into an ashtray by his easy chair, but this time the cigar slipped out of his fingers and fell onto a stack of newspapers. The papers must have been sitting too long in the July heat, for they quickly caught fire. Harry tried to reach for the cigar, thought better of it, and stamped at the flames with his slippers. A blackened shred of paper flew up, drifted across the room, and came to rest close to the lower edge of the curtains. Too close.
The fire snatched at the fabric hungrily, set it alight, and quickly leapt up the wall until the flames were licking the living room ceiling. Harry ripped the oxygen tubes from his nose, hurried to the kitchen and filled a pot with water. He threw it at the curtains and went back for more, but by then the carpet was ablaze, and Harry knew he couldn’t put it out on his own. He left the kitchen faucet running, escaped out the back of the house, and scuttled across the street as fast as his frail legs could carry him. Just as his arm was raised to knock on his neighbor’s door, the oxygen tank in the living room exploded. The windows shattered outward, and shards of glass rained down upon the empty sidewalks of Maple Street.
Two years later, the story continues. I was cautiously driving my wounded vehicle down from Harts Pass in the North Cascades, hoping I could get the motor mounts repaired quickly so I could head to Anaconda and look for a house to purchase. I reached the town of Twisp on a Sunday afternoon, and all the auto repair shops were predictably closed. With a lopsided engine and an inability to shift into reverse gear, I didn’t know where I could set up camp for the night without getting stuck. Thankfully, the police escorted me to an empty riverside lot on the outskirts of town and promised not to evict me like they normally do to campers and revelers.
In the morning, my spirits steadily sank as I learned that most mechanics in town were completely booked until the following week! I was going to have to give up on house-hunting in Montana, and the delay also threatened to jeopardize my journey to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. But an auto shop owner that looked suspiciously like Santa Claus gave me the best present of all, which was to phone a tardy customer, cancel their appointment, and put me in their place. I was out the door by noon, only 180 dollars poorer, and back on schedule.
Nine hours of driving took me through eastern Washington and Idaho to the mountain town of Anaconda, Montana, formerly known for its copper smelting industry. A 585-foot smokestack still looms above the town on Smelter Hill – the world’s tallest freestanding masonry structure - though no smoke has risen from its crest in nearly thirty years. I showed up on the doorstep of a dilapidated house belonging to my old friend and former bandmate, Paul. He had purchased the rickety residence from the county for $4,000 after the property was seized for tax delinquency. Not being a year-round resident, I couldn’t hope to secure a similar arrangement with the county, but I still had plans to purchase a home by normal means and spend a few summers restoring the place and hiking in the adjacent Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness.
Over the next few days, I inspected a lot of foundations, squeezed through trapdoors into numerous basements, and surveyed many rooftops in this town of 9,000 souls. My price range excluded about 97% of the real estate market, and the two houses I finally visited on Maple Street could not be described as mansions by any means. But the buildings were being sold as a pair for $35,000, and one house was in fine condition. The other one looked like Berlin, circa 1944. Black soot coated the interior walls, with streaks of white where water from the firemen’s hose had splashed and dripped to the floor. The living room was a charred ruin, but remained structurally sound.
It took a while to envision the house’s potential, but I knew I could reside in the good house while I ripped apart and restored the other. After visiting the local firehouse and hearing secondhand how Harry Hill had ignited the fire, I returned to the realtor and submitted an offer to buy the two houses for $30,000. The bid was accepted by Harry’s son, Bill, and on the same day that Bill drove to the nursing home to secure his father’s signature, I left Anaconda and headed south. Provisionally, I was a homeowner for the first time in my life. A homeowner twice over.
In order to accommodate the detour to Montana, I had given up my chance at climbing Mt. Hood, the highest mountain in Oregon. So on my drive south that afternoon, I decided to climb the highest mountain in Idaho instead: 12,662-foot Mt. Borah. I completed my final hike of the summer in under five and a half hours, even though the trailhead signs cautioned to plan for twelve, and I celebrated the day’s accomplishments by soaking in Wild Rose Hot Springs, eighty miles to the south. Unfortunately, I stubbed my big toe on a lava rock and tore off a deep chunk of skin on my way to the pool, but since I was the only human there, I didn’t feel bad about bleeding into the water a little bit. The bats didn’t seem to mind, for they flitted about indifferently and snatched up moths and mosquitoes mere inches away from my face.
Lounging in a cauldron of black lava filled with 100-degree water, I gazed up at the stars and considered that I had managed to do what I could never achieve back in Santa Barbara, California, which was to buy a house on the income I was making as an environmental educator. I felt vindicated, but perhaps prematurely so, because I had a lot of work to do before 213 Maple Street looked like anything other than a WWII bomb shelter or a gothic film set. Maybe someday I’ll be able to invite Harry back, show him the renovations, and hear the firsthand version of what happened on that July evening in 2006. I’ll just ask that he leave his cigars back in the car.