Kettle Falls
Visited my father’s childhood stomping grounds.
Drove past house after house as he told of his family moving from a better and better house every few years while growing up.
Stopping in a random spot along the mountain pass, we walked through the forest and quickly found our target. Mom enjoyed finding the best huckleberries.
The air is clean. The trees are green.
In this evergreen forest, both will stay true for months to come.
The reality of my paternal family’s struggle from a small lumber town to an international lifestyle hit me as my father related stories of horrid lumber mill conditions and amateurs fighting raging forest fires.
From his ever-relaxed tone, it’s hard to match the emotion with the tones.
Like a coal worker, talking plainly of digging for the black mineral, it takes a moment of reflection to appreciate the gravity of the situation, how dangerous and precarious my father’s and grandfather’s lives were in those moments in the mill and in the flames.