#young men and fire

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

I saw you are reading Young Men and Fire -- it is possibly the best non-fiction book I've ever read. MacLean has also written other memoirs and short stories that are just as lyrical and beautiful but less harrowing

My god, is it harrowing. I'm kind of reading it because during certain moods, my brain requires dark nonfiction to chew over. It's like grit that absorbs ambient anxiety and keeps it from getting up to mischief.

(Previous reads in this category include Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer, No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder, and 100:1 The Crack Legacy by Christopher Johnson. I think most people use true crime for this, but what my brain really wants is stories about systems.)

It's also... strangely, painfully good to read about my kind of place, and the beauty and horrors in it. I'm from hundreds of km north of Montana, but I also grew up moving around that transition zone, from prairie to forest, from flatland to mountain. It's where my heart is.

And a lot of my early... damage, I guess? Is from just how brutal it is, to be so much alone, in the face of all these elements that want to kill you. It actually goes back generations, because my family have all been scarred with their own different ways of coping with it. My parents, my grandparents, their grandparents.

There's a part in James Keelaghan's song about the Mann Gulch Fire (Cold Missouri Waters) that just says: "Too big to fight it/we'll fight it from the ridge instead" that just expresses how it feels sometimes, to know that the enormity of the elements are lining up to kill you, and nothing you do probably matters, but also, your entire life depends on what you do next.

I've never faced anything so intense as a crowning wildfire, but I've had other experiences--cutting my leg on a barbed-wire fence and having to walk home before I could do anything about it, capsizing a boat on a cold May day and being unable to right it and sincerely believing I was going to die from hypothermia--that stem partly from having to know what mistakes will put me at risk of really dying.

And it isn't malice, and it isn't exactly neglect or a failure on the part of the authorities, and you can spend so many years numbly accepting the inevitability of death that when someone says, "Actually, I think this kind of death isn't inevitable, so let's declare these deaths unacceptable and go to war against them" they sound absolutely crazy.

But I've also been on the side of declaring many types of deaths unacceptable instead of inevitable, and been the madman in the wilderness, and made real change. Young Men and Fire is all about that.

It's also really nice to see something that speaks with a long-familiar accent I've never really seen typologized or emulated accurately. A voice that sounds like a bunch of cowboys gathered around a fire as night turns blue, sharing their griefs and woes and philosophies, pulling together Scots and German and Texan flavour to their English, more Chinook Wa-Wa than they realize. It's my second accent, the one I can't consciously switch into, but do when someone at an Edmonton bus station asks to bum a smoke off me and all I have to give is a bus ticket, or when I'm at a livestock show and I want to ask someone if that steer is a Limousin or just a pale Red Angus and I want them to assume I understand about cattle breeds and reply without giving a five-minute preamble on animal husbandry to the kooky city lady first.

It doesn't surprise me that it's an accent shared by woodsmen of the mountains; MacLean's people and mine are not distinct entities, but an intertwined community of people who are trying to live on this land that owns us but is never really ours.

[marionto]

Bobby Cannavale and Kim Raver

"Young Men and Fire..."

Third Watch 1x22, Episode aired May 22, 2000

[totheescapement]

It is in the world of slow-time that truth and art are found as one.

Norman McLean

[walaw717]

On Growing old

I circled back to general resolutions I had made to myself about getting old. I kept returning to my seventieth birthday, seventy seemingly being what man has been given as his biblical allotment on earth. I sat in my study, making clear to myself, possibly even with gestures, my homespun anti-shuffle board philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead. I wanted this possible extension of life to be hard as always but also new, something not done before....."

Norman F. Mclean, Young Men, and Fire

Mann Gulch

[peyton-warren]

This is one of the books I am reading currently. I have to keep putting it down and picking up something else because it is so heart wrenching. Those poor poor men.

I was flipping through Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean again, a book about the Mann Gulch fire, and some of the quotes in it are just. Damn.

"It came so close it sounded as if it were cracking bones, and mine were the only bones around."

"They were still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy."

[arutoe31-blog]

[d4rklyra]

Here’s the full and coloured version

[vboundwrites]

Consider:

[itsmyfriendisaac]

♌ August 12th: Actor & Beefcake, Young Mazino.

[synintheraven]

Season 1 Ragnar vs Season 3 Ragnar

Sir, I'll bring your daughter home by 7 p.m. vs Your daughter calls me daddy too

[bo0bydrake]

i have got to emphasise on the fact that this is huge actually- gay rights in football is something that's just barely discussed. during the world cup in qatar, captains were banned from wearing a one love captain's band because it was too political (it was just a band with a rainbow heart on it), homophobia and racism is practically rooted in the songs sung during matches and there are no out players in the premier league, or more generally, there is only one (1) out player in the top leagues. having a character simply just,, be with another man and also a footballer in the premier league is a huge statement and will hopefully aid in trying to make football a better space.

[eternal--returned]

again and again young men write me the same letter: "I can't write, but I want to write. I read your stuff and I want to write just like you. can you please tell me something that will help?"

all around me the hills are on fire, floodwaters run through here swarming with rats. the streets roar and yawn to swallow me. I'm choking and can't breathe.

they want to write? like me? what do they mean? what's writing?

i only want to go to bed close my eyes and sleep forever.

Charles Bukowski ֍ "young men." what matters most is how well you walk through the fire (1999)

[astro-b-o-y-d]

Ford: Looks like the food's too hot. I can't eat it.

Fiddleford: You're too hot and I'd still eat you.

Stan, slamming his fists on the table: ONE DINNER. I just wanted ONE!!! DINNER!!!!

[happyqueenandgrumpydork]

My trolls art book comes on Dec 1

[elliotbug]

[arutoe31-blog]