Snow Lotus: Exploring the Eternal Moment

Deer Beds: A Prologue

Deer Beds: A Prologue The telephone jangled at 3:32 A.M. After thirteen years as a firefighter—being randomly paged at any and all hours—my conditioned response to such a nighttime call is amusing. I truly cannot move as fast when awake and in daylight. By the end of the first ring the quilt was off and my feet thumped the floor. I was staring at the digital clock on the dresser: 3-3-2. Bythe end of the second ring I had covered half the distance to the office phone, in darkness. Ivaguely recall butting an obstacle, perhaps the library doorjamb. I clawed at a light switch on the way through, but missed. By the end of the third ring I clutched the receiver in my hand. "Yeah?" A civil greeting was beyond me. I was angry and scared. Who in the hell calls at 3:30in the morning?During the long seconds it took to reach the 1 phone,1 imagined two possibilities. Either it was some drunk dialing a wrong number, or a tragedy had befallen a person close to us; someone was in the hospital or the morgue. Fear outweighed anger. My pulse rate was up, and the rings had struck like a trio of rabbit punches to the back of the neck. It hurts to be torn from sound sleep, to be that startled in the dead of night and bang your head against a doorjamb in a semistuporous rush to hear evil news; or, maybe no news—just that damned drunk. "Yeah?" There was hollow silence at the other end of the line, and I filled it with additional dread.Was this person struggling to find the right words—any words—to convey the unglad tidings? Then: "Pete! How are you? This is Cameron." I finally focused on the din of barroom carousing in the background, and this was no wrong number. I correctly guessed the origin of the call immediately—the beat-uppay phone behind the jukebox at The Triangle Tavern in Grangeville , Idaho. Of all the grand saloons I've patronized west of the Mississippi, it's the most esteemed. Over the course of three summers, while snared in its congenial embrace, I seized a lot of moments—from raucous to reverent.But not at three-stinking-thirty A.M.! And Cameron? A smokejumperI hadn't seen for two years. We worked wildfire together out of the Forest Service 's Grangeville Air Center in '91 and '92, and had also regularly hashed over philosophical and political questions while quaffing Betty's cheap tap beer in the soothing dimness of The Triangle. Cameron is a perspicacious, twentysomething fire grunt/intellectual, and the generational difference spiced our debates. Realizing that I might be irritated before I was thrilled, Cameron quickly revealed the impetus for hisgraveyardshift call. That evening, he told me, a memorial service had been conducted for our colleagues killed in the line of duty during the wild Western fire season of 1994. Two dozen had The Snow Lotus 2 died—smokejumpers, helitack personnel, pilots, a dozer operator, half of a hotshot crew. It had been a particularly grim year. I was personally acquainted with one of the dead; Cameron had known more. The ceremony, he said, "was a tearjerker," and The Triangle became a postmemorial refuge for many of the firefighters. Naturally, "war stories" — "a hundred of 'em" as Cameron said—soon salted the hubbub and my name came up. He felt compelled to call. I couldn't be angry, of course. Sure, Cameron was under the maudlin spell of reminiscence and alcohol, but it required genuine effort to track down our number and dial. It would have been much easier to raise a sloshing toast to my memory and call it good enough. We spoke for a few minutes, trying to catch up, but Cameron was hampered by noise and beer, and I never did attain normal alertness. He kept apologizing for the lateness of the hour, and to say we had a conversation would be stretching it. But sometimes it truly is the thought that counts, and when I hung up I was stirred by the luster of comradeship. The sinewy fetters of time and distance were temporarily loosened by the warmth of touching and being touched, even via telephone at 3:32A.M. Later that morning, after scant, fitful sleep, and too much coffee, I...