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Show Go Love/215 "Room?" "118." "Your lucky," she says. "Most of em are going without tonight. Course, I'm making room," she sighed. "I'll tack it on. Just sign this, hon." Lara's fallen asleep in her booster. Her head tilts at a painful angle. I lift her, hold her to my chest, felt her heart beat into my own. Mama always said, the child becomes your life. "Maybe we're not listening like we should," Renee says as I sign off, figur the tip. "We've got to open up, Jack." She says, "This is our life" "I'm all ears. I'm wide-flipping open." We watch the world burn, sitting in plastic charis on the porch, Lara asleep in her sunflower jammies on one of the double beds. The Wisconsin fishermen are too plowed for knot tying so they join us with their own plastic chairs while people I can't see make one hell of a party in the gravel parking lot These fishermen, they've driven all the way from Wisconsin for the blue ribbon fishery here They've planned their vacations out a year in advance, practiced themselves into topnotch casters. They watched the flyfishing video a dozen times before the power lines burned through, and are glad for the peace and quiet, despite the party off to our left, where people are carrying on something awful, like a hurricane party back east. Here we are, Wisconsin fishermen, a lawnful of partygoers and the biggest fire on the continent-and none of us with even the foggiest idea of how to behave in such company. We are on the mountainside, the eastern slope of the Uintas, staring into a sea of flames. "So you people-what's^owr story?" |