NOTE
SMALL
The earth and sky are being weird.
First there was an earthquake in western Mon-
tana, the largest in 50 years, that rattled the walls
and raked me out of sleep believing my enemies
had rented a bulldozer and driven it straight
through my house.
Then there were the forest fires in Williams
Lake, British Columbia that forced unprecedented
evacuations and turned lives upside down. Those
were followed by our own round of Montana wild-
fires that forced many people to stay inside and
defend their homes—for weeks at a time.
Then there was the whole eclipse deal, which I
didn’t even pay attention to until a friend phoned
the night prior to the big event and said, “Do you
realize the eclipse is happening on your birthday?”
He suggested Rexburg, Idaho for totality; I said, “It’s
going to be 90 percent in Missoula. Why do we have
to drive four hours?”
But the next day, there we were, sitting in a park-
ing lot with 500 other gawkers, staring at the sky. It
got darker. It got cold. A coyote howled and crickets
chirped. All of a sudden the sun resembled a fat ba-
nana hanging in the sky. But it wasn’t until that last
one or two percent of the sun faded away, when it
became night before noon and the stars came out,
that I felt like I’d taken part in something completely
unique—I leaped to my feet and wondered, if one
percent of the sun could make the difference be-
tween day and night, how powerful is that thing?
I can’t ignore all the earthquakes of late, nor this
sucky wave of hurricanes. They remind me of a time
in Alaska when a typhoon swept across the Pacific
and slammed into Seward. Salmon swam over the
highway leading to Anchorage, and part of a moun-
tain slid over a road leading from town to Lowell
Point, where my sister and I were hunkered in an
apartment. The Coast Guard couldn’t evacuate us be-
cause Resurrection Bay was in complete turmoil, and
4
it took three days, if I remember correctly, for crews
to clear and rebuild that road so we could get out.
Another time, in southeastern British Columbia,
a wild, mid-summer storm dropped half the Pacific,
it seemed, onto a drainage of the Elk River. I hap-
pened to be in that drainage and watched a river
go from perfectly clear and fishable to a raging tor-
rent in an hour. When the steep canyon walls came
down, and a friend got hit in the head with a rock,
we scaled those muddy walls on all fours. When we
reached the canyon rim my friend said, “We could
have died right there.”
He was right, but I’ve always gotten off easy—the
weather hasn’t wrecked my home or destroyed my
business or directly cost the lives of family and friends
. . . like it has for so many people this past summer.
More often these days it seems like leaving the
house could be a life-threatening event. And for us—
people who spend time on the water and willingly
deal with the elements—the odds of something cra-
zy happening increase dramatically. We could play
it safe, I guess, and stay off the water and out of
the woods, but I think things would look pretty pale.
I know this: I never feel quite as alive as when the
weather arrives, in one form or another, and drives
me away, with my heart racing and my eyes wide.
That comes from the endorphins and the adren-
aline rush, I know. But some of it has to do with feel-
ing small. I don’t get that sensation when I’m mired
in work and withdrawn to the back of my brain.
But being out there in the elements, feeling small
next to nature, let’s me grasp a refreshing perspec-
tive. Out there, in the lightning, the wind, the snow,
the sleet and the rain, I may not be in charge but the
answers are clear—we’re all in this together; nobody’s
getting out alive; time is short; might as well fish.
- Greg Thomas, Editor in Chief