"You like to tell true stories, don't you?" my father asked, and I answered, "Yes, I like to tell stories that are true." Then he asked, "After you … - Norman Maclean

In 1949 the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as “ten o’clock fires,” as if they already had them under control before they jumped. They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.

In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing — the fateful blowup.

I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.