Under Fire
FOR BOB SPENCER, Monday, September 7th, started out like a thousand other days. A fishing guide on Oregon’s McKenzie River for the past 30 years, Spencer was on the water with clients, casting for redside trout, the secret hope of a rare steelhead in his back pocket. “It was just a beautiful day,” recalls Spencer, “Clear, sunny, no wind to speak of.” He got home about six and noticed the wind beginning to gust out of the east. This was rare as a royal flush: West slope Cascade river valleys get their weather from the west, which is where the wind and prodigious rain almost always come from. “By eight it had really begun to howl,” says Spencer. “By nine we were on a level two evacuation. By two in the morning we were notified it was level three—which means you go. We left here with nothing.”
And nothing, save for ashes, is what Spencer and his wife Linda returned to a week later. Their home outside the little riverside town of Vida, which was also their office, shop, and warehouse, was gone. Parked conspicuously on Highway 126 was Spencer’s Willie drift boat. It was exposed to such intense heat that it welded to the Baker trailer it sat on. Minus the tires, which melted off the rims. A hole in the starboard side of the boat, near the bow, big enough for two fall chinook to swim through, attests to the intensity of the blaze. “God, I loved that boat,” he says.
If there was any consolation for Spencer and his wife, it’s that they didn’t suffer alone. The mind- and soul-numbing loss, not only of property, but of possibility, of beauty, and
