Photograph by Issue 31 featured artist, Brooke Williams. The sun is hot on my face and the breeze is warm and smells of smoke. The air is hazy from any one of several wildfires burning in August of , to date the hottest summer on record in Montana. I remember the Pattee Canyon fire near Missoula that burned five homes and made everyone aware that living in the city was no certain defense from being torched by a runaway forest fire.
I still see scars from that blaze, 40 years removed, when I hike the area. I think of fire all the time now. I spend most of June through August, even September, dreading every thunderstorm.
Ulm Pishkun by Chris La Tray. All around me the world is brittle and dry. The plains spread out for hundreds, thousands, of miles before me. The sky here, infinite and blue and curving from horizon to horizon, even with the smoky haze, is stupendous.
To the west I can see the massive landform known as Square Butte, rising from the plain like a gigantic stone box maybe a score of miles distant. As long as people have been here, over thousands of years, anyone standing where I am and turning their head to the right would see it. Other landforms are blue in the distance; more hills and buttes, the Rocky Mountain Front farthest away. From the vantage point of the cliffs, the land stretching away in all directions is a unique type of beauty.
Squares of managed agricultural land mostly, some greener than others. A large farm machine is moving in the distance.
