Dry Lands Seared by Fickle Fire That Chooses Its Victims

Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled.

John Steinbeck

“The Grapes of Wrath”

Ralph and Mary Jane Crisman, doing what they’d done together nearly every day of their 58 years on the ranch, had just sat down to lunch when they smelled the smoke.

“We saw it drifting through the yard,” said Crisman, 81, a farmer all his life. “We called our neighbors to try and find out where the fire was. The store in town said it was under control. Then they called back and said it wasn’t.”

Crisman got in his pickup and drove to the top of the south ridge.

“Visibility was about 3 miles and I still couldn’t see it, so I went back home.”

He told Mary Jane she had better get the engagement ring he had given her 60 years ago, just in case. He grabbed a handful of tax records.

“All at once I saw the flames a half-mile away,” he said. “In five minutes it was in our yard, traveling 40 miles an hour. The bridge across the creek was on fire so we drove north across the pasture. Mary Jane’s got a heart condition and she was getting pains. I told her to take some more of those nitro pills, but I was sure I was gonna lose her along with everything else.

‘I Took a Last Look’

“I tried to take it easy, but we had to get out. When the car quit on me I was afraid we were done for, but I got it started again. When I looked back, all I saw was flames. The barn was gone and the house was next. I took a last look at my tree.”

Crisman told his story in a quiet, resigned voice as he stood amid the devastation of his entire life’s work. Rubble from the farmhouse had collapsed into the basement, an enormous jigsaw puzzle of charred appliances, twisted iron and steel, melted glass.

The blackened bones of an ironing board leaned against the burned-out guts of the furnace; 400 carefully preserved jars of home-canned food had exploded in a corner; a big file cabinet, its doors still closed, futilely sheltered piles of heat-powdered paper.

All the outbuildings were gone. So was the carefully tended garden down by the cottonwood trees whose bark was seared off and branches were dead sticks. A ghost of a tractor baked under the sun.

The unrelenting wind lifted the charred topsoil and swirled it around the rancher as he hunched his back to it. Bending to pick up a handful of grit, Crisman already knew his land had turned to cinders that were blowing away to the Dakotas.

“The ‘30s was bad but this is just as bad, maybe worse,” said Crisman, who was semi-retired and wasn’t raising cattle this year. “With the drought, the prairie was so dry we were just waiting for disaster, and it came.

“It’s a shock to me. When you’ve spent a lifetime building up a farm, it’s just like losing a person that you love.”

The Crismans’ only child, a daughter, died of pneumonia when she was 6 months old. They seldom heard from relatives in Arizona and Florida. Their ranch was their world.

Of Crisman’s 1,200 acres, 900 were burned. The blaze, which totaled about 17,000 acres in eastern Montana and western North Dakota, didn’t injure anyone but destroyed part of another house and an empty homestead, killed some cattle and left critical pasture land useless in a year in which grass is precious.

The Burlington Northern Railroad said it will handle claims adjustments because the Amtrak passenger train whose sparks ignited the fire June 10 was traveling on railroad property. A railroad official held a meeting in Bainville to pass out the railroad’s one-page claim forms. Crisman has vowed to get a good lawyer, but he wonders how long the settlement process will drag on because “at my age, time isn’t on my side.

‘My Wife’s Bitter’

“My wife’s bitter about it,” said Crisman, his gaze always returning to the remains of his home. “When the fire started nobody came around to help us move out. When you get old, people forget about you.

“Mary Jane won’t ever come back and look at it. She said to me: ‘I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to cry. It’s done, it’s over with, and I’d like to forget the whole thing.’ ”

That first night, in shock and with just the clothes on their backs, the Crismans stayed in a motel in Williston, N.D., 25 miles east of Bainville, then moved in with friends before deciding to get an apartment in Williston.

“It makes me feel like I’ve lost all my freedom,” said Crisman. “It’s a nice enough place, but I’m stuck in it. I feel like somebody’s said to me: ‘You’re old now, you just sit in that rocker and rock your life away.’

“It feels like we’re on vacation and it’s time to go home but there’s no home to go to. This is it for us. I guess we’re gonna stay right here until we die. We don’t move around much--just once in 58 years.”

Of everything they lost, Mary Jane Crisman misses her prized cedar hope chest the most.

“It was crammed full of handmade treasures from her mother, crocheted things and lace tablecloths,” her husband said. “It’s enough to break her heart.”

And what of his heartbreak? What will he miss the most?

“That,” he said simply, pointing to the 5-foot-tall skeleton of a fir tree that looked like it was welded out of iron.

“I told the Burlington Northern man I wouldn’t take $2,500 for that tree,” said Crisman. “I planted it next to the house so it could get runoff from the roof. I put it next to the bathroom window so we could look at it a lot. Trees are so precious in this country. I knew the birds would find it, and they did. We’ve had a nest in that straight little tree for the past three years. There were baby birds in it when the fire came.”

For the first time on that hot, sad day, Crisman had to pause in his recollections to gather himself together.

Everything Gone

Everything was gone. The birds, the tree, the fruit preserves and canned green beans, the china plates lovingly accumulated over half a century, the sweet corn patch, the antique tractor, the coffee grinder that came in a covered wagon.

Ralph and Mary Jane Crisman escaped with their lives and one roll of film.

“We’d taken some photographs of the deer in March. There was snow on the ground and it was cold. It took me until a couple of weeks ago to use up the roll. It was at the camera store when the fire came,” Crisman said.

“‘Course, it doesn’t show the house. We’ll just have to try and remember it in our minds.”