I could show you what it looked like before the fire." Shane Horton pulls out his tablet in the smoke-filled parking lot of Hank's supermarket, where two Humvees full of tired-looking National Guardsmen are keeping watch for looters. It's a national emergency here in rural Twisp; nearby, the largest wildfire in Washington State history has been burning for 14 days. On the other side of the Okanogan Complex—which is actually six fires—another fire on the Colville Reservation is burning, too. Some worry the two will merge.
Three firefighters died here the previous week. The land looks like a blackened moonscape. Stress and a thick blanket of smoke blur the days together. Everyone is praying for rain.
Horton is a big, smiley guy with a graying ponytail and forearm muscles the size of my whole face. I guess that's what happens to a person's arms after 20 years carving ancient mammal bones called fossil ivory, which is what Horton used to do before all his art tools—acquired over decades, something to the tune of $50,000—were destroyed, along with his entire home. Horton had less than half an hour to get away from the 35-mile-per-hour firestorm that ripped through the valley where he lives, one that made a sound like "a huge train or Learjet... just reverberating through my whole body," he remembers.
[For more of this story, written by Sydney Brownstone, go to http://www.thestranger.com/new...-in-washington-state]
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