Javi Mendez, 59, spent 22 years as a forest fire smokejumper before launching his small wildfire risk consulting firm in Bend, Oregon, and he’d avoided every neighborhood fundraiser for the past decade until his old jump crew practically dragged him to the beer garden event that crisp late August evening. He showed up in the same frayed Carhartt jacket he’d worn for 14 years, a thin scar slicing across his left eyebrow from a 2018 Rogue River blaze, calluses so thick on his palms he could grip a red-hot shovel handle for 10 minutes without flinching. He grabbed a hazy IPA from the tent, planned to say hi to the guys, slip out before anyone tried to make small talk, and head back to his quiet, too-empty house on the edge of the Deschutes National Forest.
He’d almost made it to the exit when he spotted the table stacked with native wildflower seed packets, and his feet stopped moving before his brain caught up. His late wife, Lila, had planted purple lupine all along their fence line before she died of ovarian cancer 12 years prior, and most of it had burned in the 2020 Beachie Creek fire he’d spent three straight weeks fighting, too grief-stricken to care if a falling tree took him out with it. He was staring at the lupine packets when a woman leaned in next to him, her soft flannel sleeve brushing his bicep when she reached for a packet of the same purple seeds. “Most people are grabbing the fireweed first,” she said, her voice warm, like she spent all day talking to people who needed to hear something soft. She smelled like pine resin and dried lavender, and Javi flinched before he could stop himself; he hadn’t let anyone stand that close to him on purpose in years.