Monday morning in Haxtun, Colorado. Population 967, give or take, depending on who's counting and whether anyone moved to Sterling that week. Twenty-six miles from Proctor where the fire would start. Thirty miles from Sterling where the first calls would come in. A lifetime from anywhere that would make the evening news — until that day.

I was up before dawn, same as always. That's not discipline. That's just ranching. The cattle don't care what time you went to bed, and neither does the work waiting to be done. Coffee on, boots by the door, the familiar creak of the old farmhouse settling into another day. Generations of Tuckers had listened to those same boards groan and pop, stood at that same kitchen window, watching the sky decide what kind of day it would be.

Kate was still asleep with the twins — Kolt and Kinley, two months old and finally starting to give us a few hours of peace at night. Those first weeks had been a blur of feedings and crying and Kate and me passing each other like zombies in the hallway. But they were settling into something like a rhythm now. Jasper, our oldest at two, would be up soon enough, ready to follow me around like she always did. That girl had cow sense already. She'd stand at the fence and watch the herd like she understood something the rest of us were still figuring out.

The seed business was picking up. March meant farmers were thinking about planting, which meant they were thinking about what they needed. Phone calls to make, orders to fill, customers stopping by the shop. A contact from the Farm Bureau had called twice already about spring supplies. The rhythm of spring in farm country — that particular kind of busy that feels like hope. After a dry winter, everyone was ready to believe this would be the year the rain came back.

I stepped outside to check the sky. That's a habit you learn on the plains. You learn it young, and you never unlearn it. The weather isn't something that happens to you out here — it's something you live inside of. You learn to read it like you'd read a person's face. The way the clouds stack up on the horizon. The color of the light at dawn. The way the air feels against your skin. And that morning, the sky had something to say. I just didn't know how to hear it yet.

The wind was already moving. Not bad yet, but that March wind has a way of whispering before it screams. Eastern Colorado knows that sound — the high plains howl that can push tumbleweeds across the highway and make you brace yourself just walking to the truck. The flags at the school would be standing straight out by noon, frozen solid in a wind that wouldn't stop for three days.

Red Flag Warning, they'd said on the radio. Fire danger extreme. But you hear that a lot in this country. Dry winters, dry springs, the grasslands waiting for something to happen. The humidity was dropping and the wind was rising and somewhere over by Proctor — though I didn't know it yet — a spark was about to find fuel. You stay alert, you keep water handy, you watch the horizon. That's just life on the high plains. It just becomes a routine, but we hadn't had the luxury of knowing how important those routines were yet.

I looked out toward the north, where our 185 head of cattle were grazing on a corn stalk circle four miles away at Jared and Sarah's place. This was Kate's and my herd — one that we had built for our family. With the help of Kate's family, we were progressing well with bloodlines. The calves from last month were finding their legs now, staying close to their mothers, learning the land. In five hours, most of them would be dead. The fire would move at 70 miles per hour, faster than any animal could run, faster than we could drive in some places. It would jump highways and tear through fence lines and turn everything it touched to ash.

But I didn't know that yet.

I had no way of knowing that in a few hours, that horizon would be on fire. That the smoke would roll over the hills like a living thing, that the phone calls would turn from seed orders to evacuation routes, that my wife would be driving south toward Lone Star School with four kids in the car and flames in her rearview mirror. That over 900 people would evacuate east of County Road 49. That firemen from seventeen departments would converge on our little town. That by morning, we'd be standing in the ashes of everything we'd built.

But at 7:00 AM on March 6, 2017, it was just another Monday. Coffee getting cold on the counter. A two-year-old's voice calling from the bedroom. The wind starting to pick up. The cattle grazing peaceful in the north pasture. My cousin Luke probably already on his way over. Cole checking equipment like he always did, because that's the kind of man Cole was — always thinking two steps ahead, always ready for trouble he hoped wouldn't come.

Just another small town morning. The last normal one we'd have for a long time.

In Proctor, twenty-six miles northwest, something was about to catch fire near the South Platte River. The wind would push it southeast. By noon, it would be a wall of flame thirty feet high, running faster than a horse at full gallop. By evening, Fleming and Caliche and Haxtun schools would be evacuated. By nightfall, four families would lose their homes. And over the next two days, the Logan Fire would burn 32,546 acres and change all of our lives forever.

But first, there was coffee to finish. Kids to wake up. Work to do. A morning like any other morning — until it wasn't.

Cole pulled up around 8:30, same as most days. He'd been working for me long enough that I didn't need to tell him what needed doing — he just saw it and did it. Quiet, capable, always thinking two steps ahead.

The wind had picked up since I'd first stepped outside. That March howl was building now, the kind that rattles the windows and makes the flags stand straight out like they're frozen solid. Cole stood by his truck for a moment, looking at the sky the same way I had earlier.

"Might want to get that water truck ready," he said. Not a question. Not panic. Just a statement of fact from a man who understood what wind and dry grass could do.

I nodded. "Wouldn't hurt."

Cole went to work on the water truck — checking the batteries, turning over the engine, making sure the tires were good. The kind of maintenance that seems like paranoia until the day it saves somebody's house. Or somebody's life.

My cousin Luke was there too. Luke Harper — the closest thing I have to a brother. We grew up together, got into trouble together, learned to work together. Then he went off and became a Marine. Five tours in Iraq. Came back different in some ways, same in others. Still the first one to show up when you needed help. Still the last one to leave.

There's a thing about men who've been to war. They carry something with them — a kind of calm that only comes from having seen the worst and survived it. Luke had that. You'd want him beside you when things went bad. I had no idea how much I'd be counting on that before the day was over.

Customers started arriving for the seed business. Normal conversations about planting schedules and varieties and prices. The phone rang a few times. Orders to process. The ordinary business of a farm operation in spring.

But I kept looking at the sky. And Cole kept checking that water truck. And the wind kept building.

Two hours. That's all we had. Two hours of normal before the smoke appeared on the horizon and everything changed.

Cole's daughter Cole's daughter was at school. Fifth grade. Old enough to understand what was happening when the buses started evacuating. Old enough to be scared. Cole didn't know it yet, but in a few hours he'd send his daughter away with my wife and stay behind to fight. That's the choice he made. That's the choice a lot of people made that day.

But at 8:30, we were just getting ready. Just in case. The way you always do when the wind blows and the grass is dry and something in your gut tells you to pay attention.

My great-grandfather broke this ground. Came to eastern Colorado when there was nothing but grass and sky and the kind of silence that makes you hear your own heartbeat. No roads to speak of. No towns. Just the promise of land and the willingness to work it.

They called it the high plains for a reason. This isn't gentle country. The winters can kill you. The summers can break you. The wind never stops, and some years the rain doesn't come at all.

Our family has worked this land through births and deaths and weddings and funerals. Through drought years and good years, cattle prices going up and down, watching the sky and hoping and praying and doing the work anyway.

My grandfather used to say that farming isn't a job — it's a covenant. You make a deal with the land, and you keep your end of it no matter what. The land doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care about the market or politics or what's happening in the cities. It just is. And your job is to tend it, protect it, pass it on.

That's what we're doing on this land. Not just growing crops or raising cattle. We're keeping a promise that was made a hundred years ago. We're holding the line for the people who came before us and the people who'll come after.

You don't walk away from that. Not when it gets hard. Not when the prices drop. Not when the weather turns against you. And not when the fire comes.

The day the Logan Fire burned across our land, it wasn't just grass and fences and cattle we were fighting for. It was every fence post my grandfather set. Every field my father planted. Every morning my great-grandfather spent looking at that same horizon, wondering what the day would bring.

A burned field looks like dirt and ash. But underneath that, there's history. Sacrifice. A hundred years of someone's life work.

That's why we stayed to fight. That's why we'll stay to rebuild.

Fourth generation. And God willing, there'll be a fifth.

The winter of 2016-2017 was wrong. Anyone who pays attention to the land could feel it. Too warm. Too dry. The kind of winter that makes you nervous come spring.

Eastern Colorado was in moderate drought — that's the official designation. But "moderate" doesn't capture what it felt like on the ground. The grass was brown when it should have been greening. The soil was powder. The ponds were low. Everything was waiting to burn.

Fire needs three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. That winter gave us fuel — endless miles of dry grass, CRP land that hadn't seen a controlled burn in years, stubble left over from harvest. The high plains gave us oxygen — that relentless wind that never really stops. All we were missing was the heat.

All we were missing was a spark.

The National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning for March 6. Fire danger extreme. Wind gusts expected to reach 60 miles per hour. Relative humidity dropping into the single digits. The kind of conditions where a spark becomes a fire becomes a disaster in the time it takes to make a phone call.

We knew. Everyone knew. You could feel it in the air — that electric tension before something breaks. The old-timers talked about fires they'd seen decades ago. We all checked our equipment, our water supplies, our escape routes. We watched the sky like it owed us an explanation.

But knowing something's coming and being able to stop it are two different things. You can prepare. You can be vigilant. You can do everything right. And the fire comes anyway.

That's the thing about nature. It doesn't care about your preparations. It doesn't care about your warnings. It doesn't negotiate. When all the ingredients assemble — the fuel, the wind, the drought, the spark — it happens. And then you're not preventing anymore. You're just reacting.

March 6, 2017. Red Flag Warning in effect. Wind building out of the west. Humidity dropping by the hour. Fifty thousand acres of dry grass stretching to the horizon.

All the ingredients assembled. Waiting for a spark.

We didn't have to wait long.

Somewhere north of us, a man named the man who started it was welding.

A metal feed trough. In a dry cornfield. With wind gusting to 60 miles per hour. On a Red Flag Warning day.

I want to be clear about something: I'm not here to destroy this man's life. He made a choice that day that he'll have to live with forever. The law dealt with him — fourth-degree arson, reckless endangerment, arrested April 19, 2017. But I'm not interested in vengeance. I'm interested in truth.

The truth is this: a spark from that welding torch caught the dry stubble. In conditions like we had that day, that's all it takes. One spark. One second. And then the world changes.

Fire doesn't think. Fire doesn't plan. Fire just does what fire does — it consumes. And when you give it fuel and wind and dry air, it consumes fast.

Seventy miles per hour. That's how fast it moved. Faster than most people can drive on a highway. Faster than you can react. Faster than you can believe until you see it with your own eyes.

The fire created its own weather. Its own wind. Its own environment. It pulled air into itself like a living thing breathing, and then it exhaled destruction. The smoke column rose thousands of feet into the air, visible from miles away.

By the time we saw the smoke rolling over the hill, it was already too late to stop it. All we could do was try to survive it. Try to save what we could. Try to get our families out of its path.

Even though the root cause was man-made, the fury of that fire was something else entirely. Once it reached that size, moving at that speed, with that much fuel in front of it — it wasn't human anymore. It had become a force of nature. And forces of nature don't negotiate.

You can't stop a fire like that. You can try to put pinch points down. You can try to knock the heads down. But in that scenario — all the fuel it could eat, all the wind it could breathe — the control was never in our hands.

It was in God's hands.

And all we could do was hold the line and wait.

10:00 AM

I saw the smoke before I heard anything. Posted it to Facebook right there: "All prayers needed for the safety of people and property. Its a bad one."

Luke and I were just getting back from town when we saw it rolling over the hill. To Cole: "The party started, we better get rolling."

The Evacuation

Kate called. "Where do I go?"

"Get the hell outta here, head as far south as you can. I don't really care how far south you go."

She'd been about to put the twins down for a nap. Two months old. We'd just gotten back from lunch in town. The guys had the water truck ready, and we were going to call it a day because of the wind. Then I got the call about the fire up by Crook.

It didn't seem that long before the smoke was already there. I took off in the water truck. Kate stayed at the house with the girls. Then the phone rang again — evacuation notice. The whole town of Haxtun.

Kate told me later what happened. She was trying to get the girls' stuff together, not knowing what to grab since the twins were only two months old. Then neighbors showed up and started helping her load the car. That's what people do here — they just appear when you need them.

Kate called family, asked if they needed anything from their houses. Stopped to grab what they needed. Called other relatives to ask if they needed anything. They said they were good, just get the kids and get out of town.

Four kids in that car: Jasper, our oldest, two years old. The twins, two months old. And Cole's daughter — Cole's daughter, fifth grade. Old enough to understand what was happening. Kate picked up other kids from neighbors, then drove to Lone Star to get Cole's daughter.

She went to a relative's place because we knew the fire was close. That's where she was when word came that our friends' house was up in flames.

None of them believed it at first. But then they all started crying and hugging. Thankful they were all together and everyone was OK.

Kate headed for Lone Star like I told her. And in the rear view mirror — the smoke, the orange glow, the thing she was running from.

That little warning etched in the glass: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Cole sent his daughter with my wife and stayed to fight.

People ask me why we stayed. Why we drove toward the smoke instead of away from it. Why we risked our lives for land and cattle that weren't even ours.

The answer is simple, and it's complicated.

It's simple because that's what you do. You don't leave your neighbors behind. You don't watch someone lose everything while you stand safe on the sideline. You get in your truck and you go.

It's complicated because how do you explain that to someone who's never lived it? How do you explain that the cattle grazing on my friend's land were also my kids' college fund? That the fences we'd strung together over the years had our conversations woven into every wire? That when his house caught fire, part of my history caught fire too?

"It's your friends and neighbors and their families and our values. You don't leave anybody behind. Just because it wasn't our home doesn't mean it won't be our home next time."

That's not a slogan. That's a way of life. That's the contract we have with each other out here — unwritten, unspoken, but understood down to the bone.

When the fire comes, you go. When your neighbor needs help, you help. When the school buses are evacuating kids to safety, you make sure there's a road for them to use. When the flames are bearing down on someone's house, you stand between them and the fire.

Not because you're brave. Not because you're foolish. Because if we don't look out for each other, nobody else will. That's what holds a place like this together.

So we went. Cole and Luke and me and dozens of others — farmers and ranchers and volunteers who dropped everything and headed straight for the smoke. No plan. No orders. Just the knowledge of where we were needed.

The strategy for fighting a grass fire like this one is simple in concept and brutal in execution: strip the fuel. Plow a gap the fire can't jump. Create a firebreak wide enough that the flames have nothing to burn when they reach it.

The problem is, you have to do it faster than the fire is moving. And this fire was moving at 70 miles per hour.

Dozens of tractors converged from miles around. Farmers who smelled the smoke and didn't wait for a phone call. Men who knew what they were doing because they'd done it before, or because their fathers had told them stories, or because some things you just know when you've lived on this land your whole life.

a local farmer drove 12 miles after smelling smoke. Just hooked up his disc and started driving. When they asked him why, he said it plain: "This is what we do, us farmers."

That's it. That's the whole explanation. This is what we do.

Working a disc in those conditions is like driving blind into hell. The smoke is so thick you can't see past the hood of your tractor. The heat hits you in waves. Your eyes water, your throat burns, and every breath feels like you're swallowing ash.

But you keep driving. You keep turning the earth. You keep stripping the fuel because every foot of bare dirt is a foot the fire can't cross. Every pass of the disc is buying time for someone's house, someone's cattle, someone's life.

The tractors worked in patterns that nobody coordinated — they just happened. Farmers know how to work together without talking about it. They know how to anticipate what needs doing and do it. They know how to cover ground.

Someone — I don't know who, though I have an idea — put in some of the smoothest fire break paths I've ever seen right around the edge of town. Excellent equipment. The kind of work that only comes from an extremely competent farmer who knows exactly what he's doing. If that fire had turned toward town, those paths would have been the last line of defense. That's the kind of thinking you get out here — someone saw what might happen and just handled it. No fanfare. No credit. Just the work.

Some of those tractors were worth more than most people's houses. Nobody hesitated. Equipment can be replaced. Lives can't. Houses can be rebuilt. Neighbors can't.

And it wasn't just the discs. Farmers brought out their tankers filled with water. The coops sent their rigs. Hundreds of thousands of gallons — maybe millions — working in unison, dumping into staged water fills or pumping directly into trucks. Nobody waited for someone to tell them what to do. They saw what was needed and they attacked it.

We just knew we had to knock it down and get it stopped. Who knows how many people would have been affected if everyone just threw up their hands and said "not my problem." We used almost everything available in the area — and the surrounding area too — and we were still bested by Mother Nature.

The firebreak didn't stop the Logan Fire. Nothing was going to stop that fire except God and weather. But it slowed the spread. It gave firefighters time to position. It saved houses and barns and lives that would have been lost without it.

The fire ended on a godly man's ground. And there is no doubt it was meant to be.

Strip the fuel. Knock down what you can. Keep going until there's nothing left to fight or nothing left to save.

That's what those tractors did. That's what those men did. No ceremony. Just the work.

The Voice on the Radio

the fire chief was on the Mack 10 channel. Fire chief. Former Navy fighter pilot navigator — like Goose in Top Gun. And there couldn't have been a better man in that position that day.

When all these departments show up and all these trucks are running everywhere, they switch to the Mack 10 channel for inter-company communication. As farmers, we were listening only — scanner apps on our phones. We couldn't communicate in, but we could hear when they called for assets. When they needed disks or water, we'd deploy on our own.

We have everyone's phone numbers out here. So we were all on text message strings trying to coordinate needs and orders. And Jeff — he was on both. Fire chief on the radio AND farmer on the text threads. Local knowledge plus division reports from surrounding agencies.

His calm, concise cadence from years of fighter pilot training carried over as a clear voice of reason and direction. High-tension situations were nothing new to him. That training showed.

Jeff knocked down the fire's head that day. Directed the whole battle with that Goose-calm voice.

Then at 3 PM, the state took over the Mack 10 channel.

And the incompetence began.

Richard Wells at the Origin

Richard Wells was one of the first on scene where the fire started — right next to the South Platte River. He fought tooth and nail to keep the flames out of the river bottom. All those trees down there — if that caught fire, we could still be fighting the thing today.

Everyone was mostly unconcerned that the fire would go south. The river bottom was the worry. No one had ever seen a fire jump the interstate. That just didn't happen.

They were wrong.

Three Friends, Three Positions

A neighboring fire chief, Richard Wells, and I — we didn't grow up together. We all went to different schools. In fact, we barely knew each other until 2001. From then on, we were inseparable. Had the time of our lives. We have stories upon stories. But the Logan Fire connected us in a way nothing else could.

Knowing what I know now, that college bond might be even more impactful. In college, you're molding into the adult you become. The high school relationships build the foundation of your thought processes, but the college years shape who you actually are.

Richard was at the start. I was in the middle. My other friend was knocking down the head as a county fire chief — command position, making the calls that mattered.

And here's the thing — Richard was fighting alongside those he grew up with. I was with my hometown crowd. My other friend was with his. Three different units, working united. Communicating with great knowledge of one another because of what we'd built in college.

Now, most of the others fighting that fire did grow up together. They played on teams all through school — and in small schools, really, everyone pretty much gets to play. They already had a good idea of how each other thinks. How they're going to react. Same teachers, same coaches, same training.

So for them, fighting side by side was already natural. They used to rely on each other for a block or a tackle. For an assist or to gun a base runner down. Together playing games since birth. Church together. All at the same school — and the other districts, they played against them their whole careers. They know each other. Very few surprises about who shows up and how they respond.

Sure, there are move-ins. Those who assimilate and those who melt right in. And I know it's not war — it's football, it's the dances, it's the academic competitions. But those shared experiences build something. A rhythm. A shorthand that shows up when the pressure does.

When you've got twenty-plus mutual aid districts showing up and intercompany communication breaking down, that history becomes infrastructure. We knew each other. We trusted each other. Our communication helped smooth some of the delays that bureaucracy creates. That's not something you can train for. That's just years of knowing a man's voice and what he means when he says something.

Each department is that way. Each unit is its own group of skills. When you're in your backyard, you know the roads. You know the people. You know the places. You know where to anticipate trouble. When you show up without the local landscape knowledge, you're at the mercy of directives.

A crew showed up from about two hours west of us, close to the mountains. They rolled in with a paddy wagon, pulaskis, and rakes — trained up with their red cards for wildland fire. Ready to dig trenches. They were confident their methods would outperform the tractors.

I understood where they were coming from. In their terrain — slow-moving forest fires in the mountains — those tools work. But I'd already seen this fire cross a 240-foot tilled line. Hand-dug scrapes in the ground weren't going to cut it out here. Different landscape, different fire behavior, different fight entirely.

Nobody was wrong for showing up with what they knew. We just needed different tools for this particular beast.

The Fire's Path

The fire jumped I-76 around noon — the interstate was no barrier. Something nobody thought possible. It raced over the Crook-Fleming highway, tore through the wind farms, and came roaring at us from the north.

The fire moved 26 miles in 8 hours. Moving at 70 mph in gusts. Winds ranging from 40 to 60 miles per hour, sometimes higher. By the time the state fire officials arrived to brief us at the Haxtun Community Center, the fire had already charred over 30,000 acres. The county sheriff was coordinating with the state. Eighty firemen from seventeen departments were on the ground. Seven fire engines stayed on location throughout the night.

Schools evacuated: Caliche, Fleming, Haxtun. Buses full of kids heading away from the smoke. Haxtun students were bussed south to Lone Star Schools and eventually returned in the early evening once the evacuation threats lifted.

Over 900 residents were called to evacuate east of Logan County Road 49. There was a moment when it looked like Haxtun itself would burn.

Twenty-plus mutual aid districts. Pure chaos on the roads. So many people not knowing the country roads. So many farmers and tractors who DO know the roads trying to get through the tangle of fire trucks.

The Catch-22

Here's what nobody talks about: If a department officially tells a farmer to put his equipment in harm's way, it becomes the department's insurance liability. It's a catch-22.

So it stays informal. Text threads. Scanner apps. Self-deployment. The system that works can never be made official.

The Sounds

The sounds you don't forget. The bellowing first. Then the silence after.

185 head. That was our kids' college funds.

The Decision

There were survivors. Maybe 50 head still standing. Burned. Alive. Some would make it. Some wouldn't.

Luke Harper — my cousin, closest thing to a brother — and a Navy veteran. Navy. These two walked through those fields. I asked them: "If they were yours, what would you do?"

Luke and Matt put down over 100 head that day. Veterans carrying what veterans can carry.

What It Means

These weren't just animals. They were genetics we'd built over years. Bloodlines. The foundation of what we were building for the next generation.

Gone in hours.

The Houses

Four homes burned that day. Three in Logan County, one in Phillips. Four families lost everything.

My best friend's place was northeast of Haxtun. He was just south of his house when it lit on fire. His cousin — the fire chief — was on the radio coordinating the whole battle, knowing his family's place was burning.

As soon as I knew the house was on fire, I called another friend who was serving as a fire chief in a neighboring county. I knew he was on the eight mile curve. I told him to haul ass to the house because it was about to go.

If they'd been about 5 minutes sooner, they might have saved it. But the winds were whipping flames at that house for 3 hours.

I still don't know why there were no assets at that house. The yard had been on fire before. My friend and his wife had time to get valuables out — he grabbed the guns, she got files and clothes. One carload total.

Everyone knew it was headed right for them.

Three other families lost their homes too. Four families who woke up that morning with houses and went to bed that night without them. The local paper would later report that burnt metal, rubble, and dust were all that remained at some of these sites. Flames came within feet of other houses — close enough to melt the siding — before crews managed to hold them off.

a neighbor's House

Crook Fire saved a neighbor's place. Two old guys from Crook — they stood there and said "that house won't burn."

And it didn't.

The Glowing Earth

We fought fire every day. When the wind went down at night, the whole countryside was glowing embers. Like a thousand campfires spread across the land.

As the winds came up the following days, there were small fire eruptions. With everyone so on edge, so on point, the constant oversight of not allowing it to get out of control again was amazing.

Past Midnight

We would pump water and keep filling fire trucks past midnight. It was so cold — hard to keep the trucks from freezing and breaking pumps.

There wasn't time to stop. You couldn't stop because of the fire, and you couldn't stop or you would freeze up.

The local farmers would leave for a few hours a night. We're all kind of accustomed to long hours. You do what you have to do.

Kate's Night

The wind finally died down in the evening. Kate stopped at the fire hall so Cole's daughter could see Cole for a moment. She saw me there too, just for a minute — covered in soot, exhausted, but still standing.

They were able to go back home after that. But it was a long night for Kate, waiting with the kids while I was out in the water truck most of the night, trying to keep ahead of the hotspots. Every time she dozed off, she'd wake up wondering if I was okay. Wondering if the wind would shift again.

The next day the wind was supposed to blow again. Kate kept the kids home and they just hung out together. Waiting. Watching. Hoping.

a fireman

Earlier that day, a fireman was in the Sedgwick County big tanker fighting fire in the sand hills. The parabolic dunes out there — carved by millions of years of scorched earth and fires. Without our current agricultural practices, this whole area would burn to the ground every season. That's the land he was fighting in.

His truck got stuck. No escape. Fire bearing down, roaring toward him.

Ryan had time to do two things: pray and turn the water on. Build a wall around himself. Years of experience — plus the instincts of a former college football athlete — and he did exactly what needed to be done.

He survived. Kept fighting.

Come to think of it — lots of people from this small town have gone on to fight bigger monsters. So when one comes to take their homes or their neighbors' homes, it's engrained in us to fight.

That night at a neighbor's place, Luke noticed heat coming from a doghouse near the house. Flipped it over. Flames erupted.

In an instant — like ninjas appearing out of nowhere — a fireman and Sedgwick Fire had water spraying on that doghouse. House saved by seconds.

Nobody talked about their experiences until way later. Everyone was in shock and reaction mode. Too many moving parts to stop and chat.

Still water freezes.

The Fire Hall

Days 1, 2, and 3 — there were always volunteers bringing food to the fire hall. Anyone coming in for water or supplies could get fed.

A local rancher — well respected in the community — brought in a whole tin of hamburgers he'd grilled at his place.

Someone from the state temped the burgers. Made them throw them all away.

That didn't sit well in a small town. We don't waste, especially in that kind of situation. We eat and we are grateful. We are raised better.

The Morning After

As of Tuesday morning, fire officials said the fire was only 50 percent contained. The state officials briefed us at the Haxtun Community Center — the day's goals were to locate hot spots in trees and brush, knock them down, and douse the flames. The wind was still blowing, visibility sometimes less than two feet according to the sheriff. Large plumes of black smoke could be seen and smelt for miles.

5 AM

Luke called me at 5 AM. a neighbor's place was on fire.

"Are you still hooked up to the tender? Is it full?"

"Yes."

He came and got the 1600 gallons of water in the tender and pickup and booked it up to Brian's. I took the truck to town, refilled, and hauled out there.

The Safety Briefing

Meanwhile, the state fire chief had all the fire departments in a safety briefing. Day 2 morning. Fires restarting. And the crews were in a meeting.

a volunteer firefighter from Fleming Fire didn't go to the briefing. She defied orders. Stayed on the line.

If Tracy hadn't disobeyed orders, Day 2 could have been way worse than Day 1.

The Roadblock

The state had the roads shut down. They were stopping all traffic — including water trucks. Had them lined up in town, useless.

I knew what was happening. And my longtime friend, my closest neighbor growing up — he was working for the state, blocking traffic to keep anyone from going north.

I pulled my truck out of the line. Started grabbing gears and blowing smoke headed north.

Got a wave and a nod from a man who understood what we were up against.

an old friend. No words. Just understanding.

a neighbor's Yard

We pulled into the yard and started dousing flames in the feed bunks. Looked over at the house — smoke smoldering. Dust and soot had plugged the heater vent. House was igniting from inside.

While some remained on the bunks, others took care of the house. Knocked out the smoldering before it became a real issue.

Ten people in that yard that morning trying to battle the blaze.

The real threat: CRP grass to the north. Unbroken fuel. If that lit before we knocked it down, with 70 mph winds coming back, Day 1 restarts.

Fire knocked down. Shortly after, winds kicked back to 70 mph.

The Toll

By March 8, when the Haxtun-Fleming Herald went to press, the fire was 100 percent contained. 32,546 acres burned. Close to 200 head of cattle perished. At least one horse had to be put down due to injuries suffered from the blaze. Four homes destroyed. Countless outbuildings, fences, and equipment gone.

The Herald reported it matter-of-factly: "Devastation swept through the plains of northeastern Colorado Monday afternoon as a wildfire raged from east of Sterling to north of Haxtun." Those words don't capture what it felt like to live it.

The Pit

The state made us dig a pit. 40 feet by 300 feet by 14 feet deep. For the burial.

We had to get water quality tests. Ensure we weren't going to contaminate anything. Legal bullshit to ensure I can go bury my family's future.

It was horrific. Mortifying. And extremely sad.

The Terracotta Army

I sent Cole over early morning to start placing the cows. When I showed up at the pit, he'd been there about an hour. Five to seven in the pit.

He was placing them in a perfect line. Perfect, statue-like form. It reminded me of the stone soldiers in China. The Terracotta Army. Perfect. In line. Surreal.

The state vet lady said, "He's doing such a good job. They're perfect."

I said, "I'm glad. But I'm not interested in this project taking all day."

The Bucket

I jumped in our other loader. Picked up a bucket full of cows, took them down to the bottom of the pit. To get them out, I would just tip the bucket and hit the brakes, let the cows roll out.

The state vet walked down the slant of the pit waving her arms. Stopping progress.

More loaders were showing up to help. She sees the piles of cows and halts everything.

"I don't want the dead cows touching each other in the pit."

Like it mattered. What in the world does that have to do with anything?

I told everyone to sling the cows harder to spread them out. Make her happy.

The Tape Measure

After about ten more loads, the state vet came back down the side of the pit as I hit the bottom. Loaders surrounding the pit by this time. Men and machines ready.

"We have to stop."

"For what?"

"I don't want any cow parts in the top six feet of soil."

Here we are. At the bottom of the pit. I am burying my livelihood. Trying to keep it together. And the regulation nazi is nitpicking every single action for absolutely no logical reason.

I looked her dead in the eye. "The pit is 14 feet deep."

Without hesitation, she starts reaching for her tape measure. Wants to measure the height of the cow.

And then I lost it.

"Ma'am, there isn't a chance in hell those cows are over 8 foot tall. And if you would like to stop the progress of this adventure again, I am not going to have the loaders stop, and you can see if you get out without being buried with them."

I flipped around. Waved my arm signaling the loader operators to start rolling.

I'm 1000% sure they could all see my frustration from a distance. That was the last time we were going to be stopped.

We had the rest of the cows in the hole within the hour.

Filling the Pit

The remaining loaders and a local excavation crew stayed to fill in the hole. Bury the cows. Replace the earth as it was.

Fun fact: to this day, you can't tell where those cows are buried unless you know they're there.

Those guys are the best in the business.

I took off to get the other tractor ready to roll so we could start drilling oats.

Still water freezes.

Finding the Origin

Fire investigators work backwards. They read the burn patterns like a map, following the path of destruction to its source. The way grass chars, the direction timber falls, the shape of burn scars on fence posts — all of it tells a story if you know how to read it.

Investigators from the county sheriff's office took the lead. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation was brought in to assist. This wasn't just a local matter anymore — the scale of destruction demanded state-level attention.

The Logan Fire's origin wasn't hard to find. Investigators later confirmed that the blaze began on private property near the South Platte River, near Proctor. Follow the burned acreage back, mile by mile, past the destroyed houses and the dead cattle and the scorched earth, and you end up in that field. A cornfield. Dry stubble from the previous harvest. The perfect fuel. The fire had traveled 26 miles from that spot, pushed by winds that ranged from 40 to 60 miles per hour.

What the investigators found there told the rest of the story.

The Evidence

the man who started it had been welding that morning. A metal feed trough, in an open field, on a Red Flag Warning day with winds gusting to 60 miles per hour. The kind of conditions where any spark is a death sentence for the surrounding land.

The weld marks were still there. The scorch pattern started right at that spot and radiated outward in the direction of the wind. The physics were undeniable. The timeline matched. The evidence pointed to one place, one action, one moment when everything changed.

A spark from a welding torch. That's all it took.

The Arrest

On April 19, 2017 — six weeks after the fire — the man who started it was arrested. The charges: fourth-degree arson and reckless endangerment. Not intentional. Not malicious. Just reckless. Just careless. Just the kind of decision that destroys 50 square miles and kills 185 head of cattle and burns down people's houses.

I want to be clear about something. I'm not writing this book to destroy the man who started it. He made a choice that day — a bad one, a negligent one — and he'll have to live with that for the rest of his life. The law dealt with him. The courts decided his punishment. That's not my business.

My business is the truth. And the truth is this: a man made a careless decision on a dangerous day, and thousands of people paid the price for it.

The Question Nobody Asks

Here's what keeps me up at night sometimes. It wasn't malice. Stevens didn't set out to burn down his neighbors' lives. He was just doing what he'd probably done a hundred times before — welding in a field, getting work done. The kind of thing farmers and ranchers do every day.

But on that day, with that wind, in that drought — every spark was a loaded gun. And he pulled the trigger without checking to see if it was loaded.

That's the part that's hard to reconcile. The gap between the action and the consequence. A few seconds of welding. Fifty square miles of destruction. A moment's carelessness. A community's worth of trauma.

Fire doesn't care about intentions. Fire doesn't grade on a curve. Fire just takes what it can reach, and on March 6, 2017, it could reach everything.

Forgiveness

People ask me if I'm angry. If I want vengeance. If I hate the man who started the fire that killed our cattle and threatened our home and put my wife and kids on the road with flames in the rearview mirror.

The honest answer is complicated.

There are moments when the anger rises up. When I think about the pit full of dead cattle, the months of rebuilding, the look on my friend's face when his house caught fire. When I remember that all of it could have been avoided if one man had made a different choice on one morning.

But holding onto that anger doesn't bring back the cattle. It doesn't rebuild the fences. It doesn't undo what happened. And the God I believe in doesn't call me to vengeance — He calls me to something harder.

the man who started it has to live with what he did. Every day for the rest of his life, he has to wake up knowing that his carelessness destroyed part of this community. That's a punishment I wouldn't wish on anyone.

So I focus on what I can control. The rebuilding. The community. The future we're building out of the ashes of what we lost. That's where my energy goes now.

The fire is over. The investigation is closed. The only thing left is what we do next.

We Weren't Alone

While we were fighting for our lives in northeastern Colorado, the same conditions were sparking fires across four states. The same wind. The same drought. The same perfect conditions for disaster. But these weren't connected fires — they were dozens of separate blazes, each with their own causes, all igniting on the same terrible day.

Two million acres. That's how much burned across the Great Plains that day and the days immediately after. Kansas. Oklahoma. Texas. Colorado. Multiple fires, multiple origins, one catastrophic weather pattern. The entire heartland was on fire, and the smoke could be seen from space.

The Starbuck Fire

In Kansas, the Starbuck Fire became the largest in state history — roughly 500,000 acres, an area larger than most eastern counties. It jumped highways, overran towns, moved so fast that evacuation notices came too late for some.

The Gardiner Angus Ranch took a direct hit. They'd built one of the premier cattle operations in the country — 48,000 acres of carefully managed land, generations of breeding work, a reputation known throughout the industry. The fire burned 43,000 of those acres. Left nothing but ash and fence posts and the kind of destruction that most people can't imagine.

A rancher from Kansas said something that stuck with me when I heard it: "Hey, I didn't lose anything. All I lost was just stuff. It's the people that matter."

That's the mindset you need to survive something like this. That's what separates the people who rebuild from the people who break.

The Human Cost

Seven people died across the region that day. At least five of them were trying to save cattle when the fire caught them.

In Texas, a young rancher was 25 years old. His wife was pregnant with their first child. He went out to move cattle away from the flames, the way his father and grandfather had done, the way any rancher would. The fire moved faster than anyone expected. Cade didn't come home.

That haunts me. The thought of a young man doing exactly what we were doing — what any of us would do — and not making it back. His wife becoming a widow before their baby was born. The randomness of who lives and who dies when nature decides to remind us how small we really are.

We lost cattle. our friends lost their house. The whole community lost something. But we didn't lose anyone. And when I think about a young rancher, and the others who didn't survive, I understand how close we came. How thin the line is between tragedy and survival.

The Numbers

Between 7,000 and 9,000 cattle died across the region. Entire herds wiped out. Decades of genetic work reduced to burial pits like the one we dug on our land. The economic loss was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but that number doesn't capture what it felt like to be in the middle of it.

Numbers can't measure the weight of watching your livelihood burn. They can't capture the smell or the sounds or the feeling of helplessness when the fire is bigger than anything you can fight. Statistics don't cry. Statistics don't have to explain to their kids why the cattle are gone.

The Brotherhood of Disaster

Something happens when catastrophe hits multiple communities at once. Different fires, different causes, but the same grief. You become part of a brotherhood you never wanted to join. The ranchers in Kansas — fighting their own fire, not ours — understood exactly what we were going through. The families in Texas knew our grief because they were living their own version of it. The farmers in Oklahoma didn't need explanations.

In the weeks after the fire, that connection mattered. Hay shipments came from states away. Donations poured in from ranchers who'd lost everything themselves but still found something to give. Phone calls from strangers who'd been through the same thing, offering not just sympathy but practical advice: how to deal with the insurance companies, how to handle the mental weight, how to start over when starting over seems impossible.

March 6, 2017 was a day of destruction. But it was also a day that revealed something about rural America that the rest of the country doesn't always see. When disaster hits farm country, farm country responds. Not with thoughts and prayers — though there were plenty of those — but with semi-loads of hay and volunteer hours and cold hard cash.

We weren't alone in the fire. And we weren't alone in the aftermath.

Happy Birthday

March 8, 2017 was my birthday. Two days after the fire. I spent it drilling oats into scorched earth while news vans rolled down our county roads.

The national media had discovered us. CBS, CNN, the networks — they'd seen the satellite images, the aerial footage, the scope of destruction across four states. Now they wanted faces. Stories. Someone to stand in front of a burned landscape and explain what it felt like to watch your world catch fire.

I wasn't interested in being a spokesman. I had work to do. Oats to plant before the wind started moving topsoil instead of just smoke. Neighbors to help. A community to hold together. The last thing I wanted was cameras in my face while I was trying to process what had just happened.

But the cameras came anyway. And someone had to talk to them.

The Interview

CBS found me in the field. Or maybe someone pointed them my way — I don't remember exactly. What I remember is standing there in my work clothes, ash still in the air, trying to put words to something that didn't have words.

"I've never seen anything of this magnitude ever," I told them. And that was the truth. I'd seen grass fires before. I'd helped fight them. But this — the scale, the speed, the totality of it — this was something different. This was biblical.

They asked why we stayed to fight. Why we didn't just evacuate and let it burn. Why we risked our lives for property.

"It's your friends and neighbors and their families and our values," I said. "You don't leave anybody behind. Just because it wasn't our home doesn't mean it won't be our home next time."

That's the part they aired. That's the part that seemed to resonate with people who'd never been to a town like Haxtun, who didn't understand why anyone would live out here, who couldn't imagine what it meant to be part of a community where everybody's business is everybody's business.

The Circus

For a few days, we were news. National news. The kind of coverage that makes your phone ring nonstop and puts reporters at the end of your driveway.

It was strange. Surreal. Here we were, exhausted and grieving and trying to hold things together, and there were people with microphones asking us to articulate our feelings. There were cameras pointed at the burned cattle, the destroyed houses, the ash-covered fields. Our worst days turned into someone else's content.

I don't say that with bitterness. The coverage helped. It brought attention, which brought donations, which brought help we desperately needed. People across the country saw what was happening in rural America and decided to do something about it. That matters. That made a difference.

But there's something disorienting about being in the middle of a disaster and also being asked to narrate it. About grieving while being recorded. About trying to find hope for the cameras when you're not sure you feel it yourself.

What They Didn't Show

The media showed the destruction. The dramatic footage. The flames and the smoke and the empty fields where cattle used to graze. That's what makes good television.

What they didn't show — what they couldn't show — was the real story. The text message chains coordinating equipment. The farmers who drove twelve miles to help strangers. The fire chief calling plays on the radio while his cousin's house burned. The woman who spent ten hours sifting through ashes to find her friend's earrings.

They didn't show the Sunday after, when a town prayed and something lifted in my chest that I still can't explain. They didn't show the volunteers who kept showing up, day after day, asking what they could do. They didn't show the way a community closes ranks around its wounded and refuses to let anyone fall.

The fire was the story for the national news. For us, the fire was just the beginning. The real story was what came after.

Birthday Wishes

Somewhere in the middle of all of it — the interviews, the drilling, the nonstop chaos — Kate found me in the field. The kids were safe. The house was still standing. We were still a family.

Kate came out with me that day. To the farms. To help bury our cattle. She wanted to see it — needed to see it, maybe. The land that had been green and alive just days before. Now it looked like a desert. Black and empty and wrong.

She didn't say much. Neither did I. Some things you can't put into words. You just stand there, together, and try to understand how the world could change so completely in a single afternoon.

She wished me happy birthday. We didn't have cake. We didn't have a celebration. We had work to do and grief to carry and a future to figure out.

But we had each other. And that night, with the CBS interview about to air and the oats going into the ground and the whole world feeling like it had shifted on its axis, that was enough.

It had to be enough.

The Moonscape

After the fire, there wasn't a stitch of grass or any remnants of a crop. It was like the Sahara Desert. Sand blowing, making sand waves everywhere. The only thing stopping the sand or building up piles were the structures or implements left behind.

It was horrible. Like being on the moon.

The Oat Mobilization

We knew we had to do something. The best thing anyone could come up with: plant oats. Plant lots and lots of oats.

But from where?

A neighbor secured the oats. And we mobilized the tractors just like we'd mobilized the firefighters. Pulled the equipment out again and rolled side by side, sinking oats in the ground at an exceptional rate.

People with seed tenders going around filling drills. And drills — just drilling away.

Same mobilization as the fire. Different enemy. The wind was trying to take the topsoil now instead of burning everything.

Ireland

About a week after the oats were planted, the area started to green up. It looked as green as Ireland. Everyone felt better.

Funny thing — most of the farmers were more concerned about which drills did the best job. Since all makes and models were running side by side, it was the perfect comparison.

About 3 weeks after the fire until it greened up. Then it was time to plant corn. So the pretty didn't last long.

The Smell

The smell lasted a couple of weeks. But we couldn't really tell — we were immune. We woke up every morning and went to work in the scar. We had to. Too much to rebuild. Too many neighbors to help.

The Sunday After

Sunday after the fire. Everyone else going to church.

I was in the Case tractor drilling oats. Once everyone started going to church, the realization was setting in.

I kept getting texts and videos from people in church. Of the prayers. Of the thoughts. Of the concerns.

And I am 220 pounds.

As the prayers came in, I was physically lifted up in the seat. So much so that I could not keep the autosteer engaged. I was wrapped in the warmest, most calming blanket imaginable — trying to embrace the moment but to keep the tractor on track.

It was then my faith was firmly cemented that there is no doubt of God's hand in our lives and there is no doubt that we were all going to be alright after that experience.

It was the coolest, kind of frightening thing that left a lot to faith.

I understand completely how unreasonable the story is, but it is 100% true and has changed my life for the better ever since.

A town prayed. An area prayed. A state prayed that day.

And we felt it. Real. Raw. Amazing.

And extremely blessed.

The First Calls

The phone started ringing before the smoke cleared. Calls from Colorado Springs. From Wyoming. From every corner of the state and beyond. People we'd never met, asking one simple question: "What do you need?"

That question hit different when you were standing in the ashes of everything you'd built. What do you need? Where do you even start? How do you inventory a disaster?

Hay. That was the first answer. The cattle that survived still needed to eat, and the grass they'd been grazing on was gone. Burned to nothing. The surviving animals were standing in ash, waiting for someone to figure out what came next.

The Convoys

Within days, the semi-loads started rolling in. On Thursday, March 16 — ten days after the fire — six semi-trucks full of round hay bales made their way to Haxtun from Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota. Drivers distributed the goods to local ranchers who needed feed now and would need it for months to come.

That wasn't all. A school district in Nebraska gave their students the day off. Instead of staying home, those kids went out and worked for area businesses, picked up trash, did odd jobs. They raised over $1,500 for fire relief. FFA chapters across the region did the same, volunteering their time and donating everything they earned.

I watched those trucks pull in and something broke open in my chest. Not sadness — or not just sadness. Something bigger than that. The realization that we weren't alone. That people hundreds of miles away cared enough to do something about it.

Absolutely amazing, the selflessness that was happening. Strangers giving up their own hay supplies, their own time, their own diesel money, to help people they'd never met and might never meet again. That's not how the world is supposed to work, according to the news. But that's exactly how it worked for us.

72 Hours

A neighbor lost his camper in the fire. Just gone — burned to the frame like everything else. He was looking at months of insurance paperwork, negotiations, the whole bureaucratic nightmare that comes with any claim.

Seventy-two hours later, there was a new camper in his yard.

Not a loaner. Not a temporary solution. Someone heard about what happened and just... handled it. Found a camper, arranged delivery, got Bill back on his feet before the insurance company even finished processing his first phone call.

That's how fast this community moved. That's what "neighbors helping neighbors" actually looks like when it's more than just a slogan on a church sign.

The Balance Sheet

In the weeks after the fire, we started taking stock. Counting what we'd lost. Counting what survived. Trying to make sense of the randomness — why one fence line burned and another didn't, why one house was saved and another was ash.

And somewhere in that accounting, a phrase emerged that captured everything: "Everybody lost some. Nobody lost everything."

It wasn't comfort, exactly. Losing 185 head of cattle doesn't feel like "some." Watching your best friend's house burn doesn't feel like "some." But in the context of what could have happened — seven deaths across the region, entire ranches wiped out, families with nothing left at all — we understood what that phrase meant.

We still had our house. We still had each other. We still had a community that showed up, day after day, asking what they could do. We still had strangers from four states sending hay and money and prayers.

Everybody lost some. Nobody lost everything. And the gap between those two realities was filled by the people who answered their phones, loaded their trucks, and came to help.

The Weight of Generosity

There's something heavy about being on the receiving end of that much kindness. You want to pay it back, but you can't — not to those specific people, not in equal measure. The debt is too big. The gratitude is too wide.

So you do what you can. You remember. You tell the story. You make sure the world knows that when rural America needed help, rural America showed up. And you promise yourself that when it's someone else's turn — when the phone rings and someone else is asking "what do you need?" — you'll be the one loading the truck.

That's how this works. That's how it has to work. The kindness doesn't get repaid. It gets passed on.

The Paperwork Begins

A few days after the fire, they set up a Disaster Assistance Center. State and federal agencies, all in one place, ready to help the affected families navigate the bureaucracy of catastrophe.

I walked in covered in ash and exhaustion. We'd been working nonstop — fighting the fire, planting oats, burying cattle, keeping the surviving animals alive. I hadn't slept more than a few hours at a stretch since March 6. And now I was supposed to fill out forms.

There were tables set up with different agencies. FEMA. Farm Service Agency. Colorado State agencies. Insurance representatives. Each one with their own stack of paperwork, their own requirements, their own version of "I'm sorry, but we need documentation of..."

Documentation. Of cattle that were now in a burial pit. Of fences that were melted wire. Of grass that was ash. Of a disaster that happened so fast we barely had time to think, let alone take pictures.

Two Different Worlds

The people at those tables were trying to help. I believe that. They had procedures to follow, boxes to check, regulations that existed for good reasons. Someone, somewhere, had written rules about disaster relief, and these people were doing their jobs by following them.

But there's a gap between the world where rules get written and the world where fires burn at 70 miles per hour. A gap between "we need three forms of documentation" and "I spent yesterday burying my kids' college fund in a 40-foot pit."

The state vet who wanted dead cows placed carefully, not touching each other. The inspector who needed to measure the pit depth while we were still loading cattle into it. The requirement for water quality tests before we could bury animals that were already decomposing in the March sun. Rules that made sense in a training manual and made no sense standing in a field that used to be our livelihood.

The Good Ones

Not everyone was like that. There were agency people who understood what we were going through. Who looked at the forms and then looked at us and said, "Let's figure out what you actually need."

The Farm Service Agency folks, mostly. They'd seen this before. They knew what it was like to watch a rancher walk in shell-shocked and try to translate tragedy into line items on a federal form. They moved things through. They made phone calls. They treated us like neighbors instead of case numbers.

That made a difference. When you're drowning in paperwork and grief and exhaustion, having one person who actually sees you — who understands that you're not trying to game the system, you're just trying to survive — that person becomes an anchor.

The Math of Disaster

The federal programs have formulas. So much per acre burned. So much per head lost. So much for fencing, for equipment, for infrastructure. It all adds up to a number that's supposed to represent your loss.

But how do you calculate the value of bloodlines you've been building for three generations? How do you put a number on genetics that can't be replaced? How do you value the fence posts your grandfather set, the fields your father planted, the land your kids were supposed to inherit?

You can't. So you fill out the forms with the numbers they want, and you take whatever help you can get, and you understand that no government program can make you whole. That's not what they're for. They're for helping you survive long enough to rebuild on your own.

The Real Assistance

Here's what I learned at the Disaster Assistance Center: the forms and the programs and the agencies — they matter. They help. But they're not what saves you.

What saves you is the neighbors who show up before any government agency even knows your name. The text message chains coordinating tractors. The hay convoys from four states away. The contractor who builds your friend's house in six months because that's what you do for neighbors.

The Disaster Assistance Center processed our paperwork. Our community saved our lives.

Both of those things are true. But they're not the same size.

The Fund

Within hours of the fire, the Haxtun Chamber of Commerce started a relief fund. The Haxtun Community Federal Credit Union opened accounts — not just one, but several. General fire relief. Individual families. Local fire departments. Agriculture. The money started coming in before we'd even finished fighting the flames.

Community volunteers set up a Facebook page — "Haxtun Community Fire Relief" — to coordinate donations and serve as an avenue of communication. The first post reached over 31,600 people. Donations poured in from as far away as Florida, Utah, and New Mexico.

An advisory board was established to help disperse the funds fairly. Five community members taking on the impossible task of deciding how to distribute generosity.

The numbers were staggering. A steer auctioned at a regional livestock market brought in over $34,000 — one animal, sold and resold by bidders who just kept giving. At an FFA auction, a hog was sold seven times, bringing in $3,650 for fire relief. The United Methodist Committee on Relief sent eight pallets full of cleaning supplies.

Four hundred thousand dollars. That's what the Haxtun Chamber Fire Relief Fund eventually raised. Four hundred thousand dollars from a town of under a thousand people and the communities around it. From strangers who saw the news coverage. From ranchers in other states who understood exactly what we were going through.

The Farm Bureau

The Colorado Farm Bureau Foundation stepped up too. They'd seen disasters before — hail, drought, flood, fire. They had systems in place for this, ways to collect and distribute funds to agricultural families in crisis.

Three hundred fifty thousand dollars. That's what came through their channels. Combined with the Haxtun fund, we were looking at three quarters of a million dollars in community-raised support.

Three quarters of a million dollars. From regular people. From farmers and ranchers and small business owners who gave what they could spare, and sometimes more than they could spare, because that's what you do when your neighbors are hurting.

Where It Went

The fund administrators had the hard job of figuring out how to distribute the money. Who needed it most? How do you compare one family's loss to another's? How do you put dollar amounts on grief?

They did the best they could. Prioritized the families who lost homes. Made sure the ranchers who lost cattle had help replacing them. Covered immediate needs — food, clothing, fuel, the basics that people don't think about until they're standing in ashes with nothing.

No distribution system is perfect. There were probably people who got more than they needed and people who got less. But the money moved. It got into the hands of people who were rebuilding. It made a difference.

The Real Value

Here's the thing about those numbers — $400,000 from the Chamber, $350,000 from Farm Bureau. They're impressive. They matter. That money helped families survive the worst months of their lives.

But the numbers only tell part of the story.

Every dollar in those funds represented a person who decided to help. A family that wrote a check they didn't have to write. A business that donated when times were tight for everyone. A stranger three states away who saw the news and thought, "I should do something."

The money was important. But what it represented was more important. It represented a country where people still look out for each other. Where disaster brings out generosity instead of just grief. Where strangers become neighbors when the need is great enough.

Paying It Forward

We couldn't pay back everyone who helped us. The debt was too big, spread too wide. People we'd never meet had contributed to our survival, and we'd never have a chance to thank them face to face.

So we made a promise instead. When the next disaster hits — and in agriculture, there's always a next disaster — we'd be the ones loading trucks and writing checks. We'd be the strangers who show up for people we've never met.

That's how the cycle works. That's how rural America survives. Not by paying back, but by paying forward. Not by keeping score, but by showing up.

The Haxtun Community Credit Union still has that account number. It's still there if anyone ever needs it again. God willing, they won't. But if they do, the infrastructure is in place. The community is ready.

Because that's how it works out here.

The Donation Center

Material donations flowed into a building on the main street. Within days, tables upon tables and shelf after shelf were stocked with donations for those affected by the fire, smoke, and dust. It was indescribable — just the sheer volume of it.

Clothes. Household items. Food. Water. Pet food. Cleaning supplies. Toiletries. Paper products. Anything unused would eventually go to the local thrift store once affected families had what they needed. The families asked that food donations be given to firemen and those assisting in battling the fire. Local churches opened their doors for residents displaced by the fire and for firemen who needed support and rest.

The Volunteer Coordinator

A local woman had bought an old hardware building a couple of years before the fire. In the basement, she'd been stockpiling emergency supplies.

Two years of stockpiling supplies. Ready before anyone knew they'd need it.

When the fire hit, the infrastructure was already there.

The Simple Things

Neighbors — they helped load the twins at my house during the evacuation, then went straight into town to the donation center. They helped distribute all that was needed.

It's hard to explain how much a toothbrush or shampoo meant to people who had been in the blaze, wind-blown for hours straight, with no home to go take a shower.

Simple? Yes. But man. It was needed.

his wife's Earrings

After the fire, his wife asked a volunteer if she would be interested in doing some archaeology work at the destroyed house. She had lost her wedding diamond earrings in the fire.

a volunteer spent over 10 hours sifting through ash and rubble.

Found them.

The Weekend After

That following weekend, we all got together at my office. Close friends. Finally stopping.

We cried. Hugged. Thankful we were all still here.

Our best friends were there. Our best friends. Homeless. Wearing what they had. Shocked. Mad. Sad. Still in the grip of what in the sam burritos just happened.

But even then — we started making plans. Because that's what you do.

a local contractor

a local contractor had just started his construction business not too long before the fire. He made it his mission to be the fastest and the best house built after the fire.

There were those who chose to get prefabs. But Cash worked tirelessly for six months. He would show up at 4 AM and leave at 10 PM.

He built that house with fury and intent. Did a fabulous job.

For a small-scale crew, he too showed what small-town tenacity is about. Cash is amazing.

Not Charity — Partnership

It was all hands on deck. our friends worked alongside Cash. They weren't just recipients — they were builders.

Jared worked with Cash on his own house. Both of them showing up, working like a 10-man crew with just the two of them. The effort those two put in was remarkable.

Our Best Friends

They were at the center of everything. The fire chief — running comms while his cousin lost everything. Our friends — losing their home, then rebuilding it with their own hands. A Navy veteran — out there putting down cattle with my cousin.

One fire. One family. Hit from every angle. And they all kept going.

The Widow

One of the residents who lost everything was a widow. Her home was among the four that burned that day. GoFundMe pages went up for the affected families within hours of the fire.

She's the essence of the prairie woman. That frontier attitude that's been bred into these parts for generations. When the fire took her home, she took the hit in stride.

More than that — she saw the loss as an opportunity. Rebuilt right there on the same spot. That was her place. Still is.

That's the spirit out here. You don't run from what hurts you. You plant your feet and you build again.

The Mail

In the weeks after the fire, the mail started coming. Not just bills and junk — letters. Real letters. Handwritten on paper, stuffed into envelopes, sent from places I'd never been to by people I'd never met.

The CBS interview had aired. The news coverage had spread. And suddenly, people across the country knew about Haxtun, Colorado. Knew about the fire. Knew about us.

And they wrote.

The Words

Some letters were short. A few lines of sympathy, a prayer, a promise to keep us in their thoughts. The kind of thing you might write to someone you don't know but want to encourage.

Other letters were longer. People sharing their own stories of disaster and recovery. Farmers who'd been through droughts, floods, fires of their own. Veterans who understood what it meant to face something bigger than yourself and keep going anyway. Parents who'd watched their kids' futures disappear and found a way to build new ones.

They wrote because they'd been where we were. They wrote because they wanted us to know that the darkness doesn't last forever. They wrote because sometimes, when you're in the middle of the worst days of your life, a stranger's words can be a lifeline.

The Checks

Some of the letters had checks in them. Not big ones, usually. Twenty dollars. Fifty. A hundred. The kind of money that someone probably couldn't really afford to send, but sent anyway because they felt like they had to do something.

There was a retired teacher from Ohio who sent fifty dollars and a note saying she'd been praying for us since she saw the news. A farmer in Nebraska who'd lost his own barn to fire years ago and wanted to help someone else the way his neighbors had helped him. A church group in Texas that took up a collection and sent the whole thing our way.

Those checks added up. But more than the money, what mattered was what they represented: strangers choosing to care about people they'd never meet.

The Kids

The letters that hit hardest came from kids. Elementary school classes that had seen the news and wanted to help. Children who drew pictures of cattle and wrote "I'm sorry about your cows" in careful, crooked letters. Kids who sent their allowance money — a few dollars, sometimes just coins — because they understood that someone was hurting and wanted to make it better.

Those letters went up on the wall. We kept every single one.

There's something about a child's compassion that cuts right through all the exhaustion and grief. They don't overthink it. They don't calculate whether their five dollars will make a difference. They just see someone who needs help and want to help. That purity of heart — that simple, uncomplicated kindness — it reminded us what we were rebuilding for.

The Connection

What struck me most about those letters was the connection they represented. People who'd never set foot in eastern Colorado, who couldn't find Haxtun on a map, who had nothing in common with us except being human — they'd taken time out of their lives to sit down and write to strangers.

That's not nothing. That's not small. In a world where it's easy to scroll past tragedy, to change the channel, to let someone else's suffering become background noise — these people chose to engage. To reach out. To say, in their own way, "I see you. I care. You're not alone."

We tried to respond to as many as we could. Some days that felt impossible — there was so much work to do, so many more immediate demands. But when we could, we wrote back. Thanked them. Let them know their words had landed, had mattered, had made a difference in the dark days.

The Benefit — April 15, 2017

Six short weeks after the fire, the Haxtun Fire Hall was packed again. But this time, the atmosphere was different. On March 6, the hall had been full of volunteers and firemen frantically coordinating the battle. On April 15, it was packed with over 1,100 people who came to honor those who fought and bring relief to those who suffered.

The mayor spoke to the packed house. He'd signed a proclamation declaring March 6 Firefighter Appreciation Day in Haxtun. The proclamation started: "Firefighters are unsung heroes who are prepared to be summoned at any moment to risk their own safety to preserve lives and suppress fires." It ended: "The Town of Haxtun is greatly indebted to the valiant and hardworking volunteer firefighters that saved lives, homes, acres and our small community."

A free-will dinner fed nearly 970 people. The family who lost their home spoke, thanking the community for their support, donations, and prayers. They presented the Haxtun Volunteer Fire Department with a canvas photo of local firemen battling the blaze at their home. He told everyone that Haxtun firemen had stayed at their home throughout the night on March 6 while other departments moved on — that was something he would never forget.

Community members presented a metal cutout of the United States with the American flag, fireman logo, and the hashtag #haxtunstrong to the department.

Then came the auction. Local auctioneers worked through more than 200 live auction items. When the gavel fell on the last one, they'd raised $142,650. The silent auction added another $12,337. Grand total: $154,987 in one night.

Local musicians played for the crowd until the event's end. Kate told me later how surreal it felt — standing there among all those people, all that generosity, while still trying to process that it was real. That our friends had lost their home. That we'd buried cattle. That everything had changed in a single day.

The outpouring of cards and donations from complete strangers and old friends was unexpected and a blessing. Nobody expected anything, but the support was tremendous. The way everything came together, the way everyone worked together to rebuild — it brought everyone closer.

#haxtunstrong

Still Have Them

We still have those letters. Boxes of them, stored away. Every now and then, when I need to remember that the world has more kindness in it than the news would have you believe, I pull out a few and read them again.

Letters from strangers who became, in some small way, neighbors. Proof that compassion can travel across state lines and time zones and all the things that are supposed to divide us. Evidence that when people see suffering, many of them — maybe most of them — want to help.

That's worth remembering. That's worth passing on. The fire showed us what destruction looks like. The letters showed us what humanity looks like.

Both are real. Both are true. And on the days when it's hard to have faith in people, I remember those letters, and I choose to believe in the better angels.

Watching the Ground

After the fire, after the burial pit, after the endless days of fighting and grieving and filling out forms — we watched the ground. Waiting for something to happen. Hoping for something to happen.

We'd planted those oats as fast as we could. A neighbor secured the seed. The tractors mobilized the same way they'd mobilized for the fire — farmers rolling side by side, drilling oats into scorched earth while the wind tried to blow the topsoil to Nebraska.

And then we waited.

The ground was black. Ash and char and the remains of everything that used to grow there. It looked dead. It looked like nothing would ever grow there again. It looked like the land had given up.

But we'd planted those oats. And farmers know something that most people don't: the land doesn't give up. It just waits.

The First Green

About three weeks after the fire, the oats started coming up.

At first it was just a faint color change — a greenish tinge to the black, like someone had adjusted the contrast on a photograph. Then it got stronger. Deeper. More obvious. The sprouts pushed through the ash, reaching for the sun the way plants always reach for the sun, and suddenly the black fields weren't black anymore.

They were green.

Green like Ireland. That's what everyone said. The burned land, covered in fresh oats, looked like something out of a postcard. Rolling green hills where there'd been nothing but destruction. Life where there'd been death.

It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

Kate felt it too. When the tractors started rolling to put oats in the ground, she told me how amazing it was to watch — how smoothly everything ran, all those farmers working together without having to be asked. And when the oats came up and it was green again, she said it was a glimpse of hope that everything was going to be okay.

What It Meant

I know it's just oats. I know it's just grass, really — a cover crop to hold the soil until we could plant something permanent. The agronomist in me knows exactly what was happening: germination, emergence, the basic biology of seeds doing what seeds do.

But standing there, looking at that green, I wasn't thinking like an agronomist. I was thinking like a man who'd just buried 185 head of cattle and watched his best friend's house burn down and sent his wife and kids running south with flames in the rearview mirror.

I was thinking: it's coming back. The land is coming back. We can come back too.

That's what the first green meant. Not just oats growing. Hope growing. The physical evidence that destruction isn't permanent. That ash becomes soil becomes life becomes future.

The Farmers' Debate

Here's the funny thing. While the rest of us were having spiritual experiences watching oats emerge, the farmers were having a completely different conversation.

All those tractors rolling side by side meant all those different drills working the same ground. Different makes, different models, different configurations. And now, with the oats coming up, we could see exactly which drills had done the best job.

The debates got serious. This row is better than that row. Must be the disc openers. No, it's the depth wheels. My uncle's drill would have done better. If we'd used this seeding rate instead of that one...

It was the most farmer thing in the world. Standing in the middle of a disaster recovery, watching hope literally grow out of the ashes, and arguing about equipment specifications.

I loved it. Even in tragedy, farmers are thinking about how to do it better next time. Even in grief, they're comparing notes.

The Short Season

The green didn't last long. About three weeks of Ireland, and then it was time to plant corn. The oats had done their job — held the soil, covered the scars, gave us something to look at besides black. But the real work of the year was calling.

We tore up those beautiful green fields and put corn in. That's farming. You don't get to keep the pretty moment. You have to move on to the next task, the next season, the next crop. The land doesn't wait, and neither can you.

But I remember that green. I'll always remember it. The first sign that the fire hadn't won. The first evidence that we were going to make it. The first green shoots pushing through the ashes, telling us that life goes on.

It does. Even after the worst. It goes on.

The Math That Doesn't Work

The insurance adjuster did the math. So many head lost, at so many dollars per head, equals a check for this amount. Sign here. Claim settled. Move on.

But the math doesn't work that way with cattle. Not when you've been building bloodlines for generations. Not when each animal represents years of breeding decisions, careful selection, the accumulated knowledge of what works on your land with your grass in your climate.

You can't buy that at auction. You can't replace it with a check. The genetics we lost in the Logan Fire took decades to develop. And now they were gone — buried in a 40-foot pit along with my kids' college fund and my grandfather's breeding program.

Starting Over

We had about fifty head survive. Burned. Traumatized. But alive. They became the foundation of whatever came next.

The question was: what does come next? Do you try to rebuild the herd you had? Do you start fresh with different genetics? Do you even stay in the cattle business at all?

Those questions kept me up at night. The easy answer was to take the insurance money and walk away. Put it in something safer. Something that can't burn.

But our family has raised cattle on this land for over a century. My kids were supposed to carry that forward. Walking away would mean letting the fire have the last word.

So we started rebuilding.

The Hunt

Rebuilding a herd isn't like shopping for groceries. You can't just order what you want and have it delivered. Good cattle — cattle with the genetics you need, the traits that work for your operation — they're hard to find. Expensive. Scattered across the country.

We started making calls. Talking to other ranchers. Going to sales. Looking for the right animals to start again. Not just any cattle — the right cattle. Animals that could become the foundation of something worth passing down.

It took time. Months. Years, really, to get back to where we wanted to be. Every purchase was a decision about the future. Every breeding choice was a bet on what would work five, ten, twenty years from now.

That's the part people don't understand about ranching. It's not just about the cattle you have today. It's about the cattle you're building toward. The genetics you're developing. The herd you're creating for the next generation.

What Was Lost

Some things couldn't be replaced. Some bloodlines ended in that pit. Some genetic potential died with those animals and can never be recovered.

I try not to think about it too much. It doesn't help. You can't bring back what's gone, and dwelling on it just makes the work harder.

But sometimes, late at night or early in the morning when the world is quiet, I think about the cattle we would have had. The calves that were never born. The generations that will never exist because of one spark on one windy day.

That's the part of disaster that doesn't show up in the insurance forms. The future that was stolen. The possibilities that burned.

Building Forward

The herd we have now is different from the one we lost. It has to be. You can't recreate the past — you can only build toward a new future.

In some ways, starting over forced us to think differently. To make choices we might not have made if we'd still had the old herd. To take chances on new genetics, new approaches, new ways of doing things.

I don't know if the herd we're building now will be better than what we lost. Ask me in twenty years. Ask my kids when they're running this place. They'll be able to tell you whether the choices we made after the fire were the right ones.

What I know is this: we're still here. Still raising cattle. Still building something worth passing on. The fire took 185 head and decades of genetic work. It didn't take our will to keep going.

That's what irreplaceable really means. Not the cattle. Us. The people who refuse to quit. The families who stay on the land no matter what nature throws at them.

The cattle can be rebuilt. The spirit has to be maintained.

Jasper Remembers

Jasper was two years old when the fire came. Too young to understand what was happening. Old enough to remember.

She doesn't remember the flames, not really. She remembers the car ride. The urgency in her mother's voice. The way everything felt wrong even though she couldn't name why. She remembers being somewhere that wasn't home while the world outside did something terrible.

As she got older, the questions started. Kids ask questions. That's what they do. And eventually, the questions turned to the fire.

"Why did the cows die?"

How do you explain that to a child? How do you tell your daughter that 185 animals — animals she would have grown up around, learned from, helped raise — are gone because of a spark and a wind and a drought? That the world can turn that fast, that completely, that permanently?

You tell the truth. As much of it as they can understand.

The Hard Conversations

Fire is dangerous. That was the first lesson. Fire can spread faster than you can run. Fire doesn't care about fences or roads or anything you build to contain it. When conditions are right, fire takes what it wants.

The animals died because we couldn't save them all. That was the harder lesson. Sometimes you do everything right and it's not enough. Sometimes the disaster is bigger than your ability to fight it. Sometimes you have to choose what to save and what to let go.

We tried. That was important for them to understand. Their father and their uncle and their neighbors — we didn't give up. We fought until there was nothing left to fight for. And then we buried what we couldn't save and started again.

That's the lesson I wanted my kids to learn. Not that the world is safe — it isn't. Not that bad things won't happen to good people — they will. But that when bad things happen, you face them. You grieve. And then you get back to work.

The Twins

The twins were two months old when Kate drove south with flames in the rearview mirror. They don't remember any of it. To them, the fire is a story, not a memory.

They'll grow up hearing about it. The day the world burned. The day their mom loaded them into the car and ran. The day their dad stayed behind to fight. It'll be family history, passed down the way farm families pass down all their history — stories told around kitchen tables, lessons embedded in the land itself.

I want them to understand what happened. But more than that, I want them to understand what it meant. The neighbors who showed up. The strangers who sent help. The community that held together when everything else was falling apart.

The fire is part of their inheritance now, whether they like it or not. So is the recovery. So is the proof that this family, this community, this way of life — it can survive anything.

What We Tell Them

We don't hide the fire from our kids. We don't pretend it didn't happen or minimize what it cost. They live on this land. They see the places where the burn scars still show if you know where to look. They need to understand.

But we also don't make it the whole story. The fire was one day. The recovery was months. The rebuilding is years. The future is generations.

We tell them about Cole's warning and the water truck he had ready. We tell them about their Uncle Luke and what he did in those fields. We tell them about a local contractor building a house in six months and a volunteer finding his wife's earrings in the ashes.

We tell them about the letters from strangers. The hay convoys from four states. The way people showed up, day after day, to help.

That's the story we want them to carry. Not just the destruction, but the response. Not just the loss, but the love. Not just what the fire took, but what it revealed about the people around us.

Their Questions

The questions change as they get older. Why didn't we move away? Why do we stay in a place where fires can happen? Isn't it dangerous?

Yes, it's dangerous. Farming is dangerous. Ranching is dangerous. Life on the high plains is dangerous. There's always something that can go wrong — fire, drought, flood, hail, markets, weather. That's the deal you make when you work the land.

We stay because this is home. Because the risk is worth it — worth the sunrises and the freedom and the satisfaction of building something that matters. Worth raising kids who understand hard work and community and what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself.

We stay because leaving would mean the fire won. And we don't let fires win.

That's what we tell them. That's what we hope they understand. And someday, God willing, they'll tell their own kids the same thing.

The Things That Stay

The fire ended in March 2017. But it didn't end inside of us.

We still have wind all the time. That's just life on the high plains — the wind blows. But now, every time it picks up, we go get hooked up. The tractor and disc stay ready outside the office. We get the water truck prepped. Check the tires. Make sure we have all the connections to hook any fire trucks or dump on the side. Every single time.

That's what we carry. Not just memories. Routines written into our bodies.

Red Flag Days

On the mornings when the wind is wrong, I'm up early. Water running. Air built up for the brake system. Batteries charged. The tractor hooked to the disc before I've had my coffee. You never know.

When we added office space to the warehouse, we triple-insulated the outside walls. Then triple-insulated the inside walls. The wind noise is virtually eliminated now. You can still hear just a bit in the office, but I put on headphones anyway. Pull down the blackout blinds. Work on anything — paperwork, emails, inventory — anything to keep my mind occupied while I wait.

I keep an eye on my phone, ready to respond wherever we're needed. But otherwise, I almost just shut down on those days. Waiting. Listening. Trying not to hear what might be coming.

I never want to be away when the weather is like that. Never. How can I ask someone else to defend what we built? I know they would — that's the kind of people we have around here. But I feel obligated to be here. To try to keep it.

Kate sees it too. She says that whenever there's a red flag warning now, there are tractors and discs ready to roll at a phone call's notice. The whole community has that same feeling — that alertness, that readiness. We learned something that day about how fast things can change. And now we're ready. All of us. Together.

Still Water Freezes

There's a phrase I keep coming back to: still water freezes.

It's literal, actually. If we stopped — if we didn't keep the pumps running, keep the equipment moving — the water would freeze and we'd be useless. Have to go find a heated shop while everything burns. So you keep moving. You don't stop to think too much. You stay busy so you stay useful.

That's how I get through the bad days. Not by processing. Not by talking it out. By moving. By checking the equipment. By putting on the headphones and pulling down the blinds and doing the next thing.

What We've Learned

It's amazing how much we've learned about fighting fire since 2017. All the equipment upgrades at the local fire department. The training. The coordination. We're better prepared now than we've ever been.

We haven't seen anything of that magnitude since. But the propensity is always there, lurking every time the wind kicks up.

And here's the most disheartening thing about all of it: it doesn't matter what equipment you have. When those fires want to go where they want to go, you're not going to stop them. You're not going to change them. You're not going to do anything but try to work with them and find a pinch point to take them down.

They will only go out with their own weakness. Anytime they gain strength, we don't have a chance.

That's what we learned. That's what we carry. The knowledge that all your preparation, all your equipment, all your courage — sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes you just have to wait for the fire to find its own weakness. And hope you're still standing when it does.

Still Here

People ask how we're doing, years later. The honest answer is: we're still here.

The tractor stays hooked up. The water stays ready. The office walls are thick enough to block out the sound of wind, most days. And when the weather turns wrong, we're here — headphones on, blinds down, phone in hand, waiting.

Still water freezes. We keep moving.

Who We Are

We grow the food. Raise the cattle. Work the land. Up before dawn, done after dark, measuring the year in bushels and calves and seasons we made it through.

It's not glamorous work. Most people don't think about where their groceries come from until the prices spike or the shelves get thin. That's fine. We're not in it for the recognition.

But we've always been here. And we always will be.

The Squeeze

Farming isn't what it used to be. The family operations that built this country are getting squeezed out, caught between rising costs and stagnant prices, between corporate consolidation and government regulations, between the markets and the weather and the thousand things that can go wrong in any given year.

The monopolies have taken over the food system. A handful of companies control the meat packing. A handful more control the grain trading. The farmer is stuck in the middle, paying whatever they charge for inputs and accepting whatever they offer for outputs, with no leverage and no alternatives.

That's not a free market. That's a squeeze. And the family farmers are the ones getting crushed.

Why We Stay

People ask why we do it. Why we stay on the land when the economics barely work, when the weather is always a gamble, when one spark on a windy day can wipe out everything we've built.

The answer isn't money. If it was about money, we'd have left a long time ago. There are easier ways to make a living. Safer ways. Ways that don't require betting your life savings on the weather every single year.

We stay because there's dignity in producing something real — something you can see and touch and eat. Our family has worked this ground for over a century. Letting it go would mean losing more than land.

Someone has to do this work. We're glad it's us.

The Values

What we have learned is the ability to survive, the ability to overcome such forces, and the ability to stand next to one another. Regardless of what nature throws at us, we do not have to be vengeful. We do not have to be pent up in so much rage that we shut down.

We can put on our boots. We can go to work. We can be neighbors.

And as long as we're lifting up the people around us, the foundation holds.

What happens to a society that does not look out for one another? What happens to a world where we do not care how our neighbors are doing? If we are not advocating and cheering on our neighbors on a daily basis, we all fall behind. We fall into a world where everybody just looks for subsistence or complacency.

But if we cheer for their successes, and if we learn from their mistakes, and if they help us manage our own mishaps — could you imagine the world we could live in?

The Warning

Too often in this society, we look at those who have what we want. We very seldom understand what it took for them to get it — the sacrifices they made, or their predecessors made.

The world of jealousy that we have built through social media, through text messages, through who has the nicer things — it has allowed us to pit each other against one another, to consistently and constantly tear each other down.

And even through all of that, people have built remarkable things in this country. Communities. Traditions. Ways of life worth preserving.

But nothing sustains itself on autopilot. Complacency is the real threat — the slow erosion of the things we take for granted.

Why would we let that happen on our watch?

The Call

This book isn't just about a fire. It's about what the fire revealed. The strength of communities that look out for each other. The power of neighbors who show up without being asked. The resilience of people who refuse to quit, no matter what nature or the markets or the government throws at them.

We're still here. Still producing. Still showing up for each other.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, come out to Haxtun, Colorado. See the people who rebuilt after the fire. Meet the neighbors who drove twelve miles to help strangers. Watch the farmers argue about drill specifications while standing in fields that used to be ashes.

That's the version of this country we know. And it's worth fighting for.

The Men in This Story

Rural America fills the military's ranks. And when disaster hits home, that training comes back.

Luke Harper: Marine. Five tours in Iraq. My cousin. The closest thing I have to a brother. He walked through those fields putting down over a hundred burned cattle because he could carry it.

a Navy veteran: Navy. Parachute specialist. Walked those same fields alongside Luke, doing what had to be done.

the fire chief: Navy fighter pilot navigator. Fire chief. Goose-calm on the radio while his cousin's house burned down. The discipline to keep calling it, clear and concise, while knowing his family was losing everything.

a fireman: Let fire burn over his stuck truck, survived, and went back to work that same day. Showed up that night and saved a house from a smoldering doghouse.

The Training

Their training transferred. High-tension situations. The discipline to keep functioning when everything's falling apart.

Luke and Matt did the cattle work because veterans can carry what veterans can carry. Jeff held the radio because fighter pilots don't break under pressure.

Farmers' kids become soldiers. And when they come home, they bring something back with them.

The Roots

My great-grandfather came to this land when there was nothing here but grass and sky and possibility. He didn't come because it was easy — nothing about homesteading the high plains was easy. He came because he could see something that wasn't there yet. A farm. A family. A future.

He broke sod that had never been broken. Dug wells. Strung fence. Built shelter against winters that killed men who weren't ready for them. Every post he set, every field he cleared, every structure he raised — it was all investment in something he might not live to see completed.

That's the long view. Building not just for yourself, but for the generations that come after.

What Gets Passed Down

My grandfather took what his father built and made it more. Better fences. Bigger herds. The knowledge of what works on this land, accumulated through years of doing it wrong and learning from the mistakes.

My father did the same. Each generation adding to what came before. Not just acres and cattle, but wisdom. How to read the weather. How to manage the grass. How to survive the bad years and save from the good ones.

That's the inheritance that doesn't show up in the estate paperwork. The practical knowledge of how to work this specific piece of earth. The relationships with neighbors going back decades. The understanding that you're not just running a business — you're maintaining a legacy.

The Fire in Context

When I think about the Logan Fire now, I try to see it in the context of everything that came before.

This land has seen drought. Blizzards that killed cattle by the hundreds. Market crashes and dust storms and plagues of locusts. Every generation has faced something that could have ended the family's time here.

None of them quit.

The fire was the worst thing I've lived through. But it wasn't the first disaster to hit this land, and it won't be the last. What matters isn't whether disaster comes — it always does. What matters is what you do after.

Home

People ask why anyone would live out here. The isolation, the hard work, the constant risk. A fire that burned across 50 square miles.

But walking away would mean something worse. Letting go of everything the family built. Letting the fire have the last word.

This is home. Not just a place to live, but a place we belong to. The land holds our history. The soil has our family's sweat worked into it. The fences and buildings and fields — they're not just property. They're connection to everyone who came before and everyone who will come after.

The Fifth Generation

Jasper will be the fifth generation of Tuckers to work this land. God willing. If she chooses it. I want her to have that choice.

I want her to stand where I stand, looking out at fields her great-great-great-grandfather first plowed, and feel the weight of that inheritance. Not as a burden, but as a gift. The gift of belonging somewhere. The gift of being part of something bigger than yourself.

I want her to understand what the fire taught us. That the land can heal. That communities can hold together. That no matter what nature throws at us, the people of Haxtun will show up for each other. That's worth something. That's worth staying for.

The Long View

My great-grandfather couldn't have imagined the Logan Fire. Couldn't have conceived of a world where news crews would fly out from the coasts to film our disaster. Couldn't have pictured the hay convoys or the GoFundMe campaigns or any of the ways the modern world responded to our crisis.

But he would have recognized the response itself. Neighbors helping neighbors. Community closing ranks around its wounded. People doing what needed doing without waiting to be asked.

That's the constant. That's what endures. Fires come and go. Droughts come and go. Markets boom and crash. But the fundamental truth of rural America — that we take care of each other — that doesn't change.

A hundred years from now, if my grandchildren's grandchildren are still working this land, they'll face their own disasters. Different threats, different challenges, different tests. But if they remember what the Logan Fire taught us — that community matters, that faith sustains, that you never quit on your neighbors — they'll make it through.

That's the long view. Not just surviving the present, but building something that can survive the future. Passing down not just land and cattle, but the understanding that none of us makes it through alone.