Tough act to follow

My dad was a logger.  A big, tall, blonde Irish logger.  To the little girl who worshipped him, he was the smartest, strongest,  most handsome man alive.  He had Paul Newman blue eyes and hands the size of a giant's.  He could climb and fell trees, drive a log truck on the steepest, muddiest hairpin logging roads in the Northwest, use a massive Cat dozer to punch roads through the roughest terrain.  Many of his friends died in the woods.  Logging is a dangerous occupation.  Many of the men in my family lost legs, arms or their lives harvesting the timber of the Northwest.  

Once, when I was four, the Safeway store across the street from our home caught on fire and began to burn. From the old leaded glass window in the front door, I could see the flames licking at the clouds overhead and feel the heat on my face.  Suddenly, the flames leapt the street and ignited the tops of the fir trees that lined the sidewalk in front of our house.  One by one, the trees along the street exploded into flames that reached out to the houses.  My  mother and teenaged siblings were scrambling in preparation to abandon the house.  My brother was running next door to bring the old neighbor woman out.  I stood, mesmerized.  I could see my daddy heading toward the flames.

He ran, silhouetted in fire, with a chainsaw slung over his shoulder, climbing spurs and harness gathered into one huge hand.  He strapped the sling around the trunk of the burning tree, and started climbing.  He quickly reached the bottom edge of the burning section of tree, swung the saw into place and began to cut through the diameter of the tree.  Within seconds, the entire burning top of the tree roared to the ground, landing in an earthshaking shower of sparks.  The twenty foot stump was still swaying as my daddy slid down the tree, unharnessed, and ran to the next tree.  He did this over and over, until all the trees on our street within reach of the fire were topped, and the houses were safe.

I pressed my palms against the cold glass, my cries of, 'no, daddy, no' turning to worshipful silence.  I watched his grinning blackened face as he accepted the backslaps and congratulations of the other men.