Free Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson Page B

east–west route that traversed the Cascade Mountain Range, which separated the dry half of the state from the wet half, where we lived. These days Interstate 90 skirted the town by a good quarter mile. The old highway was now the main drag in town, the speed limit twenty-five MPH.
    When Lorie and I first moved here as newlyweds, the occasional stray dog could be observed sleeping undisturbed in the middle of any of the side streets. Most locals didn’t even bother to honk their horns—knew the dogs and the owners, just pulled around or waited for the pooch to wake up and move. The town was small enough then (under twenty-five hundred people) that we all felt like neighbors. Then came the outlet mall and fast-food chains next to the freeway and later the upscale housing developments.
    These days people drove faster, meaner, gunned their engines at stoplights, rode your bumper, gave you the bone. Just like everywhere else.
    The fire station was a block north of North Bend Way, on a street still quiet enough that sometimes in the summer we dragged folding chairs out in front of the station and drank iced tea. Immediately north of the station was a small cluster of housing, a stray apartment building, and the North Bend branch of the King County Library. Farther north, things became rural, although new houses were going up all the time.
    My daughters and I lived farther north, our lot snug under Mount Si, the four-thousand-foot monolith rising almost straight up from the flat valley floor.
    Mount Si was the first vista strangers saw driving into town and the last one they saw upon leaving. The mountain never failed to inspire awe, especially in the winter, when the top third was encapsulated in snow and ice. The west face, the face that hovered over town, was almost a sheer cliff. In the still of the night we could sometimes hear rock slides rumbling down the face like cannon fire, taking out trees, forging long, rocky chutes above my house.
    There were ancient boulders in the field next to our house, evidence of rockfalls that surely would have swept away our home had it been there five hundred years earlier. In the middle of the night, when we heard the mountain rumbling, the girls would climb into my bed. Helen Neumann from next door would call and ask in a tremulous voice if we were evacuating. We never were.
    To the west of town, the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River ran near the heavily guarded Nintendo plant. There was a winery that had burned down years earlier, pastureland that developers and the town were squabbling over. As always, the developers would prevail. I had no doubt of it.
    East of the city center, a golf course had been cut up, paved over, and converted into minuscule lots with monstrous houses sitting on them. Joel McCain lived in one of these. More houses and planned developments could be found off the Mount Si Road, which ran parallel with the pass highway. Clusters of new housing surrounded Truck Town farther east.
    Just as the freeway began working its way up the foothills to three-thousand-foot Snoqualmie Pass, Edgewick Road took off south and snaked into the hills, dead-ending near the Cedar River Watershed, which fed freshwater to a good portion of the Seattle metro area. Generally, people didn’t take Edgewick Road unless they knew somebody up there.
    That was where we were headed.
    Our alarm had been phoned in by Max Caputo.
    We’d seen Caputo before. He’d lived in North Bend all his life, could barely read, and if he could write, I didn’t know anybody who had proof of it. His grandfather, father, and uncles had come to the region fifty years ago looking for trees to cut down, but now that the logging industry was dying, the older Caputos had retired and the younger ones had turned to more traditional blue-collar occupations: butcher, house builder, auto mechanic, and, in Max’s case, floral deliveryman, along with the occasional petty theft.
    Caputo lived on wooded property in a