One afternoon I heard a car climbing the mountain, and here came Elmore in his big Olds 88. He got out, took a look at my operation, and said (well, I can’t tell you exactly what he said; expletives were as much a part of his generation’s speech as breathing), “What in the world are you doing? No wonder everybody down in the village thinks there’s a forest fire up here!” He looked at me sideways. “You ever burned brush before?”

Well, no, actually, I hadn’t, I admitted. “Well, c’mere,” he said. “Let me show you something.” He was wearing a nice suede jacket, which is not a garment you’d normally want to be wearing around a smoky brush fire. But he tossed his cigarette into the pile and started pulling out smoking bits of brush and saplings, cursing and shaking his fingers whenever he grabbed a hot spot. Then he laid them back onto the fire, side by side. Within a few minutes he had the pile blazing and driving us backward into the snow.

“You had ‘em all tossed in every which way, and all you were getting was smoke. You lay ‘em in side by side, they share the heat, and you’ve got a fire. Always point the butt ends of the brush toward the wind, if you’ve got any. Feed the ends in when the middle burns in half, and someday maybe you’ll be worth about half what I’m payin’ you.”

I thought of Elmore again today when it started to rain and I got after a pile of brush I’ve been needing to burn. Mostly pine it was, and scraggly – hard to lay parallel. But from fifty years of doing it that way, it was instinctive, without thinking – except of the old-timer who taught me.

There are perhaps a dozen old guys in that now-long-dead pantheon of my heroes. Each of them did some thing – or even several things – beautifully, and was happy to pass it on.

Bill Broe was the most persnickety and conscientious carpenter I’ve ever known. His specialty was log buildings for wealthy summer folks, and everything was done just right; no compromises. He was concerned not only for perfection in his work, but in the reactions of future carpenters who might deconstruct it: replacing a rotten bottom log, for instance, or rafters splintered by a falling tree. All of us on the job scattered our names through his work, tucked into little empty Southern Comfort bottles, where they’ll be discovered someday. He sharpened his pencil only once a day, and toward the end of the afternoon, handing me a marked board to saw, would say, “Take about two-thirds of the mark.”

Jim Brown, by contrast, used a pencil so sharp it was sometimes hard to see the mark, and referred to Bill’s as “that %$#@! crayon!” They had endless debates (without stopping their work) about the right way to do almost everything. Raised in an evangelical atmosphere, I’d always assumed there was only one way, and every other was wrong. But their almost endless debate over the proposed swing of a bathroom door (in- or out-swing, left- or right-hand) revealed to me that there were at least four, and opened a whole new world of philosophical possibilities.

Jim also one day passed on to me his recipes for pancakes, trout and hushpuppies, and corn bread, which helped jump-start my career as a guide. Working with Bill and Jim was – well, you couldn’t pay enough, ever, to get an experience like that.

That went for the cooking in Bill’s camp, too. He hired the best cook in the village and let him buy what he wanted. After a year of batching on baked beans and ham, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven when I first sat down in Bill’s camp kitchen. Pancakes in the morning; soup, ham sandwiches, and canned peaches at noon; pot roast in the evening, with rice pudding for dessert. The aromas wafted into the woods, and the deer, hungry from the winter, drifted silently up to the porch for corn bread handouts. Jim was an animal whisperer, and could feed them from his hands.

There was Bransford, a Texas hill-country rancher, who taught me how to catch a rather nasty cow in the corral who wouldn’t be milked, and hobble her so she couldn’t kick the pail. There’s not much call for that in my life nowadays. But as a retired missionary, he also presided over a daily reading from Saint Paul’s letters. I often disagreed with him (silently; I was in love with his daughter), and realized there was more than one way to interpret the Word of the Lord.

There was Ross McKenney, a former logger from Patten, Maine, who taught me the difference between splitting softwood and hardwood, and who talked often about the fear that threatens to master us when we’re lost in the woods or committed to a rapid that appears likely to end unhappily. It was comforting to know he’d felt it, too, and was nevertheless still with us.

Looking back over these old-timers, I’m struck by the common thread running through them: They were all wonderful storytellers. Once they sensed this new kid wanted to do the best he could, they began to share their skills and, in between the lessons, told the tales of their growing up, their friends, their loves, and the long reflections that make of some lives an art form.