Fighting a wildfire on family land is like fighting to protect your children—your body will exhaust every ounce of its strength. After a dry-lightning strike one September at my great-uncle's West Texas ranch, I ran to the ridgetop to find flames burning in a wavy, quarter-mile line. Lacking water and tools, I stripped off my khakis to beat the flames and crushed incandescent brush with my boots. Two volunteer firefighters eventually climbed to the ridge, and with axes we hacked down smoldering yuccas.

Two weeks later, lightning struck again—this time on steeper ground, the dry grass thick, wind whirling in erratic breaths. Trembling at the edge of my endurance, just inside the fire line, I pumped and sprayed water from a five-gallon backpack. Then my stream died. I dashed to the nearby tanker truck to refill the pack and was halfway back when the wind kicked up and swept the flames downhill fast enough to overtake a running deer. A wet blessing thundered out of Mexico that night, dousing the 200-acre burn. Back on the ridge the next morning, I hacked into yucca roots for the hidden embers that can burn internally for days.

My years at the ranch taught me how simple life is, in the way familiar to older peoples. It gave me, through communion with nature and contact with hunters, migrants, and cowboys, an experience of life that reaches far back into history. Even beyond the era of homelands, I am of that land.

Eventually, young cousins inherited the ranch, but wanting lives elsewhere, they sold it. At home on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, I consoled myself with the dream of someday selling a script and buying back a canyon.

Three years later, at 3:30 on an April morning, a train conductor peered north into the darkness and saw the glow of burning grass. Once again, generous volunteer firefighters limited the lightning-scorched footprint to a few acres. And then drove home.

But out of some simmering yucca or clump of sacahuiste, a flame slipped back into the grass. The fire soon grew large enough to need a name. An out-of-date map led someone to dub it the McDannald Fire. Within hours, it raged beyond the scope of the volunteer crews, blackening the slopes of Mt. Livermore in a smoldering catastrophe hotter than land had evolved to cope with.

When I read the reports, I felt sick. A fire sharing my name was ravaging the place on the planet I knew best, whose language I had tried—species by species and ridge by ridge—to gain fluency in. With a new life near Bears Ears National Monument and a recent marriage to a lovely psychologist, I thought I'd moved on from West Texas, but the McDannald Fire made plain that the ranch and I are connected in ways independent of my presence there. I don't own the land. The land owns me.

So once 388 firefighters had extinguished the blaze, Christine and I drove to Texas. We pitched a tent in partially burned forest that stank of mildewed ash. Most of the trees stood blackened within silvery scars of incinerated brush. Declining rainfall and the drying up of springs meant the forest was perhaps already a relic, doomed never to regrow. Mourning the destruction felt akin to mourning a person.

At dawn, gnats flew into our unzipped tent. Ants and beetles scoured the scorched ground. Charred trees rang with birdsong. While the fire had raged, I'd comforted myself with visions of planting seedlings in the ash. But the canyons will stand as they always have, only poorer and harsher, at least for my lifetime. Perhaps it's better if we cease to experience what land can mean. Then at least we'll be saved from knowing that we're homeless.

This article appeared in the July/August 2019 edition with the headline "My Very Own Wildfire."