Ron Henderson could smell smoke as he walked out to his pickup on a Monday morning in the summer of 2013, but he was not alarmed. There's no such thing as a western Montana summer without the smell of a forest fire. Blowups as far away as Canada or Idaho can waft hundreds of miles, haze a Montana day, and make a mountain valley smell like a campsite.

This time, however, there'd been a lightning strike somewhere above the stretch of residences on Lolo Creek where Ron and his neighbors lived. The blaze, which would come to be known officially as the West Fork II fire, was close. For two days it had fed on the fuel of dry grass, understory, and deadfall as it made its way toward them. Another small fire, the "Schoolhouse," had started downstream. Eventually, the two would combine into an inferno that would burn ten thousand acres, driven by forty- to fifty-mile-per-hour winds. But that morning no one knew that. Ron didn't worry about the smoke. Ron's wife, Jan, wanted to pack up and be ready to skedaddle. But Ron had grown up in these woods. And though he wasn't complacent about wildfire, he felt calm here. "We'll wait until the ash is falling," he said.

Ron eyed the tobacco tinge in the sky as he moved the sprinklers to another part of the yard. He'd been watering constantly for the past few days. The pasture that ran up to the two-lane highway was likewise getting a good soak from large sprinklers on rebar tripods. A moat of wet grass might not stop a forest fire from sending a fusillade of burning embers the size of fists onto the cedar-shake roof of his log home, Ron figured, but it could keep the flames from running up to the front door.

As for the house, Ron had assembled it himself some thirty years before, buying and hauling the logs with his truck and having them coped and notched at a log-home outfit in the nearby Bitterroot Valley. It was an upgrade from the cramped two-bedroom cabin that he had previously shared with his wife and their five kids—my brothers and sisters and me. After Ron, my dad, got home from work, we all would come out to watch him put a log on the structure before supper. He would usually run out and throw a couple more up before bed.

In the end, the house was a grand achievement. The large flagstone floor was warmed by a grid of hot-water pipes, the water heated by a large stone fireplace. The vaulted living room housed a fifteen-foot Christmas tree every year. There were three ground-floor bedrooms and a patio. A deck off the upstairs master bedroom looked out over the property—the old barn and bunkhouse, the chicken coop, and the timbered mountainside beyond. In a few hours most of it would be on fire.

The author and his father trade their bows for rifles. Morgan Levy

A few years ago, I published a novel, Fourth of July Creek, which has, as its complicated antagonist, an isolated survivalist. People often ask me if the book is based on my family in Montana—a simple question with a complicated answer. A book is made out of your experiences and your people, of course, but what drives a novelist is a central query, a nagging question. For me, that question was whether it's better to be free or good for society. The character at the center of my novel bears no resemblance to my father, but the question can be traced back to my family of pioneers, ranchers, cowboys, and loggers. They were the kind of people, living alone in the wilderness, of whom you'd have to ask such a question.

I visit my father in Montana a couple times a year, mostly to spend time with him and see my kids, who live down the road. The most recent time I visited, I drove up to his property on a beautiful fall day. The hillsides were scarred with dark stands of dead timber all around, but the sun was bright and warm.

The Henderson homesite looks different now, but it's even better suited to withstand all manner of trouble than it was before. It's set back from the highway. There's always a garden. There's a windmill that can pump water from a well in the event of a power outage. There's a root cellar and generator. There's a creek nearby, stocked with trout. The woods have game, and everyone who lives here is a fine shot. It is self-sufficiency in the extreme. You could live here alone forever.

My father and I have a cup of coffee and talk about the family. We talk about the fire. Pretty soon he's showing me the addition on the outbuilding, a concrete base and hip roof that extends off the left side and wraps around the back. He needed to corner the thing with a huge beam to account for the winter snow load. I ask how hard it was to get that beam in place, and he delights in telling me how he and my stepbrother used his tractor to hold it up and situate it.

"You're not a carpenter," I say.

"Measure twice and cut once," he says. The man loves making a shelter, an instinct that has led to tree stands and lean-tos and even a log house that will one day stand in the path of a forest fire.

Morgan Levy

He asks me to help him chop a little firewood. I jokingly complain about it—the way I did as a kid. We used to have to "do firewood" every weekend, throwing the cut wood into the back of his pickup and then unloading it and stacking it at the cabin. It was a much-reviled chore.

Now, he saws the rounds and uses a powerful splitter to portion them as easy as pulling apart an orange. He used to suffer my complaints while he swung the splitting maul, but it's fun to be out with him today. I joke that I want to make notes of the moment and sit down on the log while he works. He fires up the chainsaw. As he saws into the log, I think: It always seemed like he worked so hard.

You sort of wonder, when you're me, and Ron is your father, how you came to be this person, a writer in Los Angeles who reads and daydreams for a living. Los Angeles couldn't be culturally or logistically farther from western Montana. I have a Marmot Limelight tent, a Coleman lamp, a Jetboil MiniMo camp stove, a half-dozen freeze-dried meals and a large hunting knife. I keep a gallon of water in the fridge because warm tap water freaks me out. I have a pair of good boots, and a first-aid kit in a Jeep Grand Cherokee that will almost certainly not have a full tank of gas when I need one. In a citywide Los Angeles emergency I expect to be utterly screwed. Why? Because in the event of an earthquake, I would find myself with the San Andreas Fault (the likely epicenter) to my north and east, and millions of panicked Los Angelenos to my south and west. Prepared I am not.

We stack the wood under the new wood shelter my dad built after the fire and fill the new furnace—a shed-size freestanding woodstove that he installed as well. I ask him about the generator nearby.

"I should probably get it hooked up," he says, mentally ticking off the other more urgent things to do around the property. Sometimes I think that I simply sought an easier life than my dad has. He does more actual work in a weekend than a roomful of TV writers do in a month.

"Just a heads-up," I say, "this is where I'm headed if the world is ending."

"That's the plan, eh?" he says.

"Yeah, I hope that's cool."

About 1 p.m. on the day of the fire, my father had finished loading the trucks at his job and was sorting and decking the processed logs when his phone rang. He looked at the sky toward the house, where he'd been watching a plume of slowly burgeoning smoke. Jan said she was racing home. The fire had crested the ridge across Lolo Creek.

My dad jumped out of his loader and told his boss, Adam, that he had to go. Both men loaded into my dad's pickup and sped up the canyon, looking for panic in the faces of the people driving the other way. Mostly they watched the thick column of smoke, black and ominous as a thunderhead, overtake the sky. It was like driving into hell.

The column of smoke had blotted the sun by the time they got to the house. It was warm, but growing dark. My dad could hear the fire's approach, a sound like the high whine of a jet engine. The fire was inhaling the wind, growing. He looked at the pines in the pasture, the pines near the house. The whole scene was surreal, but he wasn't really thinking about it. He felt no fear. They had a way out. They had the truck. It was just a matter of doing what you could before the fire arrived.

Jan and her granddaughter were already hurrying important papers, pictures, guns, and clothing out to her Jeep. Adam began to hitch up the fifth wheel to it. Jan was running stuff to the trailer and then she was leaving. Something exploded on the neighbor's property, but my father couldn't see what it was from where he stood on the roof. The fire was here.

A compound bow like the Mathews MQ32 uses a system of cams and pulleys to make shooting easier and more accurate. Morgan Levy

We go out for a hike with his bow. I want to see the whole getup—the camo, the GPS, binoculars, and rangefinder. Bow hunting is my father's passion. Hitting a bull elk with his .300 Winchester Magnum from a couple hundred yards is one thing. But calling in an enormous beast with a bugle while slathered in stinging elk urine, and then silently aiming a Mathews MQ32 compound bow with seventy pounds of draw weight to hit an elk in the heart is well-nigh impossible. It's like the challenge of dogfighting in an airplane, or surfing a forty-foot wave, or writing a novel. It's crazy—a test at the very edge of your skills—but it's fun to try.

My father expects to get an elk every year and always does, with his rifle. He's a crack shot. I ask him about a story my grandmother told me, known in the family as "the goat-hunting story." As he drives, he tells me how he once applied for a mountain-goat license and rode horseback up the south fork of Lolo Creek to Snowslide meadows to hunt for one. He and his friend Joey glassed a few on the cliffs and decided they could manage an afternoon hunt. It wasn't long before they realized that the "benchy-looking spots" were in fact pretty steep and the steep spots were cliffs. They pressed on, taking turns climbing and passing the rifles up, as they edged above the tree line. Finally in a high, steep draw with little runnels of snowmelt, they found four goats munching beargrass. After confirming one of the older goats was indeed a billy, my dad took aim with his .270 Remington pump. He only had iron sights and Joey offered his aught-six with a scope. My dad had never shot with a scope before. He passed.

The first shot hit the goat right behind the shoulder, but the animal took off as though unharmed. The pump was quick to chamber another cartridge, and he got a second shot off. The goat piled right up.

"They're a pretty sturdy animal," he says, by way of explaining why it took two shots.

"When was this?" I ask.

"Oh, I must've been in the eighth grade," he says.

Morgan Levy

When my father gets his annual elk, he puts the meat in the freezer, and everybody in the family eats elk steak and elk burgers. It's the same all over the state. The first time I went hunting with him on opening day, we watched all the cars heading up the highway in the predawn to join us. Every one of those people was looking to get an elk for the garage freezer. Nearly everything you do for fun out here meets an ulterior need. You hike where you saw huckleberries last year and bring a bucket in case the bears haven't found them. You know where to mushroom. When you harvest your garden, you pickle or jam everything you can't give away. Even if you make a pot of stew, you can the leftovers and put them in the root cellar. The more you actually live on your land, the more you look for purpose and efficiencies. It becomes a kind of game, getting more out of less.

Nowadays, all kinds of modern devices make self-sufficiency easier. Take the old man's compound bow: Its complex sighting system adjusts for range, the soloCam reduces the draw weight of the bowstring when aiming, and the arrows, flying at 305 feet per second, flange outward when they hit their mark—vastly improving his chances on the entire endeavor. And if my father's lucky enough to get his bull, his chainsaw winch can drag the field-dressed thing out of some pretty nasty scrub up to the logging road where he has his pickup or ATV.

The most vital thing isn't doing everything the hard way—just being smart about doing it all yourself. It's the sense that freedom is a function of actual independence, and actual independence is a consequence of ability. For the longest time, I didn't think I had much of my father in me—just look at the pair of us walking in the pasture, one with a compound bow and the other with his laptop. But that's the thing: I'm exactly like him. I've always got a project.

I recently took my ten-year-old son to a lecture by one of the hosts of his favorite podcasts, Jad Abumrad. My son loves Abumrad's Radiolab. (Say that five times fast.) He listens to it every night. Still, I wasn't sure that the lecture was right for him. It was an exploration of the creative process—"gut churn," in Abumrad's phrasing. Interesting for me, but a lot for a kid.

During the lecture, Abumrad explained that one can navigate the emotionally treacherous waters of creativity by identifying the "adjacent possible." Instead of allowing all their options to paralyze them, he said, successful creators look for the "adjacent possible" and see choices as doors that open into rooms with more doors. You manage the fear of creative work by engaging with the next closest thing, and then the next and then the next. By breaking it up this way, you never have to look at the terrifying whole.

The phrase "adjacent possible" appeared most aptly in a 2010 essay by Steven Johnson in The Wall Street Journal called "The Genius of the Tinkerer" wherein he writes:

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

Hunting tools, including binoculars, a handmade knife, a rangefinder, elk cattle call, GPS, and a high-speed lighter. Morgan Levy

Not only does this describe the act of writing at its most exhilarating, it also explains my father's orientation to the world. He is always tinkering—playing with a step just beyond the place where he already is. It looks like a lot of work to build a log house or put in a root cellar or install a shed-size external woodstove or hunt with a bow or go after a mountain goat. To me, it looks downright impossible. But step by step, it is not only possible, but happening right in front of me, here in Montana. And it is not that my father is afraid of what the future holds—prepping for the apocalypse or whatever—but that he is excited about what opportunities it will provide for him to be even more engaged with life.

Here's an example: It's winter. Out in the yard, we kids are digging an igloo out of a huge pile of snow. My father is changing the oil on his logging truck, which involves using a kind of blowtorch to heat up the engine in the freezing temperatures. He finishes up, and of course comes to help us with the igloo. The man loves building a shelter.

So we're sitting inside pretty satisfied when that tinkering grin lights up his face, and before we know it he's got the propane tank and the blowtorch and he's running a blue flame over and inside the igloo, melting it just a touch so it'll freeze hard as stone. Come April, the thing's still standing.

So what's the adjacent possible when the house you built stands in the path of a wildfire? When your fort isn't a fort, but a house containing the memories of your family, your children, and your hard work? What does the tinkerer do then?

He fetches the aluminum ladder and leans it against the house. He dashes out to the pasture and drags the two enormous sprinklers, one and then the other, up the ladder, situating the tripods on the spine of the roof. Then he climbs down and turns on the spigot. He loses the barn and the coop and even the tractor. But the house survives because he makes it rain.

This story appears in the February 2017 Popular Mechanics.