Slapout, Oklahoma, at the intersection of a county road and a much used east-west state highway, has a population of five. The town’s name used to be Nye, but in the nineteen-fifties its residents, who were then more numerous, changed it. Locals explain that there was a store in Nye where, if you asked the owner for a particular item, he often went to look for it and came back and said, “We’re slap out of it!” How this inspired a name change no one knows. Now the store is gone, and the town consists of a single building that’s a combination gas station, truck stop, convenience mart, café, and improvised community center. In the dark of early morning, it’s jumping with truckers, oil-field workers, guys who drive the county road graders, and farmers who have been baling hay all night. A hand-lettered sign on the door reads “Please hang on to the door.” This is so the howling prairie wind won’t keep yanking it open and undoing the feeling of comfort inside.

Just to the south on the county road stands the Slapout firehouse, a metal building with three bay doors and six enormous fire trucks behind them. These vehicles, acquired from the military and the forest service, have been modified for prairie firefighting by the firemen themselves, all of whom are volunteers. Charlie Starbuck is the fire chief. He objects to being called Charles; it’s Charlie on his birth certificate. Starbuck has a drooping, Emiliano Zapata mustache and green eyes and he wears overalls, end-of-the-nose spectacles, and a rumpled Army-fatigue hat. His father was a fire chief before him. On his muscled forearms are multiple reddish burns made by sparks from welding, a regular occupation at his ranch, not far from town, as well as at the firehouse.

On the morning of March 6, 2017, Starbuck’s pager went off at ten-fifty-three and informed him that a grass fire was burning in the Mocane oil field, by County Road 141 in Beaver County, north of Slapout. Its cause was a downed power line. With three trucks and eight of his crew, he drove to the fire and saw that it had already blown up to a size where, given the conditions, he was going to need help. He called neighboring fire departments. Texas County, just to the west, sent trucks—“I will praise Texas County till the day I die,” Starbuck says. He also called Mark Goeller, the director of Oklahoma Forestry Services, who, needing a name for the fire, used Starbuck’s. Sometime afterward, Starbuck’s sister in Virginia called him to ask about the Starbuck Fire she had heard mentioned on the news. That was the first he learned of his fame.

For weeks, the National Weather Service out of Norman, Oklahoma, Amarillo, Texas, and Dodge City, Kansas, had been sending alerts. The conditions were perfect for wildfires. There had been almost no precipitation for six months; before that, however, a lot of rain had fallen, and now the plentiful prairie grasses stood up tall and tinder-dry. On some days, like this one, the winds blew at fifty-plus miles an hour, while the humidity dipped down into the single digits. An ice storm in January had damaged scores of power lines, making them more vulnerable. Often, the Weather Service alerts are mainly precautionary. But on this day the south-central Great Plains did indeed catch fire. Huge wildfires spread over the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and in western Kansas, with a smaller burn in Colorado.

This is a part of the world where extreme weather hangs out. Meteorologists refer to the prevailing late-winter “dry line,” a phenomenon found almost nowhere else, which in this case is produced by hot, dry air from the Mexican plateau colliding with moist air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico. In March and April, if there’s an incoming storm system as a trigger, the combination of wet and dry explodes above the plains. High winds generated by the dry line contributed to some of the dust storms of the nineteen-thirties. Plowed ground on the plains blew away during those years; later, the government encouraged agriculture that returned the land to grass. The big dust storms haven’t reappeared since, but now when the winds come the grass holding the soil in place is sometimes thoroughly ready to burn.

A megafire is considered to be one that burns more than a hundred thousand acres. In Oklahoma, the total burned in the March 6th fires was seven hundred and eighty-one thousand acres. Moving northeast with the wind, the Starbuck Fire soon crossed into Kansas. Eventually, the Starbuck and other nearby fires would be given an official, bureaucratic handle, the Northwest Complex Fire, but, to the people most affected, the fires that burned six hundred and eight thousand Kansas acres are still called by the name of a fire chief in Oklahoma. In the Texas Panhandle, fires burned four hundred and eighty-two thousand acres. Seven people are thought to have died in the March 6th fires. The expanse of burned land on the south-central Great Plains amounted to almost two million acres—roughly three thousand square miles. Rhode Island, that useful state for comparing geographic measure, covers about a thousand square miles of land. The March 6th fires burned an area about the size of three Rhode Islands.

Ashland, Kansas, is almost fifty miles from Slapout, if you follow a straight line across the prairie. As the county seat of Clark County, Ashland grew along the gentle valley of a creek, with ambitious streets as wide as big-city avenues. After going through a familiar Great Plains cycle of boom and not quite bust, the town today has a population of about eight hundred and fifty. Two water towers rise at either end of town; swallows swoop and dive around the tall, white grain elevators at Ashland Feed & Seed, by the train tracks at the end of Main Street. A twenty-foot-high bas-relief map on the front of the courthouse shows the county’s historic sites, including the place where one of Coronado’s men lost a bridle bit when they were looking for the rumored Cities of Gold in the vicinity in 1541. The intricate, rusted, ancient object is on display in a glass case next to the district-court clerk’s office.

Millie Fudge, Clark County’s head of emergency-management operations, is in her late sixties. Mildred Barnes was her name growing up; she has lived her entire life in the western part of the state. Dark-eyed, with short, light-brown hair and black-rimmed glasses, she walks leaning forward a bit, as if successfully towing a great weight. Her twanging, slightly gravelly voice projects calm, and her silences have formidable presence. Everyday attire for her includes a dark-blue T-shirt, bluejeans, running shoes, and a camouflage holster on her belt containing a radio. From time to time the radio squawks, and she answers it. She works with the volunteer fire departments and the police, not only in Ashland but also in the county’s two other towns, both of which are smaller. Her office is in the ambulance building, because she is also the E.M.S. director for the county.

Millie’s husband, Gary Fudge, is a retired truck driver. The couple married in 1970 and moved to Ashland in 1979. They had three boys and a girl. Their third son, Brannon, born in 1981, suffered from a brain disease called Rasmussen’s encephalitis, which caused him to have as many as three hundred seizures a day. When Brannon was seven, his parents took him to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, where Dr. Ben Carson (now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) performed a brain operation called a hemispherectomy, which cured the seizures and allowed the boy to function. Brannon learned how to talk and take care of himself, and did well until his late teens, when another operation was necessary. He graduated from high school in 2000, but because he required monitoring he stayed in Ashland and opened an ice-cream shop called Fudge Man’s. “He and I ran it together,” Millie says. “He loved people and they loved him. In fact, he enjoyed visiting with customers so much that he sometimes ignored business and I’d have to remind him about it.”

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In 2002, because of complications resulting from a hairline fracture in his skull, Brannon went to a hospital in Wichita, and while recovering from surgery he lapsed into a coma. After thirty-three days, his family made the decision to take him off life support. The experience led his mother into despair. She got through this period only by the grace of God, she says. Her family’s ordeal left her with love for her Ashland neighbors for patronizing Brannon’s shop and supporting her family and being with them as they grieved. In a way, Brannon was why she got into public service in the first place. She had signed up for her first E.M.S. course back in 1983, partly so she would be able to take care of him and her other children.