Summary

In the chapter “Mount Vision,” Lamott writes that even though people can be hard to get along with and can cause pain to one another they can also work together to help one another survive losses. To illustrate her point, Lamott tells the story of a fire in 1995 that was accidentally set by four teenage boys who went camping illegally on Mount Vision. The boys had buried their fire under dirt before they left but it still broke back out and burned 12,000 acres of wilderness and destroyed 50 homes. A nearby town was saved but the loss of wildlife and wilderness was devastating.

The four teenage boys who started the fire turned themselves in for the crime. Their parents were with them when they confessed. A firefighter wrote a letter to the town paper explaining how carefully the boys had covered the fire but...