Retired Grand Forks Central teacher and football coach Mike Berg shared something at yesterday's session of
Literary Lunches that he thought not everybody knows about him.
"I am huge into reading," Berg said and then added, "There's never a book very far from me."
Berg read excerpts from
Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, a non-fiction book about a group of smoke jumpers, those who parachute into otherwise inaccessible areas to fight fires. Mostly he read about a fire in Mann Gulch, Montana in August 1949, a fire that claimed that lives of 13 of the 16 men who jumped into the area to fight off its flames. Those men died in less than an hour. (Mann Gulch is near the Missouri River very close to where Lewis and Clark camped.)
One of the excerpts followed the three survivors, Rumsey, Sallee and Dodge, and what they dealt with on the ground during that fire fight: tremendous flames and injuries in tough, almost impossible to navigate conditions.
Berg said of the book, "It's held my attention," something which he added has been the case with others to whom he's recommended the book.
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