Title: A Moth to the Moonlight: My Journey With “Wildfire” By Michael Martin Murphey
There’s a certain moment in the blue-paint dusk, somewhere between the last meadowlark cry and the first whip-poor-will chuckle, when time folds and memory breathes fresh again. In the quiet fields on the outskirts of Helmond, long before country music was a thing here, I first heard a song on a station from far across the North Sea, a song carried to me on a crackling AM frequency that bent and shimmered through the night.
The year was 1975, and the tune was Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.”
Now, for those raised on the storied legends of the country charts, Murphey’s “Wildfire” might seem like a whisper in the wind—present but never center stage, a gypsy tune on the edge of the firelight. No one in my Dutch world had heard of it. Amongst the rhinestone heavyweights and honky-tonk sermonizers, here was a song that glided over the prairie like the spirit it mourned: gentle, mysterious, and—a word beloved in my youth—haunting.
I remember that first night clearer than yesterday. My father had finished mending the fence line by the canal, and I lay on the roof of our old shed, the air tinged with the scent of early summer, and I pressed the little orange dial of my transistor radio. The song began: just a tumbling piano and a voice that sounded as if sorrow itself had a melody.
“She comes down from Yellow Mountain / On a dark, flat land she rides / On a pony she named Wildfire…”
I didn’t know who Michael Martin Murphey was. I didn’t even know what “Yellow Mountain” meant. But there was an ache in those lines, a longing that rode alongside the melody like the pony and rider the lyrics conjured. To a boy from Helmond, with mud on his boots and calluses on his hands, here was magic.
Moments in “Wildfire” unfold like pages from a dream: “There’s a hoot owl howlin’ by my window now / For six nights in a row.” The image fit those quiet Dutch nights, when owls skimmed over dewy fields and the wind wove its cold fingers under our windowsills. That coincidence—hoot owls and longing—tattooed itself into my imagination, and it never faded.
“She’s coming for me, I know / And on Wildfire we’re both gonna go…”
The chorus unfurled, and each word was a lantern in the darkness, leading to something beautiful and tragic:
“We’ll be riding Wildfire
Riding Wildfire
We’ll be riding Wildfire…”
It’s a refrain about escape, about breaking “free by the dark of the moon.” When you grow up somewhere wide and green and a little bit lonely, those words claw at you, tugging your heart toward open roads and dusk horizons. I used to whistle “Wildfire” on my bicycle, riding the levees that run from Helmond toward the German border, trusting that somewhere out there, someone else heard that song and wanted to break free too.
What makes “Wildfire” so special, so lasting, is not just its story of a haunted prairie and a girl lost in the snow. It’s the way Murphey sings it—with the hush of someone telling a secret to the midnight air, barely daring to hope anyone will listen. Unlike the grand dramas of Marty Robbins or the barroom bravado of George Jones, here’s a tale soaked in myth and quiet grief, delivered with a restraint that strengthens its power.
It’s a country song, yes, but also a ghost story, a folk tale, a piece of pure Americana that could just as easily be told in a churchyard or whispered over peat fires along the Maas. For a boy in the Netherlands, yearning for something wild beyond the plowed fields, “Wildfire” was a candle-flame promise that wonder travels where you least expect it.
The Dutch have our own ghost horses—the “Witte Wieven” of the moors, the “Galopperende Jager” who rides the dikes at midnight—but Murphey’s ghost rider and her tragic pony felt instantly familiar. As if the pale specter gliding through Wyoming storms was kin to the shadows running along our old canals. Is there anywhere on earth where people don’t yearn for a horse to ride away on, to carry them above their troubles, toward that distant, forgiving horizon?
Over the years, “Wildfire” fell out of the stations’ rotations. It never got the endless play of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” or “The Gambler.” But I held onto it like an heirloom. I learned every chord, the trickling piano, the peculiar lilt of Murphey’s voice. I carried it from small Dutch bars, where I strummed it for three drunk farmers and a sleeping dog, to smoky clubs in Rotterdam, where not a soul cared for the song but me.
When my own father passed, and the fields seemed emptier, I sang “Wildfire” at his graveside, beneath a sky too wide to contain grief. The lines meant something more then:
“By the dark of the moon, I planted / But there came an early snow / There’s been a hoot owl howlin’ by my window now / For six nights in a row…”
It was as if our old lives—the wildness we chase, the warmth we lose, and the freedom waiting under a silver moon—could be summed up by a simple song, half remembered and wholly cherished.
That’s what makes “Wildfire” unique. It asks us to believe in ghost stories, but more than that, to cherish beauty glimpsed only in passing: a fleeting love, a flicker of hope, a lost pony in the snow. You can find plenty of country heartbreak in the charts, but only a handful of songs capture that feeling of being haunted by longing, of chasing the wild animal of freedom, never quite catching it, but never turning away.
Time rolls on, the fences grow new rust, the radio waves have changed, but I still hum “Wildfire” when the owls hoot at midnight, and I still think of those old, wild escapes.
For anyone who’s ever chased the setting sun—a song, a memory, a love—take a listen to Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.” You can find it if you look hard enough, like a ghost horse on the far horizon, still riding free.
Keep riding.
Kroes den Bock
Helmond, Netherlands