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Fire
I collected a bit of wood Saturday night, built a little fire in the copper bowl out back. It has been sitting unused for years. Zeke was always terrified of bonfires, and though over the years I would harden my heart to his tremulous suffering a couple times a year and build a fire, the Summer of 2005 put an almost-literal damper on my almost-literal ardor. Watch an entire landscape you loved killed by flame, and your appreciation for a campfire will diminish.
But Saturday that longing came back, and I put a handful of dried grasses in the bowl, some years-dead twigs from the live oak atop them, and the ple roared with one match. A few pieces of fuel wood went on. Foot-long sections of Christmas tree from 2003, a bit more dead wood from the oak, a couple unidentifiable pieces of fruit wood. When we moved here five years ago I brought some plum from our old place. It may have been some of that, the bark long since eaten under a mantle of oak leaves.
Fire is balance. Push the glowing logs too close together and the oxygen is cut off. Pull them too far apart and the heat from each logs no longer amplifies the heat from the others. We are privileged to occupy an atmosphere with sufficient oxygen for easy combustion, but not so much that things are continually bursting into flame. A few more percent partial pressure of oxygen and your house would explode if you held a match to a clapboard. We are each of us slow fires inside, wet fires, water burning as it walks around poking the wood fire with a stick, trying to find the spot around the fire where the smoke won’t go.
I feel sometimes as if I am only truly awake at fireside, all my life between fires a pallid, non-combusting dream. The heat settles into the heavy fuel logs, the fire establishes itself and works ever inward, and I remember suddenly, I think “Oh, right. This is how it is.” I have spent a hundred nights on Cima Dome staring dully into embers thinking of those long gone. I would put a slab of piñon pine atop the coals. Thirty seconds later bright yellow flames would reflect in coal black eyes: A woodrat sharing my fire with me between runs to the cold spaghetti in the pot. At Deadman Creek near Mammoth some anglers, kids from LA, apologized for bothering me at fireside so late. They had caught too many rainbow trout and would I take two, already cleaned? I had five weeks’ worth of food with me already, but that five weeks included a bag of slivered almonds and thick green olive oil, and the fish were soon curling in the cast iron pan.
Cima Dome will almost certainly die by fire: the exotic red brome grows thickly there. The last three or four times I’ve slept there I had no fire, save that from backlit clouds over the far distant ranges as the sun sank toward Los Angeles. It is a choice: belong to the fire or to the night. Each has its benefits. Fire truncates the night, pulls attention inward. This weekend I burned five logs through, and the sun set as I waited with them to be consumed.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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