Fire
Our fireplace in the trailer was surrounded by a hearth, to protect the carpet and on either side was just enough space for the fire tools, a poker, and an accordion shaped set of tongs used to adjust logs just so during the active burning of the fire. We also had a broom with unwieldy and strange waxy fibers that never stayed in place. It was helpful in sweeping up the ashes that invariably found themselves jumping out of the fireplace onto the hearth, even though it had a mesh protective screen. Into the black metal can went all of the white-gray ashes that easily disintegrated during cleanup, leaving a mess on the carpet. The black shovel rounded out the collection of fire tools and all of them neatly hung on a prong, one for each, of the brilliant gold holder.
Making the fire was an art form. First the ashes from the night before would need to be scooped out from underneath the grate. You’d know you were getting close to finished when the metal would make contact with the metal of the firebox and even then, there were still many repetitious scoops necessary before you were done. Next you religiously unfold the newspaper, separating each story and page away from the other, sometimes crumpling into a ball, and other times rolling into a shape that resembled a twisted breadstick. Underneath the grate they go, making sure to leave space in between for air flow. Teepee stacking was the preferred way to place the logs, and getting them just so was important.
The fire poker was my favorite fire tool as you could spend hours upon hours helping keep the fire stoked, by simply navigating the poker in between the logs and helping to readjust which way they leaned, to control the burn. I watched both of my parents build and tend to fires, and it’s remained one my favorite ways to pass the time. Years later, when I took my own family to our abandoned property, left almost like a ghost town, the fire poker was still in the same spot as it had always been, propped up against the fireplace surround, as the structure of the trailer crumbled around it.
—-
She was sitting on the edge of the waterbed in our bedroom with the dark wood paneling, and an excited look on her face. Nearly three years younger than me, she was just as gutsy, if not more so. For some reason though, I ended up always leading the charge for big adventures and out-of-the-box explorations. “I promise it will be fun. Let’s go! Get your backpack.” She always looks
at me the same. Equal parts annoyance mixed with admiration, with a slight bit of wild adventure. Her hair, more coarse and wiry than mine, but somehow more manageable and tamed. Today it is in two traditional pigtails, with a very precise part down the middle towards her nape, but they sit high on top of her head, almost like cotton balls
I find myself often jealous of her. Even as we were little girls, I felt she was prettier than me, and more talented and funnier for sure. She always seemed to let everything go, while I made a big deal out of even the smallest of issues. Her way of being in the world was a lilt, and with a gentleness. My introduction to a space always felt clunky and definitely less dignified.
“What are we doing though? Like, where are we going?” she asked, her head tilted to the side. She’s now scooted her bottom back and down into the waterbed and started using her tiptoes to push waves into the bladder of the bed. Back and forth the water hit against the opposite wall of the bed. I squatted down and said to her in a quiet, mischievous whisper, “We’re going on an adventure”
Feeling secure with my explanation and without doubting me for a second, she started packing books, because she knew I would appreciate the gesture. She didn’t need anything more because we’d be back by supper time, and because she was accompanied by me, always prepared. Without direct supervision and definitely not outside of traditional meal times, we were not encouraged to help ourselves to snacks. Since we never had anything remotely resembling junk food, she returned from the short jaunt down the hall to the kitchen with cut vegetables and dried fruit. I stuffed my backpack with a roll of toilet paper, a box of matches, two fruit rollups and an extra large Ziploc bag of trail mix. We were perfectly ready and set up to head out
Backpacks slung over our shoulders, with a small water bottle thrown in just in case, we walked out of the house, sauntered off the front porch, tromping down the few stairs from our trailer house, we rounded the corner by the pump house. Stepping over errant garden hoses and kicking at dirt clods, we traipsed our way past piles of old tires, the abandoned T-bird with the suicide door, and the old pop-up camper, long rendered unusable from the last wind storm.
The path to the hill was lined with barely alive fir trees my mom had planted a few years ago. All by hand, she lugged bucket after bucket of water up to each spot where she’d dug a hole, three hundred odd feet from the house and from the water hose, just to make sure they were well saturated after dropping their root bags into the freshly moved dirt. They didn’t look so good that day. They were scrawny when they were first planted, and the country air and the wind that licked over the rolling hills hadn’t done them any favors.
Sica is trudging behind me, already asking if it was going to be a long trip. I knew though, just where the right spot was and this was only the beginning. I also knew that she was full of zest and excitement for something to break up the monotony of our days. Homeschooling as a family meant that for most of our waking hours, we were together, in one form or another, and adventures such as this one, brought joy to our days. Since I was the big sister, I felt an unspoken responsibility to devise diversions such as this.
I had only recently started realizing that while we shared many similarities with our friends, a big tenet of our family’s core wasn’t the same as other families that we knew. All of our friends’ families are still intact and their parents are still married. Was this journey, and my desire for an adventure equal parts a desire to take full advantage of the childhood freedom we’d been given, and just as much a defiance because of what felt as though had been restricted from us, a normal life like everyone else?
While the highway route to the property was filled with rolling hills, once you got to our place, it was relatively flat, except for the big hill that just west of the trailer. We knew the old man who owned the 1,000 acres that surrounded us, and I knew that if we dared to jump his fence again – like we had when we explored the abandoned house - he’d be right there waiting to chase us in that old pickup truck through the fields, yelling all the while, with his head stuck out the window, his right arm loosely guiding the steering wheel as his left arm shook its fist in the sky, “You damn kids. You DAMN kids.”
Once we made it to the top of the big hill, I knew she would be re-energized by the journey. At the top of that gigantic crest, you could see the entire rest of the county, or so it seemed. Nebraska is flat, for the most part, but here the hills rolled, one into another, for miles. While we owned 19 acres, the surrounding property was vast and literally endless. At first glance, the palette seemed restricted to three colors, green, brown and blue. On closer examination though, it was a veritable tray of watercolors because of the beautiful expanse of tones and hues. On a day with clouds in the sky in the great plains of Nebraska, you can see their shapes, magnified in scale and replicated on the ground below it as they move through the sky. On this day however, the sky was a brilliant blue, cornflower as it was most days, but without a cloud in sight. The familiar whistle of the cottonwood trees attempting to give resistance to the wind was very present also that day, as were the sounds of that same wind rustling up through the prairie grasses.
Setting down her book bag and her own rear end, she said “Here? Are we stopping here?”. “No.” said matter-of-factly. We’re going to start a forest fire, and I’m going to teach you how to put it out.” Her brown eyes opened big, even bigger than they normally were, and I could tell by the way she stood up quickly, and leaned a bit closer to me, that she felt the same mature, grown-up feeling I was experiencing. It was us against the world. Or at least us against the rest of the land we could see stretching forever ahead of us.
We began our forward march, now down the same hill we’d just traversed. We didn’t turn right towards the tree line that had been dutifully planted hundreds of years ago, well before our time. We also stayed clear of the cow pasture. Straight ahead we plodded … our mission clear in our heads, or at least in mine.
“Now watch” I said, dropping my backpack in a spot that felt just right, where every blade was as tall as we were, if not taller. Unpacking my bag, I set the toilet paper down to the side, and wrestled to find the matches. I felt determined and proud of myself. I swiftly hit a match against the striking strip and in my memory, I’m sure my sister drew in her breath loudly at the same time. I think that I should have had a glimmer of hesitation in this moment. I perhaps needed to think it through, but forged on. I was determined and desperately wanted to prove a point. Show that I was grown up enough to handle a challenge, and help take care of everyone.
We had grown up with fire, both in our own fireplace back at home, and during our many camping trips. Fire was a necessary thing – for heating our home, for making popcorn in the black contraption that allowed us to add kernels and some oil and magically have perfect popcorn a short time later, and for s’mores at the end of a day exploring our surroundings at various national parks. Perhaps with this adventure, I wanted to not only not fear fire, but also have an innate of the true power that it held, when uncontained, and then control it.
At first, the match didn’t stay lit. As soon as I struck the side of the box, it seemed to go out and extinguished just as quickly as it had taken to flame. A second time and a third, the same result. Each time I struck the match on the striking pad of the box, it instantly went out. Not realizing the magnitude of the presence of this wind, and unphased what it would mean should I become successful at starting the fire, I pressed on. “Here. Stand right here so the wind won’t hit it this time.” Asking her to block the wind, I noticed for the first time that she looked small, fragile and very worried. She was wearing a yellow windbreaker with the rainbow across the front. It formed a whole rainbow when zipped up, and when unzipped always looked awkward. She unzipped it now and opened both sides, holding them tight with her hands. Forming a natural windblock, the match finally lit.
My adrenaline spiked and I dropped the match into the tendrils of grass at my feet. I didn’t drop it on purpose, but my reaction to the surprise that it finally stayed lit, accompanied by the rush of excitement resulted in it falling out of my hands. I didn’t expect the oxygen in the space to draw up so quickly. In an instance, with no time to process what was happening, the single match erupted into a large whoosh, almost like the earth inhaled sharply, as every last piece of grass joined the party and danced among the flames. Instead of the slow, gradual roar of a fire set in the confines of a firebox, or over a grate, this one instead felt wildly encouraged by the vast expanse gifted to it with all those acres to be consumed.
The fire quickly turned on its own self and instead of normal and typical flames becoming hotter and as the intensity grew, but staying low to the ground, it began spreading like a blanket over the grass in front of us. It looked possessed and driven to cover as much ground as it could before it was discovered. We didn’t move from the place where we originally stood and miraculously, the fire continued to pulse only away from us, and didn’t come near us. Somehow I was more entranced by the licking yellow and orange points of heat than I was worried or scared. I could feel my sister start to panic, but I assured her. “It’s ok. It’s ok! Just be patient and then we’ll put it out. It has to get bigger before we can put it out. Just let it get a bit bigger.” Did I want it to be more of a blazing fire than it was? What rationale was there in only proving my point if the fire was allowed to get bigger?
Mom? She quietly whimpered. I could sense the terror in her voice and realized it was time to put it out now. “Hit the fire with the backpack like this. It’s ok.”
Inside my head, I was simultaneously terrified of what was happening, but I still wanted to show her that I knew what I was doing. I wanted to fiercely protect her. Maybe we should run back to the house? Should I send her back, and try myself to keep this fire from spreading too quickly?
No, that was silly. We can do this. I’m strong enough, and big enough. We can do this.
This is too big. Too big.
SO big.
The crackling of the grass as it was eaten and consumed by the fire was so loud. No longer simply mesmerizing, the flames were licking up the spread laying before it, leaving only charred blackness behind its path. It felt like the sky was saddened by my choices. I could deal with that disappointment, I wished instead that it would open up and cry, and douse the flames I’d created.
Mom?
MOM!
MOM!!! It was my turn now to scream and call desperately for our mother.
Turning my body back towards the hill from where we’d come, and pushing her body in front of mine, I formed a subconscious barrier of protection between her and the fire, even though it wasn’t needed at all since the fire was rapidly heading in the opposite direction, towards our neighbor’s property. The fire I’d started continued to have zero interest in my sister and me. I realized for the first time that the hill between us and the house completely prevented any line of sight of our family, our home … and of any chance of fixing this mess.
We half ran, half stumbled. Tears streaming both down our faces, or at least one of ours, in the rush of adrenaline, I can’t quite recall if the fear had broken into my otherwise fearless façade. We climbed over the fence, much less carefully this time, barely making room for each other to crawl through the barbed wire, and willed ourselves up to the top of that hill.
Mom told us that she had just set out to make the quarter of a mile (3/10s of a mile be exact) trek to our mailbox, all the while, her back to the trailer. The dirt road to the mailbox was lined with yucca plants, and along the middle of the road, grass grew. The only way you ever knew a car was traveling on our main road was to occasionally see a roving dust cyclone as a vehicle tore down the gravel, kicking up a storm of mess. She mentioned – much later in a retelling of the story – that when she heard our calls, she didn’t turn around and assumed perhaps we’d been bitten by a snake, and since she was so close to the mailbox, she’d simply wait to tend to our needs when she returned to the house. Not until she reached the end of the road, did she turn and see the smoke.
Because we lived so far out in the country, and the closest town was Wellfleet (but with only a post office and an abandoned car repair shop), we relied on volunteer firefighters. They each spend the majority of their days at their full-time jobs, and when they receive the call about a fire, they race home to change into their gear, and it can take hours for everyone to gather. By the time they arrived, approximately 3-4 acres had been burned and the nearby plains all smelled of smoke. Adding complications to their ability to address the fire, the fence we’d climbed over earlier to get closer to where the fire was started, created a barrier for the firefighters. It took them quite some time to navigate the most efficient way to deliver water to the fire without cutting down sections of the fence.
As the sun was setting, we walked back to the top of that same hill, this time accompanied by our mom. As we watched the firefighters wrapping up their hoses and putting away the equipment into the water tanker, you could distinctly see the massive ring where the fire burned, many parts of the outer edges still smoldering and red embers still flickering.
When nightfall had completely overtaken our existence, our hair smelling firmly of campfire, but without the pleasant memories of pitching a tent and quality family time, my mother tucked us both into bed, in our clammy waterbed. She didn’t scold or shame us, but simply pressed play on a cassette tape with the audio version of The Tales of the Kingdom, a book series telling the tales of Scarboy and the evil Enchanter. It was meant to soothe us and help us to sleep. Instead of acting as a balm, and as reassurance, the words instead it became the soundtrack to future recurring nightmares I had for years to come- all loosely based on themes and moments from that fire, and from those stories that played in the darkness of our bedroom. I easily recall the heat of the fire, the swiftness of the blaze, the look of terror in my sister’s eyes. I recall turning over in our waterbed, bending my elbow and pulling my hand to rest under my face, and looking at her. Not only had I made a very bad decision, it didn’t even truly serve any purpose. No purpose at all. Nothing was to be gained from that adventure.
Now, so many years later as we tell the story in current times, the tale is accompanied by laughter and assumptions of bravery. It is always a joke that I’m a pyromaniac and a Firestarter when it comes to the work that I do and the impact that I have. In reality though, I carried with me for many years, a great shame in having put my very trusting sister in harm’s way. She went along with me, simply because I said “I have an adventure for us.” Even though I do truly love building, stoking and enjoying the flames of a fire to this day, my rationale for starting that fire so many years ago was not because I admired the flames and loved the act of firestarting. It was because I wanted someone to sit up and take notice of the fact that our lives were crumbling. Everything that was safe and routine and expected, was being yanked out of our hands. I needed someone to acknowledge that, and at the time, it felt like it required something drastic. Fueled by the assumed guidance and courage of the hero in the books we’d been reading, it was up to me to rectify the situation.
After the fire, in the next years of our childhood, we would continue to walk over that hill for new adventures – matches left safely at home - that section of land never ceased to be a uniquely brighter color of green. The land reclaimed itself regardless of the harm caused to it. In retrospect, there was no lasting impact, no ongoing consequence. I had chosen a spot that was far from any trees being burned, and no livestock was nearby.
It was my first lesson in the power of destruction and tragedy. That sometimes out of pain, heat and the burning away of something, comes something much healthier, with new growth, rebirth, and possibility.
