1982 (4) The Man Fire

Our last day in paradise was spent in individual contemplation; no doubt pondering the veracity of the previous evening’s profound events.  Not much of the day was left, after sleeping off the exhilarating effects of the night before.  Few words were spoken amongst us, as if we were afraid of the true reality of our experience, and what it could mean to our lives “back home.”  Seriously.  Have you ever thought about the ramifications, if it was known for a fact that we humans were not the masters of the universe, but were instead a sad joke; a sideshow for the amusement of some greater intelligence?  Maybe we’re not as important as we like to think we are.  Anyway, before the sun reached the same spot tomorrow, we would be leaving this place… for who knew how long?  It was never in doubt that each of us had revealed a significant part of our souls up here, but we all needed to sort out exactly how much of it might remain here, and what might be left for the “real” lives we had back home.

This, then, becomes the ultimate challenge: how does one reconcile the comfortable life at home with the essential teachings that result from exposing one’s soul to the wilderness, and the boundless mysteries of the natural, uncivilized world?  What might be “real” back home could have little or no relevance to what is experienced in the mountains, where one feels truly alive, and connected with the “all that is.”  How can one distill the essence of this truth, and use it in the context of a concentrated struggle to survive in a false society?  Is that even the right place to focus such energy?

On our final evening in communion with the numinous landscape, there was nothing left to do but to compose a masterpiece of a Man Fire to pay homage, and announce our diminutive presence to the universe.  By the means of elemental alchemy, we would convert our locus from the material to the elemental.  It’s interesting how we instinctively revert to a “primitive” response when confronted by the awesome vastness of true reality.  As if by some unspoken cue from our DNA, all of us began thinking of fire; to assert our humanity in a lonely galaxy.  All that afternoon, we brought choice logs back to camp whenever we wandered off somewhere.  We intended to break them into fire-sized chunks, with the rugged stone tools and other implements at hand, and construct an impressive pyramid of that magnificent Trinity Alps firewood that burns with such primal ferocity.  The unspoken intent was to create the boldest and brightest warning – to any wayfaring aliens that might have unknown agendas – that this particular corner of the planet was inhabited by the fierce and brave, and they had better look elsewhere if they wanted any human research subjects!

There was something so remarkable about the natural firewood that laid all around the Little Bear Lake campsites within easy reach.  It was so easy to find, that it bore testament to how few campers bothered to hike all the way up here for an extended stay.  I’d marveled at the stuff in every previous visit, and so I tried to examine the wood more closely, to store it intimately in my memory.  The deadfalls seem to offer themselves to you eagerly: everywhere you look is a perfect size piece ready to be picked up.  It’s almost entirely Mountain Hemlock or Ponderosa, with hard and scaly bark that scratches without gloves.  The wood is usually from the branches of larger trees, and is dense and rigid, with incredible tensile strength when green.  As it seasons, it becomes brittle; almost glasslike when broken, which is one reason why the “Neanderthal” method I described before is so satisfying.  I naturally eschewed Greg’s new-fangled hatchet in favor of the (ahem) traditional method passed on by my ancestors, and made quite a racket in the lazy afternoon.

“Boom!  Crack!  Boom!”  The head-sized rocks veritably bounced off the taut, thin skin of pine needles that passes for a forest floor at this altitude.  With each new break, I stooped to catch my breath, and examine the grain of the wood; to better know its character.  The precocious material was like nothing I’d ever encountered elsewhere.  While younger branches were riven with lengthwise splits, as they got older many crosswise cracks began to appear, breaking the entire wood mass into hard, cuboid chunks that rang like porcelain when sprinkled on a rock.  In a perfectly seasoned log, these cracks did not cleave until licked by flames, as they tinkled and popped appealingly in the fire pit.  Those primal logs sometimes resisted a forty-pound rock thrust downward, with brute force, from over six feet high – bouncing the large projectiles into the air like baseballs.  I pointed out the similarity to Joe Morgan’s bat, just to remind Chris and Greg of their disappointment.  They threw sticks at me.

By crude trial and error, I found that with branches thicker than one’s leg, it was physically impractical to crack them with the largest rock one could safely deploy.  Where the burly variety of log contained knots, or burls, or some other concentrated carbuncle of growth, it was impossible to render it with any hand tool.  Perhaps a hydraulic splitter would make quick work of them, but with rocks and hatchets, you might as well be trying to break concrete with a spoon.  Those hardy specimens would have to be fed into the fire inch by gnarled inch, stubbornly resisting the flames like natural asbestos; clinging tenaciously to their material forms.

Due to the harsh winters and short daytime afforded by the high ridge lines, the trees near Little Bear Lake grow slowly and densely.  Long limbs that venture past the point of no return get snapped off in stormy winds, or crushed by a winter sledgehammer of ice and snow.  These are the branches that are easiest to find, and they are usually underdeveloped and unremarkable.  But search in the protected lees and glades where the mature branches have died a natural death, and you’ll find legendary logs that could have songs written about them.  Those demigods of firewood are peculiarly enchanting to convert back into the elemental energy from which they were created.  We brashly intended to have a Man Fire that was epic in composition and thematic elements; a burning idol of devotion to the majesty of the wilderness.  The surrounding forest virtually shuddered from the force of our exuberant testosterone agenda.

After an overly-masculine planning session with lots of spitting and scratching, we prepared our ceremonial pyre in a suitable spot, away from any overhanging trees.  We wanted to achieve this mythical conflagration without damaging our dear surroundings in any way, and without leaving an ugly burn pit to ruin the aesthetic.  Al (having been a former Eagle Scout and therefore always prepared to a highly irritating degree) actually had a genuine folding shovel amongst his paraphernalia.  He was anxious to use it, lest he carry its weight in vain, so he dug a discreet pit away from camp, into which we would dispose the ashes the following day.  We collected stones that were already fire-blackened, to extend a ring that some uncaring campers had already left in the middle of an open spot near the shore of the lake.  To be certain, this was no spur-of-the-moment drunken bonfire.  This was a meticulously coordinated choreography for the elemental dance of wood, granite, oxygen, and fire.  The honor of lighting the match was bestowed on Joe, as the youngest and newest visitor.

All the best fires are built in stages that are prepared for in advance.  First, the driest twigs and needles are offered to coax a flame.  Then branches as big as your finger are added in a teepee shape, to create an updraft and lay a thin bed of coals.  The objective is to add bigger and bigger branches in a manner that allows air to flow freely from the bottom of the fire, carrying the smoke swiftly upwards and out of breathing range.  Without proper attention, the jealous flames will play games with you, in which anyplace you sit the smoke will follow.  Give a fire what it wants – ample fuel and access to oxygen – and it will burn happily without bothering you.

Our aspiring Man Fire was reaching puberty when night crept down to the Little Bear Lake basin.  The little stuff had all been burned to create a nice bed of orange micro-coals, and the inviting stacks of arm- and leg-sized logs beckoned towards a rite of passage for all who dared to dance before the sacrificial altar, in honor of the god of changes.  Now, animated discussions and demonstrations were required to achieve the optimum placement of any log on the burgeoning blaze.  The building pattern shifted strategically from teepees to Lincoln Logs, in a rustic flashback to our youth.  The underlying embers got richer, and more intoxicated with oxygen, as the available fuel increased in density.  It seemed as though the combustion began to transform from a feeble collection of disjointed flame to a cohesive and ravenous conflagration with a life of its own.  Just as fire produces energy by destroying matter, a new life is also created from the chain reaction: a demon that is obsessed with the desire to consume.  When you think about it, a fire’s conversion of solid matter into gaseous heat and energy is analogous to mankind’s insatiable appetite for collecting and consuming material objects.  Except that we don’t produce any measurable energy from our consumption – just a temporary, unsatisfying facsimile of warmth and comfort.  We grasp and devour until only cold ashes remain from the spent fuel of our desires: a penance for living shamefully apart from the abundance.

The larger logs were burning now, and the vivacity of the bonfire expanded.  There is no way a fire can burn all that it craves.  Every fire is overly ambitious, and often they can explode out of control: a hell storm of desire run amok.  If it could, fire would gleefully consume all matter on earth.  One must understand and respect the fire’s evil cravings, if only to prevent them from being fulfilled.  Before the darkness descended, we prepared the shovel and several containers of water as a responsible precaution.  It’s worth repeating that our intrepid Man Fire was positioned well away from any overhanging branches and upwind of the lake, where sparks could never satisfy their nefarious missions.

Unofficially, according to the standards that have evolved in nearly a million years of human experience, a fire only reaches Man size when the flames exceed one’s height.  Its core temperature is such that the gases become ionized and turn into plasma, so any combustible material within its grasp will be consumed fully.  This is when the knotty burls may be added, to be subsumed in the heart of the inferno.  Our bonfire was not yet at this stage, but it was putting out enough heat that our rock-stools had to be moved back, lest we roast like marshmallows in a furnace.  The time had come for the Man Fire’s journey into adulthood, when the pervasive, dark energy of the night would be challenged by an ancient, elemental power marshaled by human skill and intelligence.  A large burl as big as my head was wrestled into place over the center of the coals, angled upwards and propped in position by two blackened boulders already situated for that purpose.  This was the main trunk of a young Hemlock – perhaps 9 inches in diameter and over 10 feet long – that we had carried like triumphant hunters from where it had fallen a few years ago.  We found it on bare rock above the camp, where its future value as a nurse log was doubtful.

As the plasma flames licked the bark off the burl, the pitch began to explode in jets of blue and white gas that sang shrilly in the crackling, popping, hissing mass of exothermia.  The glowing spaces between the logs below had coalesced into a molten slag of impossibly hot coals.  All at once, the entire burl burst into a nimbus of flame like the head of a massive Mercurial torch, and the Man Fire roared into full virility.  The gnarled burl at the center writhed upwards in a grotesque mask of burning corona, as though our sacrificial offering was levitating above the incandescent altar.  From various angles around the fire ring, the hideous visage of a demon could be seen leering and grimacing out at us from the maelstrom, as if it knew that we, too, would inevitably be consumed by the implosion of matter.

“Wow, that’s getting hot,” Chris said unnecessarily, as we retreated farther from the intensely radiating heat.  We had now been driven more than eight feet from the edge of the fire, and were each illuminated harshly by the glare: equidistant and equally rapt.

I moved out into the night, seeking its refreshing coolness on the baked half of my body that had been facing the bonfire.  My eyes watered in an effort to adjust to the rapid change in darkness.  This is why you should not stare directly at a strong fire when alone in the wild – you never know when you’ll need to see something clearly in the night.  I had abandoned my usual sense of wilderness caution in my fascination with the dancing flames.  It was as if the fire demon had been trying to hypnotize me, to reach out and consume my very soul.  I felt dazed and vaguely relieved to have broken the spell.  Out here, the orange firelight glanced off the tree trunks and rippled on the undersides of tree branches well past 30 feet in the air.  As my eyes recovered their sensitivity, I could make out reflections of the light on the granite boulders across the small cove at the mouth of the lake; perhaps 100 yards away.  I walked up to the top of White Bear Rock to get above the Man Fire and see its effects from a different point of view.

In the pervasive gloom before the rise of the moon, our Man Fire radiated as a beacon to all mankind; the last vestige of light in a world of darkness.  Its flames reached over six feet tall at times, and the half-circle of trees beyond it was illuminated so I could see every pine needle, just like in the daytime.  Beyond that limited stage, all details blurred into black.  It struck me how much energy the sun must produce to enable us to see a whole forest… a whole region… an entire hemisphere; in all its daylight detail.  From where my friends orbited as planets around a star, four large, manly shadows were cast outward from our sun-fire in a radial pattern.  We were the first objects blocking the expansion of energy, as the surrounding tree trunks added their writhing starburst patterns of alternating light and dark.  I tried to identify the vanishing point at which the fire’s light was completely consumed by darkness, but I was still within its radius myself, and lacked the perspective.  I considered hiking up Dis Butte for a better view, but my toasted skin was already shivering in the coolness away from the fire’s warmth.  Besides, I remembered the main reason for the fire was to discourage marauding aliens, and I had no desire to give them an easy target.  The moon had risen above the south rim by now, and I could see almost every footstep clearly on my way down the rock; drawn back to the crackling siren’s song.  I felt the heat faintly, about 25 feet away, growing more intense as I resumed my place to roast at the perimeter.

While I had been gone perhaps ten minutes, the devilish burl had broken off at the bottom, in the shape of a flaming skull missing its lower jaw.  Beneath the core mass still pulsating with plasma, a cavernous grotto of white-hot embers had coalesced into a seething cauldron of molten lava.  I tossed a pine cone into its center after several aborted tries.  It was hard to get close enough to be accurate due to the intensity of the heat.  Instantly, the pine cone appeared to fold in on itself before its pitch vaporized like a flash bulb.  There were areas of the fire that were painful to look at, dazzling in white and yellow solar flares, seeming to poach our eyeballs in their sockets.  The core of the Man Fire was lustful and strong, thrusting upwards in a vortex of flame that spiraled mightily into the receptive atmosphere.  Truly, this was an apotheosis of combustion, and none of us could bear to look away from the awesome, primal conversion of matter to energy.  We were all channeling our inner Cro-Magnons, fearful of looking over our shoulders into the unseen eyes of the mysterious night; in a scene repeated from our ancestors so long ago.

Finally, the mocking, diabolical burl burned through and fell into the pit of the furnace, sending a spiral of sparks dancing up to the Milky Way.  The life of the fire had climaxed, and over the next few hours, as we fed the rest of the gnarled log into its mouth foot by foot, its energy waned and settled into a quagmire of pulsing, orange and yellow magma.  We let it burn down, and moved closer as the radiating heat receded, and finally noticed the severe coldness of our backsides, which had numbed in the chill night air.  To compensate, we turned one side and the other to the fire like rotisseries.  The nearly-full moon was high in the sky when we began feeling the exhaustion of staying up all the night before.  By the time we finally gave up, the once epic Man Fire had buried itself in a grave of dark red coals that glimmered faintly like landing lights on a foggy runway.  It was as if the fire had sucked all the energy out of us, leaving five slumping slag heaps of melted flesh.  Our last humble act was to flow in the general direction of our sleeping bags and burrow deep, the way grilled hot dogs fit inside their buns.