You can find a bit of prelude to this essay in yesterday’s post.
Last spring I burned a manuscript I had worked on for years, feeding it page by page into the stone fireplace. Drafts I had printed out, comments on sections from different writing seminars, pages of feedback from instructors—put together, the sheaves of paper had surprising heft, but they flaked off in airy bits that rose into the flue.
The next morning, pushing the ash into a pail, I felt an emptiness, a hollow in my body and heart. Not the sort that comes after a long bout of crying, leaving you drained and wrung out. Instead, I felt as though something had filtered, settled. The emptiness was an opening, a place I could sit calmly within as I waited to see what might slowly spring forth.
Before the era of fire suppression, and thus before the era of big fire, people knew fire in this way: as a tool for crafting the kind of empty space that invites new life. A friend with which to forge a meadow. Fire could be brought to the overly busy underbrush, allowing, after its passage, straight new chutes to be gathered and made into baskets—baskets, themselves the keepers of a welcoming emptiness, absences summoning future fullness. Fire as a creator of charcoal speckled across an entire watershed, filtering and cleaning the moisture of the land on its way to the nearest streambed.
The era of big fire has led us to fear the opening that burning creates. We see it only as the wrong kind of empty: decimated lots and burnt out automobile frames crumbling in the driveway, entire communities uprooted overnight. So we worry, as we wonder how long the time of big fire will last. Big fire and big smoke. Once, fire allowed us to not miss the forest for the trees, gave us prairies from which to look back and see the land. Now, many of us cannot see the fire for the smoke, as the heavy gray cuts off the horizon and closes in, choking off the sunlight, trapping us indoors yet again. Smoke, both the symbol and material manifestation of dread.
Here we come to the paradox: fire makes a clearing, but for fire to return to its rightful role in doing so, we must first open a way for it, work our way through all those scraggly trees we let spring up in the name of ‘scientific forestry’ and timber profits. It’s then that we might begin again to see the summer as something other than a gray tunnel to be barreled through, in search of fresh air and light. Perhaps this is exactly where we are, in the tunnel between the long centuries of colonialism, in which we denied our interdependent relationship to fire and forest both. On the other side of the tunnel lies a renewed path that we can’t quite see, one to be made from both old ways and new ways that we are still testing out.
The cabin where I released my old work into the flame sits in a small town up in the Mazatzal Mountains, homelands for both the Western Apache and Pueblo people in central Arizona. Throughout town and at the entrance to the many hiking trails there, one encounters educational signs talking about fire and the responsibility of living in the space where human habitation thins and the forest takes over. Sponsored by firewise.org, they often feature diagrams of houses that map out the perimeter of a yard, and label how many feet out one should keep the vegetation cut and kempt. The signs are meant to remind residents that one keeps house in a different way in such places, that your basic duties include not just cleaning but clearing, keeping an eye on brush and dried grass and removing what is necessary so that no fire grows too hot, or finds an easy path to the front door.
“We must live compatibly in fire prone areas,” one of the signs says. “Simple steps save lives!” I wonder about all that is unstated here. Compatible with what? And saving lives means human lives, presumably, but what about others? Perhaps this is an era in which we can once again come to know and restore not just human lives but the living force of fire. Fire, like any living being, dies when fed too little, and also like many beings, becomes a distorted version of itself when it eats too much, lets its desire to consume grow in an unchecked frenzy.
Perhaps big fire is Windigo fire, that monster force that is never sated. “Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else,” Robin Wall Kimmerer has said. Big fire, the colonizer’s fire, moves with the very same hunger that settled and stole the forests now burning every year. Presenting us with another paradox: our thirst for our own survival will not bring fire back to its right size. Windigo cravings feed, but do not satisfy, other Windigo cravings. For that, we need something else.
I burned my manuscript, and in doing so, sought to release all the opinions and desires that were crowding its path. Those of fellow writers, yes, but most of all my own—about which story it was that I had to tell, or the form in which I had to tell it. I cut off my cravings for more words, more meaning, more resolution, all the hunger that kept me returning to the experiences set out on those pages. I dropped them all into the flame that evening.
I believed that by letting this all go I was simply saying goodbye, so as to better make space in which to move more fully onto the next thing. What I did not know is that some of the seeds in that work required fire to sprout, and with time I found them sending out surprising new chutes, many of which could be harvested and woven into new work. At last allowed to grow under the influence of fire, they became short strands I plucked and used bit by bit, rather than the big, matted and messy forest of a book I had been making.
One of the stories I had been trying to tell included how I ended up on a long backpacking trip in 2015, hiking hundreds of miles in the mountains, only to find myself forced down by smoke drifting in from another state. I didn’t know, until then, the way my body would struggle while breathing the fine particulate day in and day out as I hauled my pack up and over each ridge. I didn’t know, either, that this would only be the beginning of an era of life in which smoke would be a regular companion, one that would see me delaying or re-routing or foregoing my regular time in mountains and woods. That even my city life would at times feel more precarious and more claustrophobic, as the smoke traveled down into the valley and forced me inside, irked at having to pay attention to levels marked for ‘sensitive persons.’
Yet that same year, after the smoke cleared away, I saw what the fires could create. Recovered and back on trail late season, I walked across the base of a mountain that had been closed much of the summer. I had thought that passing through the burn might be frightening, imagined charred trees crashing around me. Instead, I found myself lingering, drinking in the color as the purple and crimson huckleberry leaves blazed up at me, all the brighter in their contrast against the blackened tree bones and the shiny blue autumn sky. How were these vivid plants still here, amidst the fire’s wreck? I learned later that huckleberries, like the hazel used in basketmaking, are a plant that thrives in low-intensity fire, its fall hue calling out to the living force that sustains it.
In an area that many hikers describe as ‘slogging through endless trees,’ I did nothing of the sort. I basked in the sun as it reached to places once in shadow, and thought about eating the next year’s huckleberries.
Of course, there will not always be the promise of such harvests, especially as we live through the upcoming years of high intensity fires. The tunnel through which we must now make our way is not so easy, and I don’t know that we can even see the light at its end, not just yet.
Still, I believe that if we tend to fire with a spirit that genuinely seeks its livelihood, rather than just grasping after a stunted version of our own, and if we clear a path for fire to travel, it will reward us in kind. Fire offers us a chance to let all our preconceptions, the heaviness of our worry and fear, become weightless—so much ash drifting away on the wind. It may give us just the kind of empty openness that we need, a little space in which to tell stories we didn’t know could be told.
From the fire, new baskets.
After the burn, berries.
Through the smoke, a clearing.