The Burning Season
One previous spring our friend Tracy, while roughhousing with my younger daughter Lowry, had lost from her lobes a pair of earrings that her husband, Dick, had given her. We searched long and hard for them, particularly around the slide and swing set, though to no avail. It was late May, almost into June, and the grass and clover were high enough already (and the earrings small ones) that we were unable to locate them, though we looked until dusk.
“Don’t worry,” Tracy said. “They’ll show up.”
Except they haven’t. Year in and year out we search, confident that there will be some accrual of luck, some cumulative tally or summation that will eventually transcend failure. No matter how secretively they might have slipped into the Montana soil--two little silver leaves hidden beneath a flake of bark or a bent matting of grass--our diligence will be rewarded, and we will find them. Each early May spent searching is not a new beginning, isolated and unconnected to all the other years, but is rather an extension, a continuum of all that has come before. If our efforts and luck in previous years have not been quite sufficient, well, never fear; all those years’ labor plus one more, this one added to all the others, will surely turn the tide.
But nothing. Each year, nothing.
We’ll find them. There’s plenty of time. If not this year, then the next, or the next. Sometimes I feel a wonderful urgency, knowing that the green grass is onrushing, growing higher each day, like tongues of green flame rising higher and higher, diminishing my chances of finding the earrings with each passing day--though most days the green fire doesn’t bother me. Instead, I put in my hours. The earrings will be found again when they are meant to be found, and it will be like a little miracle. The important thing, in the meantime, is to keep showing up, to keep putting in the hours.
Each year, as a practice both in hope and in the hunt, under the pretense of searching for the earrings, under the pretense of believing, I set the dry brown sheaves of grass-hair on fire in the vicinity of where Tracy had lost the earrings. Part of it is for the purpose of remaining brazen enough to believe in the possibility of a miracle, and part of it is because I love to search and hunt--but part of it, too, is because I love to paint the field orange with flame and then black and green, with but a single struck match as a brush.
Sometimes a major mistake that you make reveals itself to you slowly, unfolding through all the various stages of dubiousness, inching inexorably toward certainty--the faint prickle in the scalp, the fear that one feels fairly confident is paranoia, yet which can’t be dismissed, and in fact continues growing until finally the fear blossoms into reality.
Other times the mistake is revealed immediately with a kind of Oh, no! alacrity.
The grass fire that I set in my front yard this year was of the former variety.
Seen from a distance, it would have seemed laughable. Why was that man getting so carried away with his task, swabbing the great square field of dried yellow-brown grass with one match after another? And why was he running as he set them, so that the little fires could join together like falling dominos, moving quickly, as if with desire, one wave leaping quickly over itself to grow into the next one--rather than setting methodical backfires, letting the dry grass work against itself in a kind of trap?
Why wasn’t the man taking his time and stomping out the little fires, after a while, before they got too big, instead of just standing back and watching them run? And why, for God’s sake, didn’t he have buckets of water lined around the perimeter of the area he wanted to burn, and garden hoses at the ready?
Why hadn’t he checked the wind? Why hadn’t he waited longer, for one of May’s many spring thunderstorms? Why did he instead need to be so god-awfully impulsive and impetuous, so reckless and disorganized?
A glutton, I wanted to see the field paint itself from yellow-brown to leaping orange to smoking coal-black aftermath, and I wanted to see it immediately.
Even as I stood back from time to time and watched the athletic beauty of the fires skipping and stuttering, then roaring across the field, even as I felt those first pricklings of doubt, I was still bending down with that box of matches and lighting new ones. It was just so incredibly beautiful. I remember thinking, It’ll all turn out all right, won’t it? It always does, right?
For my own edification, I want to explain clearly how the change occurred, how it came over me slowly but steadily, like a great tide, this metamorphosis from calm confidence, even joy, at watching the flames leap and run (watching them with the same pleasure with which a farmer might gaze at a field of growing corn), to a subtle and then increasingly not-so-subtle feeling of uneasiness, then concern, and then flat-out worry.
The mind and the body are such a strange set of wirings. Even in the moment when the joy was fading and the worry rising, I continued to race about the field, still touching match to dry grass, a prisoner of my own momentum.
How unlike the wild animals we are, how unwary, how unable or at least unwilling to change direction quickly, to dart and dip and reverse, to whirl or sprint or flee or leap, preferring instead to continue on, as if trudging, in the same habits, same directions.
Finally, through some awkward titration, I became aware of the imbalance of the situation and ceased lighting matches, and instead began trying--belatedly--to control and corral the fire, moving out in front of the quick-running flames and stepping on them with my hiking boots, trying to snuff them out.
It wasn’t working. There were too many fires and they had grown too tall, too exuberant, and were moving too fast. In the time it took to snuff out one boot-sized lick of flame, two others would race past me, one on either side. When I lifted my boot to chase after those two flame-licks, the one I had just stomped out would gust back to life.
Soon I was standing ankle-deep in yellow flame, like some heretic. The cuffs of my overalls caught fire, briefly, and with a bolt of adrenaline, I slapped them out and danced away from the heat. As if sensing my retreat, the flames surged and skittered forward a good 10 feet, rushing toward the house.
I remembered idly that Thoreau once accidentally set fire to a forest, burning more than 100 acres, and wondered if there is not something strange in all of us, some critical paradox that helps keep us poised and balanced, upright in the world, working at times against even our own hopes and convictions.
Already I was longing for the luxury of prickling doubt I had harbored scant moments earlier, and was instead in full-fledged panic, running back and forth from one corner of the fire to the next and panting, barely able to catch my breath in the thick, gray smoke. Waxy green juniper bushes were exploding into biblical plumes with crackling whoosh sounds each time a flame reached them, and the junipers threatened to send the fire from the yard into the nearby forest, with a great fire that would then swing this way and that, swallowing the house.
The junipers burned with far too much energy and enthusiasm; more boot stomps and slaps of my sweatshirt failed to subdue them, and I whirled and ran into the house to grab a five-gallon plastic bucket, and began filling it at an outside faucet.
It was a helpless feeling to be urging the bucket to fill faster, even as I sat there watching and listening to more junipers as they plumed into flame.
Finally the bucket was filled, and I dashed down the hill and doused what I gauged to be the most strategically dangerous burning bush--the one that was seconds away from transferring its fire to the next, and the next, and the next (the flames were sawing and shifting their way toward an old barn in which old lumber was stored, lumber so dry it might as well be dynamite)--and then I raced back up the hill and crouched again by the faucets, panting, waiting for the bucket to fill once more. After it did, I hurled myself down the hill, stumbling and sloshing, jittery-legged and fatigued from the heat and smoke, to the next bush, and splashed the five gallons of water onto it like a slurry bomber unloading its full cargo from far above. Instantly, that bush was extinguished, but little did it matter, for in its place two or three new ones lighted up to replace it.
It was a losing battle and, worst of all, the fire’s heat was creating a breath, a wind, that was helping drive it up the hill toward the house. Seeing this, there was no way for me not to believe that the fire was desiring the house.
I was just about beaten down. I like to believe that I’m a hard and, when need be, ceaseless worker, but there must have been some combination of smoke and panic--surely not age, not yet--that got me so whipped. I kept trudging up the hill, gasping and refilling the bucket as quickly as I could, but the fire had gotten the better of me, and I was just going through the motions.
I kept looking up the driveway, hoping to see Elizabeth come driving down at any moment--perhaps with a second bucket, and a second person, it would make a difference. But she did not appear, my wishes were not enough to summon her, and I imagined that she was still half an hour distant, and that she would return to nothing but ash and rubble, with a disconsolate husband sitting at the edge of the smoking char, trying to formulate an answer for the question that he knew would come: What happened?
It wasn’t exactly as if i were praying in my desperation--I screwed up, that’s all there was to it, and it seemed silly to ask some greater force for mercy and help in a situation that was completely of my own making. But I have to say, the thought did cross my mind, and it did occur to me to wonder, Oh, if there is a spirit of the woods out there that bears any kinship and mercy toward me, how wonderful it would be, what a miracle it would be, to get a little help with this wind, right now.
I want to be very careful not to misrepresent what happened next. I want to be extra certain that I am not suggesting my desire for the wind to cease had any bearing on what happened next, which is that the wind, indeed, ceased.
It lay down like an animal going to sleep, lay down at the last possible second, just before its own impulse carried it up the slight rise and into the house; and in that laying down, that breath of stillness, I was able to begin fighting the fire back. Each bucket I hurled onto the trouble spots now was effective, and like a pool shark running the table, I was able to begin knocking the fires out, anchoring the corners and front first, and then the flanks, making a stand.
Darkness moved in from out of the woods--dusk was coming in as if made curious by the spectacle of all the smoke and steam--and with each new bucket tossed onto the perimeter, the fire grew quickly tamer, until I was strolling through the blackened field like a man watering his garden, sauntering from one fire to the next. By the time true evening had arrived, the wind still had not returned, nor would it that night, and the last little embers and candle-flames were snuffed out, and the spring peepers were calling as they did every evening from their floating marsh-swamp below, and the snipe were performing their eerie wing-whistling aerobatics above. There was time for me to go back and scrub all the telltale boot prints of ash and mud and charcoal from where I had thundered through the house, searching for a bucket when the fire first made its run.
And by the time Elizabeth’s headlights came sweeping down the driveway, accompanied by the crunching of gravel under her tires, I was sitting out on the front porch, listening to the night songs, sipping a glass of wine and looking out at the dark patch of field like some successful farmer for whom everything had gone entirely as planned.
It was too dark for her or the girls to see or notice anything, and even the next day they did not notice the great swath of black until I drew it to their attention: and even so, it looked planned and calculated, geometric and safe. The girls were chagrined by the blackness of the field--I had to explain that it was like painting, that the deep black was a primer for the most incandescent sort of green, which would be arriving now in only a couple of weeks--but Elizabeth was unruffled by it, assuming that the fire had behaved precisely as I had intended it to, accustomed, even this far into our marriage, to the myths of men.
I went out each day for the following week, before the grass greened up, and searched the barren field for Tracy’s earrings, but found nothing; and I shall not look for them in that manner again.
And three weeks later, the grass in front of the house was a richer and deeper green than even I, with the brush strokes of the matches, could have imagined. “Remember how terrible it looked just a couple of weeks ago?” I asked the girls. “Remember how it was nothing but char and scorch?”
They nodded, impressed but not overly amazed, and again I had to marvel at, and be grateful for, a life so filled with miracles, visible miracles, that, while such miracles are not quite taken for granted, neither are they viewed as anything too far beyond the extraordinary, or beyond one’s due. I’m certain the earrings will show up yet, one of these years.