All of the speakers I listened to at the writers conferences that I went to as a kid said the same thing. “write what you know.” In other words, Bullshit is transparent. So here I am, writing about the thing I know, because it is the thing I love. But can anybody ever really know fire? For all of our studies and protocols and predictions, there is still no way to say for certain if the burnout operation at 4 AM is going to torch the 200 foot conifers when RH should be at it’s peak. There’s no way to predict whether the wind that is working so beautifully on your behalf for hours will suddenly spin on it’s heel and spit in your face. I think I know fire simply because I love it, I gravitate towards it and am irrevocably fascinated by it. Maybe it is my lifelong quest for god that has led me to sit at the feet of the flames, worshipping the godlike and mysterious qualities. They share many characteristics, god and fire. Hell, I am not the first to notice. The Hebrew word for fire is closely related to the unutterable name of the One True God. I couldn’t ever quite grasp the "gods" that religions present, so I threw it all out the window and grabbed the tangible, obvious higher power. If there is a God, he lives in the fire, and the wind, the people and the earth and the powers that we can neither control or predict. That is God, and that is as much as I ever hope or need to know about him (or fire). You can live by certain parameters that better your odds of surviving the flames, just like you can walk the lines of morality that make coexistence with other humans possible and bearable. Yeah, god is in the flames, and there really isn’t any place I’d rather be than up close and personal with this higher power that walks the earth, consuming everything in it’s path and pulling back up into the heavens for a reprieve on a whim.
Ok, so now that we've established that I don’t really know fire, maybe it is transparent bullshit, but it’s real to me, and it is what I have immersed myself in for the part of my adult life that wasn't drowned in kids and diapers and nursing bras and dishes. Somebody asked me once on the fireline if I had ever set anything on fire as a kid. Sheepishly I told the story of lighting my grandmothers carpet on fire in her retirement home with her cigarette lighter. I was congratulated at meeting the firefighter prerequisite of being a pyromaniac....
(summer of 2007)
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