The Logan Notebooks

Fires

81 The spark-creak and rise in a fire pit.The sheet-snap in a hearth.Whenever we turn on the gas fireplace in our apartment, the whole room smells like crayons. We sit on the floor around the coffee table, playing Scrabble for the umpteenth time. I never win. I just stretch out my hand to feel the radiant heat from the fireplace shining on the cat’s starboard side. I watch him, in his mustard-yellow hoodie, sliver wood for kindling. I’m sitting at a picnic table, taking an avocado apart, listening to the dog in the river a few paces away. Now he’s blowing gently into the stone drum where the fire will hatch. He stands, claps his hands and rubs them together. All right, he says. Let’s burn some steaks. Some fires are very small, like fire atop a candle.The little cat walked her tail through it once, and licked the coarse fur for the rest of the day. Or like the fire on the oven’s floor, when the pepper I was roasting burst too early and a bit of its flesh seared to the filament. Some fires, like the bonfire we built out at the SunTunnels, are bigger, and that one kept popping green and neon blue from the paint or veneer or whatever was all over the salvaged four-by-fours.We stood as close as we could without setting ourselves ablaze, kept throwing on fuel to keep the fanged and hungry cold at bay. But some fires fill the valley with the smell of burning. A little ash drifts down around your shade umbrella into your pasta salad. I’m sitting in the cafe, missing the man in the mustard-yellow hoodie, when in saunters a group of handsome, filthy men in knee-high work boots and identicalT-shirts: Lone Peak Hot Shots.The valley air has been thickening for days while two serpentine fires hatched from lightning-struck embers breathe fires 82 their way down canyon, and canyon.These are the wild-haired youths whose job it is to lash them into submission, now collecting their iced lattes and bagels. To be redeemed from fire by fire. Years ago, one such fellow told me that so much fire moving the way it does—it undulates, the fire and its seven veils—can mesmerize a man, so by the time he realizes how close it is, fire has its lethal tongue in his ear. Not long after, Margaret and I will be going to sleep in a steep Andean valley, while up the black peaks, a terrible crest of flames shakes itself fuller and fuller in the black. It makes a dangerous orange fortification around the small village, its roof-tiles watched over by so many little guardian bulls, cobbled streets guttered with running water.The same smell of woodsmoke, but different. Like something ancient, without challenger. Like something mean I feared had hatched in me. All night long, I could hear it crumpling and uncrumpling itself in the dark. When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. Sometimes, driving down theWest, you’ll come to a place along the road where everything is blackened, soft, and you can still see tattered remnants of flame.They do this periodically to clear out the duff, to keep conditions from becoming catastrophic, to make room for some new not-yet-thought-of thing. ...