It was a good thing I didn’t grow up in Arizona. I was too much of a pyromaniac for that. I well remember a time when I was in fourth or fifth grade and playing with the slightly wild kids who lived across the street. Jonathan and Danny: their house was a mess, and they didn’t have an established dinnertime like we did. I envied them no end. They ran around the neighborhood, entirely unsupervised as far as I could tell, and never had to report dutifully back home at six.
We used to play under the bridge spanning the ravine that neighbored both our houses. It was the sort of tucked-away place that grownups never went. Perfect! Once we found a big cardboard box, stuffed it full of the downed dry leaves of fall, and set it alight. What could go wrong?
Well, plenty, we found as the box exploded into flames that then began to creep through the duff we’d neglected to scrape away. It was not an opportune time for my mom to appear in the station wagon window on our driveway just above the ravine, calling out, “Everything OK?”
“Sure, mom,” I said, stomping out the flames with my pals. “Bye.” With a nod, she drove off—which might seem like the severest sort of parental neglect, except that parents in the 1970s didn’t seem very interested in the sort of helicoptering that is all too common today, and anyway this was damp Illinois, not Arizona, so we were able to stomp the flames out without too much trouble. That evening we all trooped home smelling of smoke.
Which I don’t mind, and in fact rather like. At home we have been spending a lot of time tending fire lately, preferring the cheery glow of the woodstove to the boring and dull roar of the gas furnace, enjoying the way the light of the flames dances on the ceiling and walls once we’ve turned the light out, or how the house stays warm much of the night once we’ve got the stovebox cranked up to a good temperature just before bedtime.
Still, it’s work. Some of our wood has been coming from the house itself, for one of the benefits of doing some gut remodeling, as we have been, is that the fuel for the fire comes from the walls we remove—nicely dried lumber, out of the weather for decades. But it needs to be cut to length, and then split with a hatchet if we’re in need of kindling.
And it’s not enough. In this matter it is useful that I am a hopeless scrounger, always quick to stop the bike or the car in order to take a closer look at the junk piled on someone’s curb during bulk trash pickup week. You’d be amazed at what you can find. For firewood, it’s good to keep track of where the APS tree crews are, for they sometimes leave tidy piles, cut to handy lengths, in the alleys where they’ve been trimming around the electric lines.
Back when I often commuted to the South Rim to give talks or lead hikes, I was an erratic driver on Highway 180, for it seemed like just about every year the ADOT crews would cut back some more piñons and junipers, leaving lengths of some of the world’s best firewood lying right on the roadside. Some of it I let cure in the backyard for years, to no diminishment at all. It’s funny now to take a look at the woodpile and see some of the oddly shaped chunks of shredbark juniper still lying there, relics of a time from before I was married or was a dad or had a steady job, waiting for their turn to heat us all, still as full of latent heat as 15 years ago.
It’s profoundly local work. Who knows where the natural gas we burn comes from? But for the wood, I know, often to the level of knowing the specific tree, the specific branch. And so this pleasure is part of the dividend of burning wood: it is the place itself, known and loved, that is fueling us and helping us get through the cold nights.
It’s a pleasure, too, simply to be quiet by the fire in early morning or late evening, surrounded by a peace that seems very much at the heart of winter. But it has been a tumultuous time in public life, as we all know, and so it was good to stroll downtown last weekend and join more than a thousand neighbors in demonstrating the day after the presidential inauguration.
Demonstrating for what? Well, for exactly what the new president advocated at the inauguration, at which he issued a call for “solidarity.” His speech encapsulated a dystopian vision of where America is—to say nothing of its dismissal of cooperation or common interests across borders—but there it was, a call for solidarity, which is to say, a common purpose among all, with its interesting echoes of Solidarnosc, the grassroots workers’ movement in Poland that was one of the first steps in taking down the Soviet empire.
So that’s what brought the multitudes out on a cold and windblown afternoon—a reminder to ourselves, and to the powers that be, that we are at our best when we really work toward, and experience, solidarity. The hand-drawn signs demonstrated ample empathy among genders, races, religious and gender groups, and with the more-than-human: “I’m with her,” read a sign, with an arrow pointing to a hand-painted image of the Earth.
Here in Flagstaff, a great many people know a great deal about tending fire. They know that fire can be destructive, but constructive, too. They know that it needs tending, and supervision of the sort that can only happen at ground level and only when it is spread among a great many tenders. Isn’t that the constant work of civilization, too—cradling the flames of tolerance, of a love of knowledge, of good stewardship? It’s doing this job together that gets us through the winter—or four years.
