ESSAYS
Fire and the Violence of TimeIOWA CITY, IOWA 07 November 2007 |
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Nebulous pleasure will flee toward the horizon
Like an actress who disappears into the wings;
Every instant devours a piece of the pleasure
Granted to every man for his entire season.
-Baudelaire, from The Clock
When I was very young, I loved the warm, dry, desert winds that come tearing into Southern California around Halloween. They made me restless and wild. I’d stay out as late as I could. It was like swimming. Open your front door and plunge into the wind. Dead date palm fronds were blown free. Dry leaves scraped and swirled against the asphalt. On my skateboard, I could glide from the top of my street to the high bluffs at the end, never once touching foot to road. I made long sweeping arcs, spreading my arms wide pretending to fly. The sky was washed of smog leaving the nights empty, clear and blue.
Sometimes the power blew out and the neighborhood would go black. There were jack-o’-lanterns in windows and on front porches – their candles flickering wildly in the wind. At night, I’d lie awake listening to the trees and to the rhythmic crunch of car tires passing over a fallen palm frond. Sometimes I’d slip outside and sit in the warm blowing air listening to the rustling trees.
One late October, the dry brown hills north of Sunset Boulevard were suddenly ablaze. Our neighbors were out on the street looking upwards at the dazzling flames spreading across the ridge. I stood with my parents watching the fire burn brighter as the winds gusted harder and harder. There were howling fire engines. The police were only allowing residents onto the streets. Soon there were evacuations and a girl named Holly, with blue eyes and blond curly hair, came to spend the night.
A week before at her house, she’d put flour tortillas directly onto the gas stove. It wasn’t allowed. Not without her mother there. Never touch the stove. But she did it anyway, turned on the flame and bravely flipped them by hand until they were hot and slightly charred. She spread them with butter and we ate them in her backyard watching a pile of leaves blow apart. I remember, with inexplicable intensity, the flavor of barely burned flour, the crisp blackened edges, the melted butter, the expert way she rolled those tortillas.
I wish I remembered what we talked about.
Now fire brought her back to me. It was a happy chaos. I don’t remember where her parents stayed or why she wasn’t with them - only that she slept on the floor of my room and that I was grateful for the fire. I wanted it to burn forever, but eventually Holly returned to her home surrounded by barren smoking hills.
I never saw her again.
Later that fall, with the winds still blowing, I awoke in the middle of the night. Someone was screaming. I was terrified and left my room to find my parents. My father, already dressed, had our big black dog on a leash and a baseball bat in his hand. We lived on a street above a large public high school and the ceaseless screaming rose up and spread out on the blowing wind.
My mom and I waited together as my dad walked with our dog down towards the school. There was a boy hanging chained by his wrists from a metal bar over an outdoor eating area. He’d been strung up as a fraternity initiation rite and left to find his own way down; he was screaming for someone to help him. There was nothing my dad could do but wrap his arms around the boy’s legs and bear some of his weight while they waited together in the dark for firemen to come with a ladder and bolt-cutters.
Falling back asleep I imagined hanging there by my wrists, turning slowly in the wind, the chains cutting into my skin. I thought about how lonely it must have been, how much pain he would have endured. I remember being frightened lying there alone in my bed, listening to the dry swaying trees, still hearing his screaming, imagining that boy hanging there with no one to save him.
The world seemed to shift slightly that October. Violence had brushed softly against me. The fire was a beautiful thing to see. It’s power and threat was hidden from me. It was impossible that our house would burn. It couldn’t. I’d never considered it. But those screams had floated through my window. They stirred me from sleep and left me to wonder what was out there in the night.
Soon I’d no longer walk with my parents dressed as devil or astronaut. I’d no longer carry an old pillowcase filled with candy. Now at Halloween, I dressed in black and hid in the dark. We threw eggs at younger kids and stole our neighbor’s jack-o’-lanterns and hurled them against the asphalt to see them explode into a thousand pieces. We put toothpaste on door handles. We covered trees with toilet paper. We traded rumors about gang members who shot trick-or-treaters and lied to one another about carrying switchblades for protection.
As I struggled not to be expelled from school, to garner the attention of girls I loved, to look older, to be tougher, the Santa Ana winds brought with them melancholy and loneliness instead of freedom, magic and adventure.
One night a car full of boys dressed as skeletons drove to the bluffs at the end of my street and shot two people to death.
Soon we moved to the mountains where there are no Santa Anas. There are valleys of aspen and pine trees, hillsides of sage. There are seasons and there is snow. When I arrived I wandered as a stranger through the low hills around our new house. I floated down the river and felt a strange sense of relief, as if I was, at thirteen among all these trees, young again.
* * *
This summer on August 16th at 4:12 pm a bolt of lightning struck a tree three miles west of Ketchum, Idaho. The tree caught fire. The fire spread quickly and eventually burned across forty-eight thousand some odd acres of land. The valley was filled with smoke. Entire neighborhoods were evacuated. The flames burned across the ridges above our house. My parents began moving their things, preparing to leave, preparing to abandon their home to the burgeoning fire, which had begun to descend into the valley, burning across the low hills.
They’d save some paintings. Some books. Photographs of our family when all of us were younger. Leave the rest to burn. What choice did they have? The fire would do what it would do. In the end more than a thousand firefighters prevented the town from burning. Our house was saved. The photographs were returned.
When I came home this fall the air smelled like smoke. The hills were black. I hiked through burned out forests. The ground was hot and covered with a thick, even layer of ash. It was otherworldly. Sunlight filtered through the charred trees. The new softness of the ground, the absence of leaves, of brush, of flowers, of birds, had left the sound of the landscape muted and ghostly quiet. There were pale skeletons of animals killed in the fire.
I looked out across the valley. There were scorched patches of land everywhere and on all sides. Far below I could see our house, surrounded by healthy aspens, their leaves were coins, flashing and glowing yellow in the sunlight.
Our little neighborhood, where I’d come to grow up twenty years before, was an oasis of green. The day before, two skinny moose appeared on our lawn. The day before that there’d been a bear. And later there’d be a family of deer - animals descending from the mountains, looking for food, escaping the empty smoking hills.
As time, it’s own sucking, suffocating, strangling fire, passes with accelerating and bewildering speed, I wonder why I’m lucky, why the world’s violence has, once again, passed me by. I am fortunate in a thousand ways, but above all, my luck is that the only real violence I know is the violence of passing time. And my fear is that one day, I’ll sit at the end of my life looking out across the years I’ve had to live and find the landscape ashen and wasted.
In October, I watched the neighborhood where my grandparents used to live burn. Eucalyptus trees exploded into flames. Houses burned to the ground. I didn’t worry about their house burning; it had been razed years ago and they are long since dead. Instead I remembered stealing Hershey’s kisses from a bowl in the living room and eating them beneath an orange tree before anyone awoke. There was a time then when I imagined that I was adopted, my family all spies. I’d be abandoned any moment. One day they’d all just vanish, leaving me alone. In my mouth there was the metallic taste of aluminum foil mixed with chocolate, my penance for impatience. I’d sit beneath my tree trying to satisfy my growing appetite, somewhere between boy and whatever comes next, looking up into the branches and expecting the whole world to cave in on me. I’d be left to fend for myself with a pocket full of chocolates for food and my grandfather’s putter for protection.
I’d die on the streets.
Instead, I turn thirty-five years old today. Fire seems to be close behind, burning up the places where I was a child. And I wonder why I’m lucky and what to do with all this fortune, with whatever I may have left. I think of Holly and of gliding in the wind, my arms outstretched, towards the bluffs, towards the Pacific Ocean, and all the rest that lay beyond.
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