Journal
Fanning the Flames
Amid the season of dry and heat, there are glimpses of life, of fire and rock and weed, that reveal the world’s hidden nature.
By Rick Bass

What is fire? In a drought year such as this one, even on the eighth of July—five days since the last rain—the stupendous heat has returned, and today I catch the first scent of truly dry heat, oven-baked dryness: the odor of baking pine needles, as sharp and distinct as if they were laid upon a cookie sheet and placed in the oven. There’s been no ignition yet, no spark or flame, but smelling that scent—it’s so strong that it seems almost as if the needles are already burning, or at least smoldering, even in the absence of an open flame—you have to wonder, really, how is the readying different from the finishing, and at what point does the one become the other?

The further along the summer moves, with us riding in its midst, the more the hidden nature of the world, which is surely fire, reveals itself. It is as if it’s rising with confidence from some reservoir not even at the world’s core but at some lesser depth: just beneath us at first, but then to the surface itself, warming the bottoms of our feet, and then up around our ankles, and then higher, until everywhere we look, it seems, we see fire—or if not the flames themselves yet, then the paths the flames will follow, and the material they will consume, the fiber that will be converted to their breath. The animal of fire being born.

It’s all fire. There is a point where even the lush green meadows, their grass tops blowing in the wind, become no longer like ocean waves but tongues of sawing green flame. And rising slowly from those grasses, over the course of the summer, are the weeds. It takes no special vision, no leap of metaphor or understanding, to see that even more than the waving grasses, or the swaying, branch-clacking forest itself, the weeds are fire: that they are the first flames, hot cinders dropped already lit among the tinder, and that even if they do not ignite this year, or even the next, or the next, they are already burning, consuming the terrain across which they sweep, and that they are a different kind of fire, one from which there is no subsequent rush of rejuvenation the following year. Instead, the fire of the weeds is geological, as ongoing and close to eternal as anything in this world.

Often in July, late into dusk—not having finished my other chores and lists but unwilling to let the day end without having addressed the weeds—I will be out among the tall green grasses, feeling the cooling, scented breath of the fields’ exhalations. The grasses are stirring, inflating with life again, now that the sun’s frying-pan force is shielded from them for a while by the shadows of the mountain’s wall, and the desiccating, swirling winds of the day have likewise settled down to rest for the night. Finding myself surrounded by the seemingly endless and impossible task of plucking each weed, all weeds, and with darkness settling in fast at the end of the day, I’ll feel a kind of panic rise within me.

The weeds’ fiery nature all around me will be revealed as if their essence, too, has come more clearly and fully into life, in that subdued light, and I’ll find myself plucking them quicker and quicker, pulling the tallest ones first—the ones capable of spreading their fiery seed-drift farthest, leapfrogging like skittering sparks across the waving canopy of the cool green grasses.

In that panic, it will feel that I have to move quickly—that each orange-blossomed hawkweed is a burning coal. And while a firefighter might attempt to attack a fire upslope, seeking to cut off its ascent, I attack this other orange fire downslope, trying to contain its perimeter in that direction, which is where the hawkweed spreads quickest and easiest, following the sloping contours of watercourses.

Orange blossoms or not, it is nothing but fire, for after the hawkweed has displaced the native grasses and wildflowers, it then withers in August to tinder-fluff. Nothing can eat it, and it sits there like a fuse waiting for a spark, entire fields waiting for the inferno. The irony is that by that time, whether the ignition occurs or not, the inferno has already passed; and with our inability to act, our inability to stop the weeds, we did not even notice that first fire until after it had already passed through.

What scale of time is appropriate for us to use—in our own lives, as well as in our management and perceptions of the public lands? Four weeks? Ten years? Threescore and ten? A hundred, or a thousand?

In the blink of an eye, in day’s failing light, the field of orange weeds wavers, at the corner of my vision. It’s a drought year, and in less than three weeks the valley will be filled with smoke and flame. It seems to me often that the shadow of a thing can precede the thing itself, even though our present understanding of time indicates this is an impossibility—that time cannot run backward.

Perhaps it is more that there are simply predisposed patterns and pathways, like contours carved as if by ancient glaciers (time like some immense chunk of glacier formed long ago, slowly decomposing, and creeping as it dissolves), and that these earliest-made paths and patterns help influence the shape and direction of all that falls into their provenance—like the windborne and water-drifting seeds of the hawkweed itself, creeping ever lower, following every runnel and swale in the landscape, seeking and colonizing, spreading and pooling like glowing lava spitting down a slope.

Perhaps this is the nature of that word, the one for which I do not know the name, wherein the shape of the elk’s antlers is the shape of the branches in the forest in which he lives: a thing that might be seen to be as simple as the style or voice of one single artist, one original creator, whose imprint is as recognizable in any work as the voice of one’s mother or father.

I want to be very clear that as I marvel at all this sameness, it is not nature, or life itself, or individual species and their complex and intricate adaptations, in which I see that sameness. In those things I see incredible diversity and infinite mystery: rampant and beautiful un-sameness.

Rather it is in the patterns and even contours of all this virtuoso diversity that I catch glimpses of what I suspect might be an overarching sameness, just beyond our sight, just behind the scenes: a sameness that goes much further back, it seems, than the Adam-and-Eve bloodlines of any living creation: a sameness, or echo or shadow of sameness, that again is evident, in those glimpses, in both the animate and inanimate. The rocks and mountains that are shaped like muscles—like quadriceps and breast, like recumbent man and woman, like sleeping animals, like waking animals striding the earth. What I see, in those glimpses of the sameness of pattern, is not just metaphor, nor “simply” cold hard scientific life, but instead life upon metaphor upon life upon metaphor: a dense, rhythmic layering of substance and meaning; the substance of a thing creating its meaning, and then that meaning creating another, similar substance. (Which then creates another, similar metaphor, and so on, deeper into time, or what’s left of the immense and perhaps infinite massive block or mountain of time.)

Camping last week in an intensively metamorphosed wilderness basin in the Cabinet Mountains, just across the river from here, Elizabeth and I reached a winding ridge in darkness, set up our tent, and slept. In the morning the vision from our tent of the canyons just below us was so twisted and fantastic as to be almost unbelievable, and I found myself glancing at the topo map from time to time, as if comforted by reducing and compressing all those contours to the size of the map.

Hiking farther up the mountain, we noticed individual rocks, severely eroded quartzites, in a place where tangled ridges seemed more than once to replicate perfectly, ridge for ridge and canyon for canyon, the same landscape magnified almost infinitely beyond. And climbing farther, I paused for breath and placed my hand on the smoothness of one time-worn rock, whose flexion and indentation was exactly that of a bare kneecap, with part of the shin below and part of the upper leg above. Every tendon, and every smooth run of muscle, was reflected perfectly in that gray stone. Cambrian-era quartzite that was formed perhaps a billion years before the first bacteria even existed.

My own mortal knee was aching, and after resting a while longer, we climbed higher, scrambling over that exploded boulder field of seemingly random talus and erratic rubble, and on past more of those same map-rocks, each one of which afforded us, I think, a brief glimpse behind the curtain.

Sometimes I wonder if it is not as if some timeless master artist—God, or gods, surely—bored perhaps by a lack of challenge with canvas and palette, decided to limit the next project to but one or two patterns or themes, and yet striving to see how complex and miraculous a thing could be made from even the limitations of those one or two rules or laws or patterns. And that we-the-living are the beneficiaries of that magnificent force, magnificent creation. And perhaps central, or perhaps not.

Did we come last in the story, in the metaphor, because we’re special, and the shining, one-law world was made for us? Or was there simply—barely—room and fit for one more thing, us, after all the other cracks and corners were filled with their various treasures of lives and minerals and flowing waters and crackling fires?

Were we added in at the end, again as if in some kind of bored test—a challenge—to see if, or for how long, we could sustain and preserve and protect the glory of that incredible creation, that pulsing palace, into which we have wandered?

Frightful questions, and I suspect that our answers might be guided as accurately by ancient instinct as by science; that sometimes a rock in the shape of a knee, a billion years before life, has as much to instruct us as any fossil, fern or snail, half its age.

Orange hawkweed in July, prefacing the color of the coming fire; orange-and-black checkerspot butterflies, pollinating the hawkweed, sparks of fire now flying through the air, swirling in the breezes just over our heads. Orange-and-black ladybugs in July, flocking to my picnic table to reconnoiter in the dappled shade of the alder, in a light so rich and subaqueous green, subaqueous gold, that it seems conceivable the ladybugs are drinking in that light as they would a nectar. Orange-and-black visible, that one July day, in at least a few peeks and glimpses, orange flames skipping over the blackened char of the already-burned, Halloween colors, orange-and-black, story and metaphor from substance once again. Once more there is a part of me that catches the scent and sight of a greater, occasional sameness, and I have to wonder if sometimes, as with the elegant orange-and-black, the message isn’t perhaps being simplified so that even we, with our own crude senses, can “get” it, as if in a beginner’s paint-by-numbers kit. Or if we do not get it, at least we can take notice of it.

And why, then? Does it matter whether we take notice of these things? Why is our one eye for beauty so ill balanced with our other eye, the one that would seem to focus upon the ability, the desire, to preserve and protect: to utilize the best of our hoarding, hunter-gatherer instincts? This is beautiful, this is desirable. Protect this, and this, and this. What is our purpose, our fit in this world—to preserve and protect, or to destroy and consume and lay level? Does the plan, the force that designed us, know which we are—creators and protectors, or destroyers? Does it, that force, want us to be one way or the other?

And what is the purpose of such war within us? Is something forged and fitted, by such strugglings—something graceful, and worthy of the world—or otherwise lost, in each of us as individuals, and as communities, and as a culture?

If so (and how could that thing not be called spirit), then why isn’t that thing bright orange-and-black, brightly visible to even the most inattentive gaze or ponderer?

And yet that spirit, whether growing and developing within an individual, or whether being worn down and disintegrating, does glow orange-and-black, at certain times and in certain seasons. It burns white-hot, it glows cold blue; it shimmers and skips with green and gold light, it sleeps or rests in the hazy color of autumn-cut wheat stubble. It idles within us, possessing no more color than the fog breathed from our lungs on a cold day, silver-plumes trailing away in whichever direction the wind is blowing.

And these days that we have living—not enough, but in such a wide world as this one, ample—are the only opportunity we have, the only chances, to strike the sparks that will ignite those colors, and build that spirit.

I’m not saying I think we’re central to the turnings of the world, or that it was created expressly as a proving ground—a tool chest, of sorts—for our spirits.

I am certain however of the ignition within that occurs when I stare at a vase of sunflowers, or at an uncut field of them, staring as if mesmerized—and of the peace and ease that remains within me for some time afterward—for nearly as long as I will allow it to stay—burning quietly, slowly. Traveling.

I’m fairly certain that these days in the living, walking around upright—noticing sunflowers, noticing children, noticing elk, noticing rain—are the best and probably only chance we have to light those fires within us, again and again. And that, as with a “good” forest fire, such sparkings and ignitions can prune away the clutter and debris, the buildup of tangled twigs and branches, leaving the new forest, the old forest, cleaner and stronger.

And that’s one of the wonderful things about a fire, too, after it’s swept past and cleaned up all the litter. There’s a new start, a clean surface, and you can see so much farther. Things stand out more starkly; it’s easier to notice.

Against a briefly blackened backdrop, every bit of returning color is noticeable, bit by bit and piece by piece. One yellow blossom, one blue bird. One emerald fern, one orange blossom, like a spark uncovered, a spark that never quite burned out. It all comes back. Life flowing back into a burned forest is like water flowing downhill, summoned as if by a force as dense and specific and enduring as gravity itself.

Contributing Editor Rick Bass lives in the Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana.