Tim would wake, naturally, at 4am and set out on an easy jog in the dark of a morning so cold and foreign. Normally I sleep heavy like a sweet lamb but I’m easily disturbed sleeping anywhere that isn’t home and I’d always stir at the sound of his cabin door creaking across the way, the squeal rising with the first chittering birds of dawn, then again when he returned and showered in the bathhouse. Every day he woke at 4am for a jog no matter how much we’d worked the previous day. Burning up his muscles in the dark was a comfort to Tim. A prescription.
For my own part, I tried to rise early too and greet the day as if my skin required the cold, though never as early as Tim and never so ambitious as to pound my skinny legs into the earth, not with this giant hole in the world so near, even if I knew myself to be not proportionally close to it. There was a silent groaning about it, an indifferent hunger I had no interest in tempting. A few of us would wait for the first bit of blue to begin dusting away the night, gather some sleeping bags and drive down to the south rim of the canyon. We were never alone, always other groups of people huddled in the dark, backs nestled against ridges, and we’d make idle conversation with them, get comfy like we were waiting for a movie to start, for the opening credits of a new day to roll up from the horizon and into the sky.
It was ephemeral fire every time. The sun pushing over the opposite rim of the canyon pouring molten honey into the hollow of the earth. The sheer expanse of it is too much for a little human head to comprehend, I’d say it looked flat, like a trick, like someone was tricking me. There was no trick, just the planet at its most simple, doing what it does even when no one is looking. Lots of pictures taken.
We were working with the Grand Canyon’s Wildfire Management team for the week. Something different every day so we could observe all the little parts of the big mechanism working in service of the same goal: setting fires.
Wildfire is natural, inevitable, ecologically important in moderation. As is continuously the case, human folly has turned the art of the wildfire unsustainable, made it a hungry and righteous thing that spins dizzily, easily, out of control. It’s not only the typical suspects of carbon emission and ecosystem destruction at fault. For decades, the rule of thumb in ecological practice was wildfire suppression. It’s a running joke that I’ve got beef with Smoky the Bear because he taught an entire generation that fire is cruel, reckless, a threat without exception, but for many ecosystems it is the foundation of cyclical life, a form of decomposition that clears detritus, makes room for new life, sometimes is even the essential agent for germinating the seeds of certain trees. Fire is a form of breath. There is inhale and exhale. For decades, humankind ensured that fire held its breath for as long as possible and we’re seeing now the long, hot exhale and if it is violent, it’s only because we set the stage for violence.
In Grand Canyon, and other parks where dry and hot is a precondition—meaning wildfire is inevitable—they carry out what is called the prescribed burn. An area which has not been burned in some time is burned on purpose under the watchful eye of park rangers within some specific parameters so the earth can get scorched the way it likes and the conditions which create explosive wildfires can be reduced. So when lightning strikes or the careless camper leaves cinders smoking, the whole park is not reduced to blackened brush. A little destruction is healthy, moderation in all things, etc.
In our surveying the land, the rangers would point out living trees that had burned and survived. The charcoal yawn at the base of a trunk where brush fire had chewed through several dozen ringed years before getting its fill and subsiding. Lightning strikes which could be traced like tar-laden veins from the burn site all the way up to the canopy where the electric current had latched on and anchored into the earth. Incredible that this woody matter, the burning of which has sustained human life for centuries, can survive that, being eaten right to the core, which is its infancy. These are sensitive, exposed wounds that have to be protected from future burns. I trace myself from head to toe, checking for hollows. I already know where they are.
It was meaningful work, the kind that moves through the heart with a gracious sigh. Donning all our layers in the frosty morning, then red, stripped half-naked in the evening, from the intensity of the labor as well as the temperature extremes of the canyon. Some days clearing dry brush where necessary, mapping potential burn areas, digging shallow trenches around future burn sites; there was a tangible sense that the work being done would have a material effect. Drawing hard lines in the earth, I could close my eyes and picture the indifferent flames of a late summer scorch licking at the divots I dug, flooding the gutters but unable to creep any further. As though I’d built a playpen for healthy destruction.
Most of this work was done not in the canyon but on the hundreds of acres surrounding the rim. This flat, unobstructed land was surprisingly gorgeous in its simplicity. Claustrophobic trees keeping their distance from one another, tiny creeks running in simple order, short and beachy grass lined with dried out pine needles. Hardly much cover against the sun but beautiful, the whole thing. Worth protecting, as important as the canyon itself.
After the day’s work we’d take turns showering. The evening’s dinner volunteers would cook a meal for 14 and gather in the tiny common cabin to reflect on the day, rose-bud-thorn, always some reason or another to start crying. It was March 2016, the absurd calm before the surrealist storm, and Bojana, who was Serbian, who had been born and raised in former Yugoslavia, pleaded with the liberal lot of us to consider a candidate that was not Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state had a heavy hand in the wars that raged while Bojana was a child in Bosnia. She told us, candidly, how horrifying it had been, the fear that coursed through every day, how her family would huddle daily in bomb shelters and her grandparents would tell her Those are American bombs.
The honesty made many of us uncomfortable, myself included I’m ashamed to admit. It seemed somehow that the phrase lesser of two evils had only just been coined that year. As though this was the first time any human had needed to make a hard choice, as if there was no available frame of reference. And there was Bojana framing it for us: the lesser evil is only a smaller tumor, but a tumor still. It has still killed. It has burned deep black hollows into my years.
Not me, I thought, what all of us I imagined were silently thinking. This tumor would not kill me.
My ears have been forced open by reality in the years since. But I regret it still. She was warning us of something obvious, an imminent burn that we ignored, that sweeps now unfettered and merciless. Tumors grow even when you look away.
After dinner, after cleaning up, the rest of the evenings were our own. I’d walk down to the visitor’s center, use the wifi to text my mom, post pictures on instagram so it could be known the good work I was doing, the beauty I was seeing distilled into a perfect square. Sometimes we’d play cards or Mafia, college games. Late one night, I walked down to the south rim with Peter and Kendra in a perfect dark. Above us, an incomprehensible netting of stars, these endless burning fires full lifetimes away. Nothing moderate about those blazes, just gas exploding at length until it was all used up. But glittering, timeless from below.
We got as close to the rim as we dared in the night. The stretch of it was so silent its emptiness took on the presence of a monolith which couldn’t be seen. The night was a nest for revelation. Laid out on the scraggly rock still exhaling the day's heat, heads turned toward the sky, the three of us unraveled a shared queerness and I was relieved. We spilled a few hundred words into the canyon and I think many of those words are still bouncing around down there or were carried on the currents of the Colorado River out to somewhere I could never dream of, some wide and sprawling space I haven’t seen yet. Everything released, it spreads.
On our free day, which was also our last day in the park, we mounted a hike down into the canyon. The day was ablaze, cloudless and dry, the prying sun drawing rivulets of sweat from each available pore. I raced into the canyon on my little legs, pausing only to be respectful of my group trailing carefully behind. I kept my eyes peeled across every horizon looking for vultures, endangered birds of prey. To see an almost dead thing keep living. I would have marched the several miles all the way down to the floor of the canyon just to say I’d stepped beneath the surface of the earth, but the group wanted to turn back about halfway down so we did. I raced Mikayla back up to the top. Delirious. Sweaty. Grinning.
I got burned on that last day. Had quietly refused sunscreen because I hadn’t lived very much thus far, had trouble imagining how long a life could really be; hard to make anything matter in that limbo. But the sun, it eats the vulnerable, carelessly. Someone drew aloe down my back that night, which I’ve forgotten out of the embarrassment of needing anything from another person. But the touch I remember, the cold massaged into the stinging heat. A burn that would not kill me, just remind me for a while of my own folly before I could forget it once more.
I think of that week often. I think of it now as blazes spark up and sweep whole dried out cities into the dustpan, an outcome that could have been prepared for if the most important ears weren’t shut to the reality that the earth’s breath has been held for far too long. The time for moderate prescription is long overdue.
I think of that week now on the tail end of two straight years of prescribed burns across my heart, metaphorical upheavals, but real in that they’ve stung and they’ve carved soft scars into my years and they’ve been necessary. The ecology of my heart has required this. I’ve had to do it to myself.
But it’s taken me many years since that week, a miniscule amount of time in the grand scope of canyons being carved, to start prescribing my own burns rather than waiting for the worst possible conditions to sweep through and tear me up all at once. And I have burned up so many times in this life, to the barest scraps, through all my ringed years to my very infancy. Even the core of me blackened. It is an ecology that must be cared for with a delicate hand and decisive action. Sometimes you must rise at 4am and run through the dark to fight something off.
It’s important to look closely at the landscape of our hearts and take notice of what has long been dry and dead, useless fodder taking up valuable space. A little fire is good for the soul. A little fire opens tough seeds. There is sweet love and oxygen for the brain buried beneath all those layers you’ve been hoarding.
Scar tissue. Sensitive, blackened veins. Set some parameters, then set it ablaze. Watch the life it breathes. Take your fire and pour it out, watch it paint an empty space into unimaginable resolution. That’s you.
Our return flight met the ingenious sun as it rose over my city. We landed on fire, purple and pink, a heat like no one had ever seen with their bare eyes, a trick being played. Outside Logan Airport, snow lined the sidewalks. My shoulders still ached with the burning I’d brought back. The ghost of a blaze, not cruel but inevitable.
Inevitable things must be prepared for.
“A little destruction is healthy, moderation in all things, etc.” Your writing is DAZZLING! My God!
Just stunning, James! Thank you. Steady and strong words, crackling slowly across my mind. Brilliant. 👏