To Build a Fire, Part 1

Seven meditations on a force

Yesterday the fire wouldn't take. I crouched in front of the woodstove in my pajamas, bare feet flat on the cold floor in the cold room with lots of windows that let in lots of cold air and the thin winter light. I lay the fire as I always do; I lit it as I always do. It would not take, as fires that refuse to take always refuse: the small orange flame; the brief blue flare around the edge; the blue disappears, the orange dissipates, and the flame snuffs out with a sad little whiff of black smoke that seemed right then exactly like a sad little man ducking out the back door of a bar, his shoulders hunched, trying to light his cigarette; then the sound of a dozen half-sparks and clicks before he gives up and throws the cigarette to the ground as he sinks into the night. The cigarette—the paper caught, but not enough to light—snuffs out with a sad little whiff of white smoke.

I don't know how long I crouched there, watching him in the woodstove, in the neatly built structure of kindling and logs, in the thin morning light, in the cold spacious room. The sad little man pushed himself off the wall of the bar and threw his cigarette away I don't know how many times before I got the fire lit. Then I watched it all over again in the flames.

He made a flame by touching a match to a small piece of tree bark that he took from his pocket. This burned even better than paper. Placing it on the foundation, he fed the young flame with pieces of dry grass and with the smallest dry sticks.

He worked slowly and carefully, realizing his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew stronger, he increased the size of the sticks with which he fed it. He sat in the snow, pulling the sticks from the bushes under the trees and feeding them directly to the flame. He knew he must not fail.

—Jack London, "To Build a Fire"

Recently someone asked me what I thought of Hemingway. I found it an odd question; Hemingway is canonical, and writers of that sort are often relegated to the bins of either/or, either you are a devotee or a disparager. I hadn't thought of Hemingway in a long time, and didn't much think of him when the question was asked; the day was difficult enough without getting into a row about mid-century American fiction by gruff white men or the relevance of the canon or the economy of the fucking line.

I made some kind of verbal gesture, tossed out a statement that was intended to say I am listening, I am present, we both like words, this is something small we can both agree that we like, something over which we can each warm our hands without getting close—and said—I think I said—something about the short story "To Build a Fire" in response.

I don't why I threw out that reference; it was careless. I could tell stories about Hemingway stories, those I've studied, those I've taught, and about the teachers who gave them to me, about why they mattered—both teachers and stories—so much, about the students whose faces lit up quick and sudden as the sun when it crests when they realized whatever they realized about this Hemingway story or that. I don't know why I didn't tell those, why I mentioned "To Build a Fire" instead.

"To Build a Fire" isn't by Hemingway. It's by Jack London.

I suppose it came up because I'd been building a fire.

Following at the man’s heels was a big native dog. It was a wolf dog, gray-coated and not noticeably different from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was worried by the great cold. It knew that this was no time for traveling. Its own feeling was closer to the truth than the man’s judgment...The dog did not know anything about temperatures. Possibly in its brain there was no understanding of a condition of very cold, such as was in the man’s brain. But the animal sensed the danger. Its fear made it question eagerly every movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire.

The dog had learned about fire, and it wanted fire.

I didn't learn how to build a fire as a girl. I don't know why. I'd have had to ask someone, but I don't think I did. The only thing I remember learning about fire as a child was that if I myself was on fire, I was to stop, drop, and roll, which was the sole solution my brain was able to offer one afternoon when I hiked and climbed and scrabbled my way up to a thick shale ledge at about 5300 feet that I'd figured I'd find unoccupied but where instead I found a bear sitting peacefully enough, eating some berries and taking a break, as I myself had intended to do.

The bear regarded me with curiosity as I popped up over the ledge. I froze and thought instantly: Stop, drop, and roll.

I regarded the bear with equal curiosity, listening to the tinny loop of my entire useless education playing in my empty skull.

Then he knew what was wrong. He had forgotten to build a fire and warm himself. He laughed at his own foolishness. As he laughed, he noted the numbness in his bare fingers…He pulled the mitten on hurriedly and stood up. He was somewhat frightened. He stamped forcefully until the feeling returned to his feet. It certainly was cold, was his thought. That man from Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in this country. And he had laughed at him at the time! That showed one must not be too sure of things.

Working carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire.

How stupid, that people are not born knowing how to build a fire.

That just occurred to me now. How completely absurd. As if fish hatched underwater but had to be taught how to swim.

I don't remember the first time I saw fire—does anyone?—and I don't know why I suddenly tried to think if I did. Fire was always present in my consciousness, close at hand and barely contained, licking at the edges of my world; California is always bursting into flames, rumbling and splitting open along the San Andreas Fault, and anyway I was born in a drought. The hills across the bay seemed to burn so constantly I don't recall ever being aware of them starting to burn, or the fire ever being put out.

I was neither afraid of fire, as some kids I knew were, nor, like other kids, drawn to it. I regarded fire as I did the ocean: with respect, a kind of grave awareness that both fire and water were bigger than me and should be approached with reverence, due caution, and awe.

In some inarticulate way, I also understood these forces as impersonal. They were powers unto themselves, raw powers, not dangers specific to me. They meant me no harm; I meant nothing to them at all. Both fire and ocean were and are completely unaware that I was and am this ridiculous sort of animal that goes around personifying everything—elements, rain, wind, time and space and rock and sky—and telling stories about vast, immutable forces as if those stories are actually about humans, of all the small and petty things; as if they ever were.

The fire was a success. He was safe.

He remembered the advice of the old man on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The man had been very serious when he said that no man should travel alone in that country after 50 below zero. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old men were rather womanish, he thought. All a man must do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone.

I woke up a few days after the conversation about Hemingway, jolted awake by the REM-deep realization that Hemingway didn't write "To Build a Fire."

I went to find the story. I was not relieved to find that it's a common mistaken—I was saddened that not only I but lots of people are dumb—but was relieved to find that line for line, it reads like Jack London, not like Hemingway at all.

My memory of London's books, even The Call of the Wild and White Fang, which I read countless times, is blurred. I read them when I could get them away from my brothers, who are six years older than me, so I'd have been very small. In memory, they were heart-pounding stories of lone adventurers who were always striking out, they seemed very purposeful, they were on quests that led them deep into wild places, and in those places they encountered wild creatures with whom they came to a mutual understanding, and man and wild creature gave one another something like solace and also a wide berth, and frankly it all sounded much nicer and quieter out in the wild so I burrowed into the books and read them again and again.

What surprised me in “To Build a Fire” wasn't the spareness of the story's setting—the main character is traveling across the Yukon on foot—which creates a stark contrast to the sometimes-convoluted syntax of London's lines. What surprised me as I read "To Build a Fire" was the realization that I'd retroactively relegated London, perhaps unfairly, to the teetering mental heap of books I acknowledge as both formative and deeply problematic, books and cultural stories that have influenced, for good and ill, the person I am and the work I do.

I'd assumed that London's work—like that of Edward Abbey, whose Desert Solitare is far more substantially to blame for the trajectory of my life and career than Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Dharma Bums—would be a sigh-a-minute sort of reread, and I'd have to pick and sift my way through the colonialist sexist racist bullshit that I was bound to find.

That wasn't what I found.

"To Build a Fire" is not the story of brave explorers and their exploits and their exploitation and their spoils. It’s the story of Man vs. Nature that we learned about in the second grade. In the battles between Man and Nature that litter the American literary landscape, Man comes out ahead an awful lot. But he doesn’t in “To Build a Fire.”

I sat in front of the woodstove the other night, reading a story about hubris, about arrogance, about how quickly and how completely, when we do not hear or heed warning, we fail.

The dog was sorry to leave and looked toward the fire. This man did not know cold. Possibly none of his ancestorshad known cold, real cold. But the dog knew and all of its family knew. And it knew that it was not good to walk outside in such fearful cold. It was the time to lie in a hole in the snow and to wait for this awful cold to stop. There was no real bond between the dog and the man. The dog made no effort to indicate its fears to the man. It was not concerned with the well-being of the man. It was for its own sake that it looked toward the fire.

Why didn't I learn how to build a fire as a girl? Why didn't I teach myself?

My father could have shown me. I had brothers; they'd have known and taught me with excruciating patience, as they taught me to tie my shoes and ride my bike and climb a tree and throw a punch and spit a plum pit and pitch a persimmon faster than a baseball and swim.

I sat with my arms wrapped around my knees at who knows how many bonfires on the soft cold northern California sand at night at the beaches with the boys.

It’s decades, aeons, a century, nine lives ago. Up close, we are children all elbows and eyes, haunted and hunted and hidden in cheap woven ponchos from headshops in the Haight; zoom out and we are a flare in the darkness; then we are a tiny dot on the far left edge of one green island on one small blue orb that spins quicker than most; and then we are lost.

Who brought the bottles, who brought the weed?

Beyond us, the ocean; before us, the fire. We can't see the ocean, only hear it, sense its presence nearby. The ocean and the cliffs and the night are all the same deep well of black. Flames bloom from the dry driftwood, throwing shadows on the boys' faces and mine.

Which one would I one day marry, which one would I merely kiss behind the sage? Which one would find me years later in Oakland and write his name all over my poems in blue pen while I slept, not long before he died?

Who lit those fires?

Some boy, I suppose.

---

Tonight I let the fire get too low before the sun went down. I noticed the daylight dimming late this afternoon, but I wanted to finish my thought, so I kept writing, and now I've looked up and it's dark and my feet are cold and I have to build a fire.

See you back here for Part 2 next week.