To Build a Fire, Part 2

Five meditations on a meditation on a theme

California, December 2024

If you missed last week’s post, “To Build a Fire, Part 1,” you can find it by clicking here.

It would have been fifteen years ago or more when I read that some Buddhist monks burn their poems.

I must have been facing east when I read whatever I was reading—a book about Buddhism, I suppose—because that fact so startled me I looked up from the book and straight at the sun.

My vision flooded with white morning light so bright I flinched and looked back down. I blinked, waiting for my vision to clear, watching the tiny sun that was my eye burn a hole through the page.

How could they? I thought.

Something about burning a poem felt cruel, felt worse than a waste. To devote oneself for hours and days and weeks and months or sometimes years to finding the word, and then finding the other word, and then putting those words in a row with the third word and so on until you have something so clear and exact that it meets Coleridge’s definition of poetry—“the best words in the best order”—to pour that kind of piercing focus into a poem and then feed it to the fire, it felt like a betrayal of something—the principle of poetry, poetic justice, the point.

I wonder now if I mentioned it to anyone, what I'd read—the poems, the burning, the monks—or told them how it shook me, changed me, set something in motion, lit a flame that would both consume and transform me. I might have told my husband; I might not. He found both poetry and me romantic in theory and maddening in fact—both of us hard to catch hold of, impossible to fix in place, always swerving left or right just when you’ve gotten settled, being amorphous, trailing off.

One night I emerged from my writing closet very late, after midnight, and went downstairs to get something to eat. I'd been working on a poem for a few weeks at least; my internal clock was all turned around, and I was hungry. My husband was banging around the kitchen, angrily picking things up and putting them down. His voice tight, he asked me where I'd been. I said I'd been upstairs, working.

He smiled and cocked his head at me. He asked politely, And what, exactly, do you do?

Stammering, I began, I write po—

Then I trailed off.

---

Northern Minnesota, July 2022

The summer I got the Scamp, I spent much of my time making lists.

I'd text each list to Karen, who has a 13' Scamp and has been traveling solo for years (and with whom I'm about to do a series of video chats about solo travel, Scamp life, and our very different Scamping styles, which I can't wait to share here)­ to ask her advice: what was I missing, what didn't I know, what hadn't I thought of, were all the things I'd listed essential, could some be gotten second-hand, how many of these and how much of that, what did this cost and what did that weight, where could I put it, how did it work?

The lists, which I organized roughly according to systems and parts—mechanical, electrical, plumbing/water, storage, interior, exterior, etc.—seemed manageable enough. Most gear you need for camper camping isn't terribly specialized. And Karen is a different kind of traveler and camper than I. I'll let her tell you her Scamping style, but simply put, Karen nests, I perch.

Karen maps her way from campground to campground, reserves her campsite well in advance, gets where she's going in time to build a fire, makes herself dinner before the sun goes down, and brings an electric blanket wherever she goes.

I get where I'm going whenever I get there, mostly eat gas station Chex Mix, and can barely remember to shut the Scamp’s damn door before I load in, hitch up, and go tearing off down some half-marked backwoods road.

So I knew some of the things on Karen's must-have camping list wouldn't be on mine. I wouldn’t need gossamer outdoor curtains for shaded summer afternoons at a pleasant woodsy campground somewhere sane; I wouldn’t need string lights or a microwave. I allowed that a dish wand would be handy for scrubbing the floor, but was extremely skeptical about a bedside lamp.

It was clear, though, that I’d need stuff to build a fire.

When I made my first large purchase of gear for full-time life on the road, the order included, per Karen's explicit instructions, a kindling cracker, a 6 lb. mallet in neon orange, a set of rust-proof outdoor fire tools, one case of matches and one of fire starters, several fire extinguishers, a couple types of retardant, fire-proof blankets, and two kinds of axe.

Gear-wise, I was prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that both gear and fire figure prominently in what Karen calls "the benign sexism of the road." There's the ubiquitous dude who appears at every campground to insist we need help backing up; there's the guy at Lowe's or Home Depot who won't let us get at the shelf or bin we need until we tell him what we need so he can tell us that's not what we need and explain as slowly and wrongly as possible what it is we actually need; there's the constant patter at the diner counter, the truck stop lounge, the back corner booth of a bar.

Don't we get lonely. Who changes our tire when we get a flat, who keeps us warm on cold winter nights. Who backs up the trailer. Who builds us a fire.

---

Now about last week's post,

in which I quoted several passages from Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire" and to which several of you responded with your characteristically thoughtful and thought-provoking comments—thank you.

As I've noted before, it’s a frequent failing of my work that I leave too much suggested and too much unsaid. While I maintain that the reader is generally smarter than me and will take what they want, if anything, from what I write, and while I will continue to err on the side of letting a reader come to their own conclusions before I’ll beat them over the head with what I think they should think, my preference for giving the reader wide berth does sometimes occasion clarification. This is one of those times.

London’s story simply got me thinking. Last week’s post was more or less a scribbly map of the path those thoughts took. I didn’t retell the story, or even quote it in full; the passages were cited, in several instances, out of order, and were selected because they teased out one or two threads of the story, not in lieu of the story itself. At most, last week’s post was an oblique homage; it would more fairly be called a meditation on a theme.

But this week I’ve been thinking about those “themes,” the ones I was meditating on. I was and am concerned with the risk of certainty—with arrogance—with the ways in which habits of mind skew recall, torque memory, obscure truth—with human hubris—with the danger of belief, the risk of unquestioned perception, and its ultimate cost. I’ve also been thinking about fire, as metaphor and element and power, raw power, about fire as creative and destructive force. The wolf-dog, too, has been at my heels all week, and the fact that nature’s red in tooth and claw, and nothing—not fire, not creature, not cold—care a whit about human want or whim or will, our myths and our legends, our smallness, our meanness, our impulse to self-preservation and the folly of our blind faith in ourselves.

That’s what I was getting at, I suppose. At least some of it. At least part.

But then there were the other threads, the ones that went trailing off the edges of the page as I wrote, the ones I’ve just begun to unravel, the ones that I’ve been pulling for years that won’t stop unspooling, and who knows where it ends, how far it goes? because now here we are, and while this week I'd planned to tell you—truly, I had—how I learned to build a fire, and when, and why, and by what means, now I can’t, not this week, there isn’t time, because I got to thinking about something else while I was chopping wood to build a fire.

---

I was chopping wood to build a fire

when my phone buzzed. I set down the axe, pulled the phone out of my pocket, and saw a missed call from a man to whom I once sent a text that read, "Come get your shit before I burn it in the yard."

That was a long time ago and long ways away, so I can't recall the ensuing exchange word for word. The phone rang a few second later, though, and the call was blessedly brief.

You can't do that, he said. That's my stuff.

I can, I said. It is your stuff, and it’s in my house. Come get it and you'll be set.

You're heartless, he said. You're cold.

No, I said. I'm cleaning.

We sat in silence on either end of the call.

Come get your shit and I won't set it on fire, I said.

I’d forgotten all about that call till just the other day, when I was chopping wood and his name popped up on my phone.

But you want to know the worst part? The worst part is that it was all talk. Back then, I didn't even know how to build a fire.

I put the phone in my pocket, picked up the axe, and kept chopping wood.

---

I've been working on poems for a few weeks now,

up here in the mountains. Poems swoop in, sometimes. I'm a storyteller by nature, not a poet; when the poems come, they come without warning, they come in by storm, they travel in packs, they move in formation like a murmuration of starlings, filling the sky, reshaping the light. I write them between sleep and waking, between meals and walks in the thin mountain air, I write them sitting on rocks in the half-burned pine forests and sitting on the stump behind the cottage where I bury the axe when I chop the wood.

Sometimes I lose track of time and it gets dark. I sit there with my notebook on my knees, axe at my left hand, pen in my right.

When it’s too dark to see the page—some nights there’s enough light from the moon—I put the notebook in the crate of kindling and logs and lug them inside for the morning’s fire.

This morning, I woke up and built a fire. First I fed it kindling and logs. Then, when the room was bright with firelight and warm, I fed it poems, one by one.

See you back here next week for Part 3.