To Build a Fire, Part 3

Stranger in an ever-stranger land

"What's the matter, Nick?" Marjorie asked.
"I don't know," Nick said, getting wood for a fire.
—Ernest Hemingway, "The End of Something"

New Year's Day, 2025

I woke up alone on New Year's Day in a narrow bed in a vintage camper in the desert with a song stuck in my head from a dream I couldn't quite recall and was reminded of the time I woke up from a dream in which I spoke Spanish, and in which I was very certain I knew the words "tumelo domo." In my dream I understood that this meant "little pig."

But since I do not speak Spanish, not more than enough to get me to the bus and the train and the bathroom and the bank, enough to say please and thank you, enough to order a meal and borrow a lighter and offer a few words of greeting or warning, certainly not enough to say little pig, though I was sure when I woke up that I knew how to say just that, sure enough that for a split second between sleep and waking, just before the florescent light of consciousness flipped on and ruined my dream, I thought that sleep had led me through the hidden hallways and spiral stairways of my mind to some locked room where a secret knowledge of Spanish had gone undiscovered all these years, when I woke up I thought I'd better check, so I looked it up.

Tumelo domo does not mean "little pig." It means "my burial mound" or "my grave."

The dawn of New Year's Day in the desert was cold. By the time the light was up and I was done thinking about the song in the dream that led to the memory of the dream of a language I don't really know, I stuck my toe out from under the blankets and thought: 50 degrees, below 40 lat—then lifted my head to look at the light through the white curtain over the turquoise cupboard above the sink—somewhere west of hell.

In the same way that time begins to inhabit the body when you live on the road such that you can tell what time of day it is by the angle of light and the thickness of dark, and situate a memory in season and space by the color and depth of the remembered sun, when you wake up and don't know where you are, you get the hang of guessing your coordinates within reasonable range by crosschecking the angle of light with the feel of the air on your sticking-out toe.

On New Year's Day, I woke up alone in a trailer in the desert. Once the sun was fully up and I'd stepped out of the trailer in my pajamas, wearing my sleeping bag over my shoulders like a little kid with a superman cape, and wandered into the sunshine that flooded the compound where I was camped in a circle of similar trailers around a fire, I checked my facts: (33.378993, -115.774993), 223 feet below sea level, 51 degrees.

The people who are drawn to places like these are drawn in part by the promise and presence of fire.

I am in the town of Bombay Beach, California, on the Salton Sea. I’ll be writing from here off and on for the season; there’s a rich, deep history to this place, a history of social hubris and ecological collapse, of community and creativity, of luck and resilience, of folly and error, of humanity and art. There are stories I’ve stumbled onto already and far more to discover in the coming months, but one has to make a beginning, and I’m beginning with a gathering some people called the end of the world and others called beginning again.

At least five times this week I have seen people concentrating with an intensity so great they appeared capable of willing fire.

Four separate times in four disparate locations, I've heard the word firey bounce into and out of the cochlear curl of my ear, spoken by four different people discussing four different things.

Three people have danced while in conversation with me though I did not dance. One—a internationally renowned professor of architecture wearing a ballcap and eyeglasses where one eye was a circle and one was a square—interrupted himself to explain, "I'm just dancing right now." I agreed that he was and we continued to speak about the collapse of higher ed.

Twice I have listened to people speak at length and with clarity on the strange art of receiving unbidden gifts.

Once I saw two women with white hair in matching white faux fur coats dance under string lights in the way only people born in earlier generations can dance—well—to a pick-up band of clarinet, bass, guitar, and drums.

The two of them swung, the oldest and most elegant guests at a dinner for who knows how many—well over a hundred, gathered under the cold stars along a 40 foot table built that day, warmed by a row of makeshift barrels and drums of fire—while younger guests, wide-eyed and vaguely beautiful, watched in what looked strangely like fear.

The women danced, kicking up a storm of desert dust that spun and settled on their uplifted faces and their white fur coats and white hair.

Word of the fire long preceded the fire itself.

In the same way that northerners start talking about the snow days before it comes, start stocking up, battening the hatches, pulling their hats down around their ears as if practicing the gesture, talk of the fire began on the chat thread several days before the crowd descended on the town.

Someone was beginning to build the fire on the beach. Supplies were needed, and a few extra hands. Two days before the fire, they began building a nightclub in a hole in the ground; early reports indicated the vibes were good. Preparations for the fire continued apace. I drove south, checking the thread at pit stops—ocean, mountains, city, then descending into the deep desert dark.

The day before the fire, the thread was exploding with questions—where were people camping, what was the plan for bathrooms, what time was the bar closing that night—and needs: extra help needed to set up the Poetry House, did anyone want healing, someone was bringing singing bowls, six gallons of distilled water needed at the Electric Lounge stat, nine more 2x10s for the table, can someone pick up floodlights, guy out of gas and stranded on the highway, does anyone speak Chinese.

I pulled into town late the night before the fire, stopped off at the bar for a Coke to get a feel for the place. The vibes were indeed very good. Someone said they'd heard they were expecting 300 people for the fire; someone else said they'd heard 500. I watched the two women tending bar looking at a near-empty bottle of Fireball one of them held out.

"This was completely full this morning," she said.

"Busy night," the other replied.

"But you and I are the only ones who drink it," the first one said. They looked at each other, bewildered.

I laughed, startling them. They looked over sharply; their shoulders dropped, and they laughed and shared a shot and toasted me with my Coke and I tipped them twice the cost of the soda because it was going to be a long week at the lone bar and sole business in Bombay Beach when 500 people showed up to gather by the fire.

On New Year's Day ten years ago, I began an essay that never needed to be written.

That was in the Before Times, when solitude and I were still an on-again-off-again thing; I'd run off to visit solitude from time to time, escaping my regular life, my real life, before returning to the tasks and offices of domesticity and partnership to which by then I was so accustomed that absence, solitude, space—any deviation from the habit of a shadow, the presence of a body in bed upon waking—seemed both a wild, reckless luxury and a dizzying void.

Ten years later, basking in the sun like a lizard on a rock, I dug through old files and found that bit of an essay that never needed to be. Reading it now, it seems as it was written to be found later, a reminder of the road from which, at some point or other, I took a sharp turn, for better or worse.

New Year's Day, 2015

This is not the first time I’ve woken up alone on New Year’s Day. I wonder briefly if it’s sad; if the idea of some solitary soul waking in a four-poster bed, burrowed under a pile of thick worn sheets and heavy handmade quilts, would seem sad to someone else; if it is the sadness of a small old man in an old house in the middle of winter, waking alone to another year. I could spin a whole story for this man and his sadness. He has lost his wife, a long time ago, or just this past year. His bones hurt when he bends to light the fire. He turns on the radio and it crackles into the otherwise silent room, the sound of the fire and the sound of his slippers on the floor. The drone of the radio voice reciting the news. He sits in a chair.

But maybe none of this is true. Maybe he isn’t sad at all. Maybe he pulls open the slightly broken curtains and looks out at the 5 a.m. moon and feels the warmth of the fire beginning to fill the room, and the warmth of the blood rushing into and out of the dumb mute fist of his heart. Maybe he feels the full-bodied expectation that comes over him at the dawn of every day, and mutters contentedly over the small, compact joys, the rituals by which he lives his life and measures out the hours: the fire, the floorboards worn by the scuffle of boots and bare feet, the pot of coffee, the one heavy cup so old he has forgotten its source, a blue and misshapen pottery mug. The coffee smell fills the kitchen as it does every day; the fire in the potbellied stove bursts to life and burns, kindling crackling, hot embers spilling onto the grate, catching the crumpled old papers that bear the news of who knows when, and maybe this is the way things are and the way they should be, forever and ever, amen.

It isn’t sad, waking up this way. I like it.

I like setting out into the new year in my own two shoes, the sound of my feet crunching down the snowy road, my breath white in the blue dawn air. The air is clean and cold, the moonlight sweeps across the broad expanse of snowy fields and hills. The moon lowers itself toward the horizon, fading as the dark lifts off like a wide-winged bird.

A hawk drops at 200 miles per hour. I don’t remember where I learned that, but it has lodged somewhere in the streambed of my mind, and, I imagine, will slowly erode with the rest.

New Year's Day, 2025

Ten years later, on the step of a trailer in the desert in the opposite corner of the country, I looked up from my laptop as the sun fell below the horizon—it gets cold quick—and turned my head toward the sound.

The pulse of bass was coming from the beach, more than a mile away. But here below sea level, in a town of fewer than 300 residents and a shifting crew of those who, like me, come and go from wherever we are, pulled in by promise and blown off by wind, have gathered to do something—make art, create community, dismantle the structure, tear down the system, start over, rush headlong toward some kind of end, build something, burn something down—built on the ruins of an American get-rich-quick real estate scheme turned ecological disaster zone, here in Bombay Beach there are almost no trees; there's almost no vegetation at all. There are more than 400 species of bird—peregrine falcon, crissal thrasher, mountain plover, sandhill crane—but almost no wind. There is nothing that would have blocked or the bent the sound of bass that echoed down Avenue H from a mile away on the beach.

Since I arrived at the Salton Sea early this week, I've stayed mostly in the shadows; my task here is to listen and watch, so I have skirted the edges of every gathering and every room, taking photos, taking notes. I've dodged introductions and conversations, left parties abruptly, darted out the side door, hidden my face in the ears of every dog and communed with every stray cat I've seen. I've hidden in plain sight at the bar, stood just outside the circle of light thrown by fire after fire, walked the narrow streets through a desert dark so thick I cannot even see myself.

But I looked up when I heard music coming from the beach.

I put the laptop back in the trailer and started walking, toward the sound, toward the remains of a towering fire that took days to build and burned through the night while 500 people danced by a poisonous sea in the smoke-thick air and watched the sun rise on what little remains, and slept, and woke to the first day of a new year and began sifting through the ashes, because what can we do, what should we do, what is there to do if not begin again?

I followed the music down the dark streets. I walked along the beach, skidded down a crumbling incline of sand, ducked below a rough-hewn archway and into a hole in the ground. I made my way through the crowd to a small clearing in the dust, near the center of the room where a barrel of fire burned. I felt the bass in the dusty earth, in my feet, in my bones, and I danced.

I danced until my black boots were the color of dust, until my lungs were burnt with smoke and sand, until I forgot everything I ever knew and every place I’ve ever been, until I shook off my own story and my name, I danced until sweat flew from my hair and into the fire and hissed in the flames.

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See you back here this weekend for Part 4—we’ll wrap up this series with an audio edition on Riffs & Rants from the Road. If you missed the first two parts, quick links are below.