“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” - Cheryl Strayed, Wild
I have an old feral cat, a dog with severe anxiety, indifferent relatives and a wildly independent good man in my life.
There is fire all around me.
There are days, months, years where I want to sit by the hollowed burned out blackened trees, above the old family home, and ask them if this is all about revenge. Living here. On earth.
Where does the fire burn best?
I remember when we got the lumber delivered to the land on the hillside in California.
And I remember when the little man in the fancy car stopped by our modest home, on Orchard Lane, and handed us a few old pictures from the Iowa farm in Davenport — and a small check. Cure for guilt. A check from a little big man, who approved a quiet theft from children who would never find out.
It had been a casual conversation, one evening, at a mountain steak fry.
“What happened to my dad’s land?” my young husband took the nerve to ask. Prior, his dad had married the secretary of the little-big-man-bank-president, named J.D., located on Route 66.
The marriage lasted only a few years before his dad died at the age of 59.
And it was all worked out. The will was more than likely signed in a dying haze.
Standing at the doorway that evening, we graciously took the small 4 digit check, in the letter envelope, with two pictures — and invested in a dream. I remember distinctly telling my John, “finally, some pictures of your dad as a boy, granddad and great granddad.” Getting my photo loop I was able to see some semblance of familiarity in the eyes and faces of stoic smiles. He had nothing to reference until now.
My dad would photograph the sloping parcel, throughout the seasons, above Logan Road, placing dried wildflowers in a photo album for me. It seemed as though one day we would live near them. By the seaside in Oregon. We would leave the indifference behind us.
It would never happen.
A few years later, we sold our modest home in California and invested in another piece of land on a hillside in California.
The land in the woods near the hillside. I remember driving back and forth, the questions of how? The knowing we would never leave California. The permanence. John would work well into 70, I thought. He loved being an electrician with his older brother. The one who died suddenly at 71, last January. He was his family.
And he is. John will work holding up the generations of electricians in his family, until he can’t.
How are we doing something so massive as to build a home by ourselves with our children. In our late 30’s. It didn’t seem real. Still doesn’t.
As the days passed, I realized it was a conquering. A steady flickering. Something that could only hold the determination of fire to prove one’s existence. Here. On earth.
“The world is gray, white, black, and acrid, without a single live animal or plant, no longer burning and yet still full of the warmth and life of the fire.” - Train Dreams
An everyday man, from an emotionally unavailable single mom, with nothing to her name, and his family doing the impossible. This would be my first lesson of great faith. And as I look back, his faith was stronger than mine. It’s like that. And often it’s never at the same time. He the big steam train. Me in a little handcar wanting to turn back.
I wonder if God sets it up that way? To help each other out when it hurts so bad, or gets too hard — all clarity goes out the door. Or is it to keep striving to be “together.”
I don’t know.
It took a year. Food cooked in a temporary home served on the floor of what would be the highest mountain. Machinery and eaves, driven, walked on by an eleven year old son. The baby, at four, would tumble down a boulder-filled backyard that would only become a full yard seven years after moving in. And recovering. My one and only daughter, ten, and I, wiring each electrical outlet together. Learning.
18 years of framed quiet rooms.
My family were peasants long ago, living and working in the second oldest medieval Roman town in England — and later on — train people. Plagues, black soot, illness took them. As these things do.
His were farmers. His dad, dressed in dresses, as a little man, had 11 brothers and sisters. The outdoor open cooking fires could light-up a boy’s pants and then it was over. Warmth and sustenance the goal. Only one sibling would live into her 80’s. The “c” word ran rampant. Farming life. Stress. Genetics.
But I remember the evening orange glow and sirens asking us to leave by morning for a fire named after a race car event. It was October of 2003 and for seven days it felt like the race was in slow motion. Wasn’t it autumn?
Fire in the grasslands can move a few miles per hour to over 14 mph and even up to 40-60 mph or more in extreme conditions with strong winds and steep terrain.
We had extreme conditions.
In the aftermath, everything alive in it’s path hit mach speed down that mountain. I imagined the wiggling, the tiny legs, cat cries, brave bears. Lost dogs.
We had a more than old RV, purchased on a re-fi of our first modest home. The building, the living, the surviving didn’t lend time to camp anymore and our grown kids barely remember anything we did with them. So what did it matter really?
And that is the greatest hardship of parenting — all the good is forgotten in the bad.
Except. I remember.
By the time the ash and smoke had settled all around our home, every square inch of breathing inside and out — the old camper, another dream, with newly stuffed cushions for my back, had beckoned us over. He really was a good man. And, as if it was a tree itself, any creature small enough to save it’s life had crawled under and up, ate, clawed through, desperate for shelter.
We would never camp again and I would mourn the loss of nature that could not be saved by machine. The hope of togetherness in a world of endless work.
Screams I will never forget from my place on the floor of a friends, children tucked into their sleeping bags. A calm pile of trust playing card games. Deflecting words. And worry.
Frantic, “Pray for me. It’s here.” Over and out.... hanging onto the paced crunching of walkie talkies, the ground beneath his feet, stumbling, running toward the fire. I, frozen, hearing the sounds, helpless, until it faded — but in that moment, a great faith came over me. I prayed. We prayed. Outloud.
The firestorm tore through the backyard, blew up our brother’s water truck, and met the back door. Then just like that, in a high wind turn — it was over. The fire headed west along the ridge. To Upland. The city of our first home. Miracle?
I will never really know how it all felt. It would be four days of ferrying hot spots afterward. Our home stood as a symbol of tall burned trees, exhaustion and one proud man. While neighbors who never said hello would bring new hoses to our home, a fireman ornament for our Christmas tree, I would wander the yard wondering, listening to the quiet.
Photographing twisted melted things, and blackness. Second chances came to us.
We gathered by candlelight to mourn the one man who tried to get his elderly parents out of their old home on the hill above our church. He had a fire in his heart and they had a fire in theirs. Giving up, he would drive away and die under a fallen electric pole.
We mourned the dark quiet hills, and a son’s death, at the tiny fire station in the heights of Upland where a large Christmas Star of hope shone over the valley and didn’t burn again for a few years.
The first time I saw that star from down below — I cried in my car.
No birds. Nothing but the sound of wind and trees clanging on eaves.
For three long years.
And as it does — life would come back. And I would imagine the blackened trunks watching over us as new babies scoured the garden.
The trees know.
“You cut down these magnificent trees that were around when Jesus roamed the earth, and it hurts your soul,” - Train Dreams
The weight of man and Hope laid upon the gift of trees. It does hurt the soul.
I see him saving trees. Still. Saving us. Running towards the fire — fire in his heart. His lungs. Saving himself from something deep within that I cannot touch to this day.
Because in the end, man will choose to fight by fire, or be the fire.
Until he can’t.
And in his righteousness. Man’s survival. He acts humbly. Convicted. Not confused with the obsession of fire, brimstone and hell — but rather in the act of what is good, noble and true in the sacrifice.
And I imagine the tree in the soul of an ordinary good man lives a spark, a driving purpose, unto the heavens — one which keeps flame and spirit for life quintessential outside of a mere existence.
For the love of home.
But for God and seasons of fire.
But if I say, “I will not mention his word
or speak anymore in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.
- Jeremiah 20:9
All pictures/video taken by me, except for vintage images of family. Music from the movie Train Dreams. A beautiful piece of art of what it means to be extraordinarily ordinary.
Gave me a lot to think about while away for a few weeks in a very small humble Oregon town.
