The Summer My World Burned Down

During the summer of 2002, Coloradans witnessed several massive forest fires.  One of them was the Hayman fire, which torched more than 138,000 acres of national forest.  In this fire, which was started by a federal forestry officer, one hundred and thirty three homes were lost.  Six people lost their lives, and it’s impossible to know how much wild life did not survive.

I remember several weeks of the sky glowing dark pink, and the sun was a ferocious blazing red.  Ashes covered our cars and lawns, even though the burn was more than an hour’s drive away on the interstate highway.  Asthmatics and people with other breathing problems were urged to remain inside, or else admitted to hospitals.

I was twenty-two years old at the time.  I was bartending at a hole in the wall dive bar when I learned that the youth retreat, at which I had spent several of my most memorable childhood years, had burned down in the fire.  Even today, I still recall the devastation I experienced when I heard about it on the news.

The summer I turned sixteen, I had begged the leaders of the retreat to hire me in some way.  Luckily, they had a need for an assistant cook to help out in the kitchen.  It would not have been my first summer away from home, but by that time I was nearly an adult, and learning more than ever who I was apart from the identity I had relative to my parents and my family.

That was the summer that instead of starving myself for control of my environment, I took to vegetarianism as a means for diet restriction.  Of course, it didn’t entirely work, but it was a start.

That was the summer that I fell in love with a  boy– a boy from St. Louis, whose name escapes me these days.  I was heart broken that following spring to learn he was going to become a father– in delayed response to the refusal letter my mother forced me to write in reply to his invitation to attend his high school’s homecoming dance.

That was the summer that the boy whom I called my older brother joined the army.  I remember how the tears fell in warm lines down my face when he called to tell me the news.  He was ready to start a new life for himself– a life somewhere far away, without those people who tied him to the streets and gangs of Denver.

That was the summer that my youth group leaders took a road trip together to come visit me for the day.  The sun sparkled on rocks as it fell past the spiny needles of the pine trees that towered over us as we talked and walked arm in arm together down the mountain trails.

That was the summer I learned how to fight my very own forest fires.

I slept in a trailer three hundred yards away from the kitchen.   One night my trusty teddy bear rolled off of the bed into the space heater and instantly filled the trailer with smoke.  The universe, or God, was on my side that night.  I woke up coughing, saw that Teddy was burning, rescued him before flames licked at me, and cried until I fell back asleep.

Another day, F. and I watched the maintenance man, who went by the name of “Gandolph,” set a massive pile of thrash alight.  He had worked all morning, collected all of it from the trees he trimmed throughout the camp, and piled it in a lump in the center of a cleared out space nearly thirty feet in diameter.  We were surrounded by miles and miles of pine trees.  He doused the thrash with an entire barrel of gasoline, having driven the tiny 300 gallon fire truck up behind us, “Just in case.”  I stood there in my flip flops and shorts, waiting for the free entertainment.   Not more than a few minutes had passed since he had lit the mass before it was obvious that we couldn’t control the burn.  Gandolph grabbed the fire hose, turned it on at full stream, and shouted for us to stand back.

I realized at that moment that fire was the closest thing I had ever seen to Spirit. It wasn’t a ‘thing’ or an object, yet it was a living creature with no shape and no physical boundaries; it devoured quickly and completely before moving on to its next sustaining bite.  It was hungry for every ounce of our droughted kindling, and began to lick at the trees around us.  Mesmerized by the fire as it danced from branch to branch, I was slapped back into reality when Gandolph threw the hose between my fingers so that he could be freed from the fight. He and F. must run to get the bigger fire truck before we lost control of the insatiable beast.  “Don’t let it get to the trees!”

Armored with nothing more than a tank top, cut off shorts, flip flops, and a quickly draining fire truck, I began my first tango with the Universe.

That night I slept deeply from both utter exhaustion and slight burns– no more than a sunburn– that covered my legs, face and arms.

In 2004, my brother was old enough to go to Lutheran Valley Retreat.  My mom asked me to make the hour drive with her, and I was eager to see how the rebuilding project had come along.   No warning could have prepared me for the devastation I would witness as we drove into Pike National Forest.

Tears peeled themselves away from my eyelashes in a consistent stream.  Speechless, I sat in the passenger seat as her truck slowly made its way over the dirt roads as naked black logs towered above us as far back as I could see.   I cried soundlessly and cursed Terry Barton for taking these majestic moutains away from me.