Your Friday Firesmith

It’s hard for me to be around fire and not sit mesmerized by the process.  Fire is a verb not a noun and I am willing to bet it is the single most important external process that lifted human beings from the ranks of all the other animals into what they were. Writing was the next step in that process so it’s natural that I have fire and writing on my mind. But back to the fire…

The two massive logs will be the centerpiece for the fire but there are also a couple of other largish pieces from the limb that fell off the Oak.  I had to cut that piece up into three sections because the limb was twisty and bent at angles.  Each one of those pieces was all I could get into a wheelbarrow and on the evolutionary scale the wheelbarrow wasn’t a giant step but I am damn glad to have one.  But even these three pieces, much smaller than the logs, won’t make a good fire at all. There has to be a lot of little stuff to start the fire with, you know.

A while back the top of a tree broke and fell. It landed on the tree next to it and all of this was far too large and far too high for me to play with at all. Nature took its course and both trees died. I had to pull the first off of the second before the corpse landed on the fence and therein lay the small pieces of wood. The wheelbarrow and I made a few trips back and forth, back and forth, and slowly I had enough small stuff to turn a flame into a fire.

I’ve watched people burn out a box of matches trying to light a piece of wood the size of a grown man’s arm and it never works. These same people will toss a gallon of gas on pile of logs trying to ignite them when all is need is patience and an understanding of fire itself. I stack a wheel barrow’s worth of twigs and leaves and tiny branches in the middle of the burn pit where all the big stuff is waiting.

 One match. One tiny flame.

The fire at the tip of the match has a lifespan of just a few seconds. Clear, yellow, and tiny, the solid umbilical cord of the matchstick cannot support life but for a heartbeat, maybe three. I edge the flame towards some dry leaves on the end of a limb and suddenly there is smoke, the first sign of life, light, and the leaves crackle as the water in them turns to steam.  The leaves wither quickly and the flame must claw its way up to where there is a tangled mass of Spanish Moss and twigs. It burrows hard and deep into the mass and a lesser Firesmith might think this the end of the flame and reach for the box of matches.  There is smoke, smoke and no fire. But I hear tiny sounds inside, crackling and popping noises that tell me the flame is beginning to digest the dry moss.  It emerges from this gray cocoon and now it wants sticks, not twigs. I have prepared a double handful of sticks and lay them on the fire. Like water through a sieve the flames pour upward and the sticks blacken while feeding the fire. More sticks and more small stuff are placed directly on the flame, nearly suffocating it, but there is heat now, not just fire, and that heat instantly dries and prepares the food for digestion. The fire breaks through once again and this time it wants to spread out and it takes its first awkward steps upward and outward.

It’s mythical that the doctor has to spank a newborn so the child will cry and therefore get its first breath but the process of fire can be defined as independent when it begins to breathe on its own. There is a noise, a buzz, a sound that a Firesmith can hear, when a fire begins to draw strength from the air around it. The draft of air propels the fire upward, spreads heat outward, and the fire curls and destroys smaller stuff at a small distance now, and it nibbles on the larger wood like Lillith. The fire is on its own and I can start dragging more stuff to it.

People gather at one site, pitch a few tents, and rest for a while. It’s a good spot to stay so they build a hut or two, till some land, and suddenly paths become well used and more people show up. The center of town becomes crowded and people spread out to the edges of the village and a town begins to be born. So it goes with a fire, too.  The center becomes a chimney, almost, and the fire roars here.  But it creeps along the edges of the firepit, back alleys and side streets  but all contribute in some way to the fire. There is heat, real heat, hard heat, keep your distance, Firesmith, heat, in that center. The logs burn from underneath and the fire now roars. Anything I toss into the center is instantly transformed into flame. This fire is now something beyond my control. My puny little water hose cannot put this monster to grave. It will burn out on its own, get out and run free, or it will starve to death.  The true test of my skill lies not only in bringing this thing to life but also how I control it when it cannot be. My defenses must be true. My firebreak must contain this thing. My plan must work or this one will walk away from me and then it will run.

The center of the fire burns away all but the biggest pieces and the fire begins to ebb. Like the moment after passion between two lovers the heat now is mostly underneath. It will smolder now and not burn.  One of the logs is still in one long piece but there are red coals all along it. There will be very little left when the sun arises.  I rake all the remains into the center and there is smoke but no real fire. The one big piece sends a few yellow fingers upward but they are just feeble attempts to rise from the ashy grave. The fire is done.

Take Care,

Mike

How To Roll (a log) Like A Hermit.

Okay, there's a largish dead tree that has fallen in the back acre and it's right where I want to make a path. I need to make a path so when I want to check the fence, or just generally walk around where there is a three hundred year old Oak tree, I don't have to worry about waist high weeds or snakebite.

I'm still learning to use the iPhone camera so some of the shots are a bit out of focus. Oh, like the first one below. It's where I've axed the log off the stump. Stumps don't roll like that so it had to go.

So the next task is to get the log on rollers. See photo below

It takes some getting used to steering but once you get into a rhythm...

And there is always plenty of help here for me. See photo below for the supervision of this project.

 And below is the log on the pile and the next shot is the other half I moved today and in the same way. 

I have no idea how much this all weighed but I can tell you it's not hard at all to move them once you get the right tools. We human built the Pyramids and Stonehenge using little more than what you see here. All this talk and nonsense that we cannot do something because it's hard shows a lack of imagination.

Take Care,
Mike

The Three At Play

Little Square Burgers and Johnny Cash.

If you ever think that wring might come from a sound mind just take a look at who is doing the writing. And I’m not talking about someone writing a thesis on how rocket science works or someone working on a cookbook for recipes that are gluten free, but rather the writer that doesn’t seem to have anywhere in particular that the writing is going but it is going. Shit. That would be me.

I sat down to write and suddenly the words began to appear in from of me, very much like they are appearing to you right now.  This is not the product of careful planning or some inner secret I believe the Universe has revealed to me but rather a product of some psychosis, very much like someone who feels the urge to speak to himself while in a crowded bus.  I once knew a man who would burst into song at fast food restaurants and scare the hell out of people.  But the sudden and unexpected rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues” might lead someone, or several someones, to think the song to be autobiographical in nature to the current singer. Or they may, in point of fact, believe anyone who just starts singing aloud at Krystal’s is indeed a little nuts.

Yet this does not address the fact there are people who eat the alleged food at Krystal’s.  Clearly, were we to contrive to slowly poison someone fast food would be a great start.  The people standing in line, waiting to be killed slowly, paying for it in fact, might find disturbing an old Johnny Cash song being thrust upon them by someone clearly not inside the bell curves of expected or silent behavior. Noisily intruding upon other people is looked down upon more harshly than poisoning those same people, in that same room.

But I digress.

Okay, but where does this man’s urge to sing begin? Does he leave the house in the morning with the intent of breaking out his vocal cords and freaking out the patrons of the slow poison cookers and High Fructose Corn Syrup Addicts dispensers?  Does it matter what song? IS there a triggering device? Is there something about the smell of salt, onions, and white sugar buns cooking that makes his mouth water and the bass lines kick up?

How is this different than what I am doing right now?

I could write and never publish a word of it. I did write for nearly a decade and never said a word to anyone about what I was doing or why. The decision to speak about a hobby that requires a lot of time, a hell of a lot of work, but produces very little in the real world is hard to explain. The gardener who spends hours picking away at weeds in a rose plot has something to show, something beautiful and tactile that he might show off, or at worst, have a dead thorny bush  with wilted leaves and brown petals as a testament to a thumb less than emerald. But writing might disappear forever, good or bad, it may be unheard and unseen. Much more writing has been forgotten than will ever be remembered, you know.

Yet here I am.

I was drinking with a friend one night and he told me writing was like fishing, but you don’t know what you’re trying to catch, you don’t know how to catch it, you aren’t sure what bait to use, and you aren’t sure if the line has a hook on it or now. But other than that, writing was fairly simple.  I was drunk so this all sounded pretty good to me. Odd, that most people I know who write are also drinkers and most people I know who fish also drink.

How many of you would never get up in front of a crowd of people to sing unless you have a few in you? Karaoke is very loud way to tell people you are far too drunk to be driving home. I watched a young woman belt out “You Ought To Know” one night with the expertise of Adele after a Ben and Jerry’s Binge. What ever happened to her had happened hard and deep and she wasn’t afraid to say it aloud. You have to admire that sort of pain. Hell, it sells records but not little square burgers, I think.

It’s odd. There she is, right there, in my mind, a snapshot of a young woman stepping up to the mike, and she’s got this silly “Oh shit I can’t believe I’m doing this in front of people” look and then it strikes, but deep. The woman’s face changes and her eyes close. That’s when I stopped shooting pool to watch. To hell with what she’s going to sound like, there’s something there. When the screaming stopped the crowd cheered but I stood there and watched her step away from the stage like she was leaving part of her soul lying there dead and cold. What she took with her wrapped around her like smoke coming off of ice, enveloping her and following her back to the mortals who could never see it.

Take culture out of the picture and there is no difference between some jilted half teen with a big voice carrying half the people in a bar into another world and some half demented Cash fan freaking out minimum wage purveyors of poison and their victims. Both get remembered here, and passed onto you, and both had something to sing, and both had their reasons for wanting to sing it. Value for this sort of thing is assigned arbitrarily and with prejudiced ears and eyes. Switch them around and the man gets laughed off the stage and the woman surprises the hell out of a lot of people in a very small space.

This doesn’t explain why I wrote this. This doesn’t explain why I put it out there for the ‘verse to see. I don’t have an explanation. Sometimes I feel like I’m singing in a fast food joint and there’s someone out there dying to put a tranquillizer dart in me and there are other times I feel like I’ve walked off and left something for someone. 

Take Care,

Mike

I Don't Think She's Crazy At All!

I Fought The Lawn and the Lawn Won

When composting yard debris and household debris there ought to be more natural stuff than manmade material.  The stuff we humans make apparently doesn’t compost as well as, let’s say, leaves. The process that transmogrifies paper into garden soil requires that something out there, a grub or some bacteria, dine on the composted material and leaves seem to do the best.  I more or less emptied the compost pile to get my new garden online and have been making additions to the old pile in hopes that I’ll have fresh garden soil again by next Spring. With all the rain we’ve been getting I don’t doubt a bit that I will be ready.

There have been more leaves this year than any other year I remember here. This is one of the few years we haven’t been jammed up in severe drought conditions, and maybe that’s it. But I have raked up enough leaves to get the pile back to where I want it and now, after today, I’ve got another pile of leaves and grass clippings that are getting as large as the compost pile itself.

I’ve been saving all my paper waste from the office to feed to the pile and the shredded stuff seems to go over well with the bio-fiends in the compost pile. I tell you there are many creatures in that pile that we would lock and load on in a hurry were they large enough.  It’s a very odd sort of biosphere in there, partly manmade and partly natural, and it’s the way the world ought to work.  I feed the earth what’s left over from what the earth feeds me and from that the earth will feed me again.

Some people might freak out over termites living so close to their house but I’ve discovered that termites love paper. Toads love termites, too. When I turn the pile and then water it the toads will hunt the termites and it’s like watching sea gulls fly in catching baitfish on the surface of the sea. I thought at first I had disturbed the toads and they were running for cover, but no, they’re feeding. Birds visit the pile and pick out insects, which don’t help me at all, but what’s a few worms amongst friends? The armadillos break in to steal egg shells but then again they too have some part to play in this. I do not claim to know what part they play and I cannot understand why they keep coming to steal egg shells from three large dogs, but hey, I’m not here to understand everything. It’s enough I never throw away anything the Earth can eat.

If you start composting you’ll be surprised at how quickly something can dissolve but if you don’t turn the pile on a regular basis then you’ll discover that something buried at the bottom of a pile of leaves will remain in its present state for a very long time. Water doesn’t seep down to the bottom as much as you’d think. The pile has to be turned so everyone gets and, everyone gets water, and everyone decays.  The pile has to be turned to the roots of nearby trees will begin to eat away from the pile from the bottom and it gets hard to turn with tree roots in there.

I made a few passes with the mower today and then raked up all the stuff I had just ran over with the mower. It’s a mixture of grass, leaves, weeds, and whatever has been in the yard since the last time I mowed. I’m not a lawn person; I have three dogs and a yard. There are things in there I won’t mention when you come over and eat tomatoes. Yes, you are quite welcome. But mostly it’s stuff that has grown from the ground and fallen from trees.

I’ve cleared out some areas of the yard I have never cleared out before and that accounts for some of the new stuff, but this year has been a hell of a year for leaves. I mentioned that before but I wonder if there is some cycle of leaf dropping we humans have missed? Could all the tree be on this same leaf popping thing once every twelve years or is it I just noticed it this year more than others? In the drought years I almost didn’t have enough leaves to go around so that sounds much more reasonable but I’m going to start keeping up with that, too.

I’ve never taken a census of the trees here. I know there are two giant Oaks on my property and a third just outside it. I know there are few pines tree and even fewer magnolia trees. Most of  the Oak trees are fairly young and most of those are water Oaks who do not have long life spans at all. Yet I have never dragged a tree book out and checked to see who is who and how many I have.  That might take a while but I think I might give it a shot. I’ll just grid out the property and go through it one section at a time and find out how many trees I have.

At least four big Oaks did not outlast me here.  I lost two really nice ones and that hurt. One was rather large but it wasn’t ever healthy. The fourth just plain broke in half and hit the house. I think, however, there are a couple of dozen very young trees that have only been here since I have.  I may have to thin them out in places where they are cramped or better yet replant them to better areas. I don’t know. I will have to work this out.

I fought the lawn and the lawn won, once again. This is the first time I’ve mowed this year and I’ll mow about once a week until October. Stay tuned for more adventures in yardwork and composting!

Take Care,

Mike

The Trees and Me. (Part One)

One of the first things that happened when I moved out here twelve years ago was a branch broke off of one tree and it landed on a much smaller and much younger tree. The branch was large and the young tree was small.  Most people would have not bothered to save the younger tree because freeing it meant I had to cut the large branch slowly and I had to get a ladder.

The photo below shows both trees today. Notice the scar of where the limb was. The smaller tree to the left was bent all the way to the ground.

The photo below is the smaller tree today. It is reaching towards the sky.

Look at the photo below.  I fenced in the back acre in 2007 and as a result the deer haven’t been feeding back there. The tree in the middle of the photo has a dark spot in the middle of it.

The photo above reveals the dark spot to be a nesting Cardinal.  The same trees who were allowed to grow free of feeding deer now house songbirds!

 

We humans tend to think of trees as those things that take far too long to try to grow, particularly Oaks and other giants. But in the space of a dozen years I have intentionally(sort of) grown trees that otherwise might have never lived. 

Take Care,

Mike