A Stick, a Night, a Fire
A Stick, A Night, A Fire
[Editor's Note: This personal essay by Zivara is not specifically about Balsamea, but expresses themes in a kindred spirit. We welcome contriibutions like this.]
June, 2003 – I recently broke my favorite walking stick, a good companion of several years, purchased at an annual crafts festival at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. After a brief surge of sorrow — for my loss and for my stupidity in how I broke it — I quickly resolved to take advantage of the occasion to make a new one with my own saw and knife. After a failed attempt at making a walking stick from a piece of Oak, I returned to the woods and cut two branches, the first a cane-height piece of Beech, the second a staff-height piece of Maple. Both were cut just above a sub-branch that would serve as a handle head.
Over the next few days the Beech cane evolved under my knife into a beautiful piece, with a handle resembling a heron’s head, with a small knot for an eye. The process of carving and sanding it gave me considerable pleasure, until, as the wood continued to cure, the head began to split. I salvaged it by counter-sinking a screw through it, then filling the crack and over my screw’s head using wood-filler. It has turned out wonderfully, after six coats of polyurethane and light sanding between each coat.
The Maple staff awaits carving. I generally prefer a stick of cane height to a staff, but I thought it would be nice to have both. In the event of hiking with a friend, I would offer the friend their choice. Each with a hooked head, they could serve as pulls for hiking mates to help each other through climbing obstacles or creek-fording, or to recapture a hat blown out of the canoe.
Actually, the Beech was my second attempt. The first was with that piece of Oak. It failed as a cane for three reasons. First, I had not sawed it properly to keep a branching piece at the head as a handle. Second, it was too heavy. Finally, the Oak’s long fibers made carving across their lines difficult. So I turned that one into a campfire poker, for which it is more than well suited. It is a darned fancy campfire poker. Being Oak, the tip won’t burn off quickly, and it won’t rot lying across the top of the fireplace through the seasons. Nor will it become a victim of termites or carpenter ants.
Browsing my tree guidebooks for perhaps the hundredth time, I was reminded that Ash is popular for the manufacture of furniture and baseball bats. I resolved to find myself a good piece of Ash. I studied the compound leaf pattern in the books until I was clear on what to seek afield.
Off I went to the woods, laughing to myself about how much smarter it may be to chase a piece of Ash rather than “a piece of ass” (as it was known in Navy vernacular). Far be it from me to deny that the comforts and pleasures of a female companion are good things. The trouble is that as I carve out my place in her life, unlike a piece of Ash, a woman needs to carve her place in my life, and I’m not amenable to carving unless I hold the knife. Unlike the Ash, she talks, makes demands, has needs, attitudes, desires, and many fears, and she won’t tolerate being left in the trunk of the car between hikes. My piece of ash never talks about anything I don’t want to hear, and when it does talk, I’m VERY interested. Furthermore, rather than help me ford streams and ascend arduous mountainsides and whack my way through thick forest undergrowth, as does a good hard stick, despite all the comforts and pleasures of her company at home, in the woods not all women are as sturdy as a good stick (nor men). And my stick is never afraid of the dark, or rain, or coyotes or bears, or not getting home in time to feed the cat. At my age, a good woods-mate is harder to find than a good piece of Ash.
It took half a day to find my stick, but finally I did find something that looked like the pictures in the books, and sawed off a nice piece with a good handle on it. Along the way, I also found another piece of Maple that seemed perfectly suited for my purposes. Now I have the raw materials for four walking partners: the salvaged Beech, the Maple staff, the Ash, and the second piece of Maple.
On the night of Friday, May 30, I took the Ash for a walk, in its raw, untamed state, to Big Pine Refuge. Along the way we “discussed” how the handle should be carved for the best fit and grip, and studied the potential advantages to a little shorter length.
This was the occasion when the rock walls of the fireplace at Big Pine Refuge took on their first bit of blackening. I arrived at the campsite half an hour before dark. An hour later, the tree canopy above me glowed in the orange light of a blaze, but not so much that it drowned the twinkling of stars filtering through the holes in the trees silhouetted against the bright black sky. Once again, I saw the brightness of the night.
Thoreau said, “Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible.” Perhaps this is some of the genius in the design of the human eye. Someone has argued that the human eye is not a light receptor, but an emitter. Either way, it is true, according to the New York Conservationist magazine, that after forty-five minutes in the dark, humans get the best degree of night vision. I have tested this and found it true.
Night vision is not the same as day vision. One must accept that things visible to us in the dark do not appear in the same way as in daylight. There are differences in the shadings, and different ways of looking. Some things visible in the day are invisible at night, but other things stand out as never seen in daylight. Night vision is something to learn, as in the way one learns to swim. It is merely crawling in water, but altogether different from crawling on land. Different principles apply. Seeing in the dark is a different way of seeing.
Wouldn’t it be nice if forty-five minutes in the dark yielded new vision in matters of truth, love, relationships, or career? On second thought, it is true that spending concentrated, consciously aware spells of time in darkness or silence does open channels to wisdom not gained otherwise. Thus we have meditation.
I spent three hours in a meditation of sorts that night at the fireplace in the woods. All the familiar sounds we take for granted became more clearly pronounced, and they spoke distinctly to me.
I heard as if for the first time the constant shish of not only the nearby creek, about 200 feet away to the south, but also the lower-toned gentle roar of the more distant creek, twice as far away to the north. They said with perfect diction that life is a river, in which I am immersed, and which flows through me, even flows as me.
With each piece of fire wood I snapped apart, the sharp cracking sound advised me that the energy in that sound, and the energy it took me to break it, is the same energy that would become heat and light and smoke and ash in the process of the fire. The seasoned life in the wood makes a good fire, not its death.
I fancied as a sort of laughter the snaps, pops, and crackles of the fire. I smiled back and agreed that things really are very funny. I chuckled at a view from outside myself, seeing this character reclining alone in the middle of the night on a piece of plastic-lined painter’s drop-cloth spread in the middle of the woods on a small lawn he planted around a big rock fireplace.
I looked up at the Rorschach splatters of the treetops against the starry sky and said thanks to the Genius who gives such vision, such light in darkness, even the light of humor, to see such things in the bright black of night. I observed that only some Observer greater than myself can step out of me and look at myself, and share the view with this so-called self I call me. This Observer lives partly in me, and moves freely in and out of me as it chooses, and still there is some part of me that seems able to direct its perspective to some extent.
Finally, after burning three small logs and quite a pile of smaller stock I had accumulated over previous weeks’ visits to the Refuge, I let the fire dwindle down to just orange-glowing coals. I laid back and relaxed, as if to let sleep befall me if it would. “I could sleep here just like this,” I mused. “If it got chilly, I’d wake up and feed the fire again.” I thought about the fact that I had a jacket and two emergency “space blankets” in my backpack. “Maybe I should just reload the fireplace with a big bundle of kindling and small logs and just stay the night.” Undecided, I just dropped all thought and let my heart and mind focus on everything I could hear, feel, smell, and taste.
The ember-light dimmed still more as I lay listening to the creek and watching the stars. The wind had become almost perfectly still. A soft, thin mist hung in the dark all around me. Life lay still in perfect silence and darkness.
Far off to the southwest I heard a wind rolling down from the mountains. I listened as it slowly rolled toward me, then directly overhead, stirring the trees above me, first at their tops only, then lower, each phase with a unique sound, but the movement of air at the ground with me was minimal. Then silence enveloped me again. I closed my eyes and slid toward sleep, but stopped in some half-waking zone. In a little while, from the northwest, another wind rolled down, this time missing my camp by a few hundred feet, blowing by to my left.
I could not leave. I stoked up the fire with a fistful of long sticks broken into little pieces, and watched as they quickly burned away again to barely glowing embers blanketed in their own ash.
I stood and prayed in gratitude for the place, for the time there, for the fire, for each of the things I enjoyed observing and feeling, and for a special dispensation of protective grace on this site and its surroundings, and for a blessing upon all creatures who might pass through here, human or otherwise. Then I broke the night by turning on my flashlight, drowned the embers with water I’d brought along, saddled up in jacket, hat and backpack, retrieved my trusty piece of Ash, and brought her home.
On the way down the road in the car, about a quarter-mile from home, a large white owl descended to the middle of the road, pouncing on some rodent. I stopped and shut off the car engine, watching the owl in my headlights as it watched me between gobbles of its snack. After a while of gazing at each other, the owl flew up to perch on the roadside power line. I started the engine and drove off, accepting this rare kind of encounter as a sign that I had spent the night wisely.
Zivara
