first campfire

My first campfire tonight. My first in too long. Damn far too long, as a matter of fact. I’m in the Willamette National Forest; between a winter of heavy snow and a spring of strong winds, fallen branches are easy to find. Attached to many of these branches are trees that also have fallen and these trees have closed all but a handful of campsites. The earliness of the season combined with the blowdown has provided me with very few neighbors.

Earlier in the day I had gathered some of the lichen covered scraps lying about and it was dark and still and quiet when I chose to ignite it. The fire whooshed and jumped to life, shooting flames into the air, apparently anxious to get started and fight off the cold. I sat rolling a cigarette to the familiar sounds of crackling and hissing. The heat pushed me back as I smoked and but I was able to watch just as the last of the green fir needles flared. Being mostly twigs and small branches, the fire did not last long. As it died out I noticed the clear sky for the first time that evening. Bit by bit, with the dying of the firelight, small pinpricks appeared in the sky. I laid back and let the sky slowly expose itself. First, of course, only the brightest of the stars shown through. But by the time the fire was a pile of cooling coals, the entire sky had opened up. I saw the Corona Borealis, a constellation I have always used to orient myself in the night sky, and starting finding a few more from there: Arcturas and the rest of Bootes, the dippers and their respective constellations, maybe Cygnus but I’m not convinced. Eventually the sky was so full of light that I could find very little.

Later, I stood to get the cup sitting on the picnic table so I could walk to the lakeshore and retrieve water to smother the remnants of the fire. Having exchanged sharp short range vision for shadowy long range vision, I did not see my grill until I had kicked the shit out of it, nearly falling over, and teaching any children within earshot a string of new profanities that will take them years to fully understand.

savage killer

vegetarian

After hopping around and swearing, I picked up the cup and turned on my headlamp to get the water from the lakeshore on the western side of my camp. As I bent down, something flew within perhaps 12 inches of my face. Looking up, I saw dozens of bats fluttering over the water. The sound that I had mistakenly thought to be waves hitting the shore turned out to be the bats swooping down and skimming the water to feed. Insectivorous bats wear skirts, fruit bats wear pants. That sentence will only make sense to a handful of people but I assure you it is an important distinction for those who are fascinated by Chiroptera (Hand-Wing; thanks Brad!) Apparently, having not enjoyed my presence nearly as much as I enjoyed theirs, they were absent when I returned for my 2^nd 3^rd and 4^th cup.

 By now, the fire was out, the bats were gone, my headlamp had burned away the stars, and it was past midnight. Crawling into my sleeping bag, I reflected on how much I have missed the woods and the sky and the earthy smell of campfires.

home