Our Environment: “Fire Kills” by Scott Turner

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Scott Turner, Environmental Columnist

Fire kills, you understand?                                                                            

Those were the opening words of a reprimand by a local firefighter to me, an eight-year-old blossoming pyromaniac.

The year was 1966 and I was the leader of our block’s small band of childhood fire worshippers. I procured the matchbooks from my father’s supplies (He smoked cigarettes) and collected the newspapers from his weekly subscription.

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We built the fires on the concrete pad at the bottom of a stone stairwell that led to a private home’s locked and unused basement door.

I hid the matchbooks under the living room radiator in our family’s apartment, but my mom found them, earning me that trip to the local fire station.

The firefighter’s lecture ended my arsonist-like behavior. Still, I do get to enjoy building and setting fires safely every year, when we spend an August week in a New Hampshire cabin, where I construct and ignite conflagrations in an outdoor stone fireplace to cook our hamburgers and s’mores.

For me, collecting twigs and birch bark strips from the forest floor is an unhurried activity amidst the relative quiet of the northern woods in late summer. Poking around under the tall hemlocks and pines allows me to meander. I gather, but also inspect the needle-draped ground, the granite boulders, fallen logs and more. I am in zero hurry.

Larger branches often show squiggly under-bark trails, called galleries, chewed by beetles. Such pathways range from pencil-line thin to magic-marker wide. Sometimes, frass—the powdery excrement of the insects--remains in the galleries. Or, the lines appear as clean and polished as flumes.

Worldwide, insects are on the decline, sometimes drastically. I consider the beetle galleries, which look like hieroglyphics or petroglyphs, as historical records. Over the 14 years we’ve visited that NH property, we’ve observed insect numbers plummet. Gone are many of the spiders, daddy longlegs and butterflies, for example.

Although the beetle galleries are produced under the bark, they are like past-years initials that people carve into the outside of trees. 

Such are my thoughts as I stack the kindling into the shape of a small teepee over the birch bark in the fireplace. I pride myself in the ability to build and give birth to a campfire, without employing any fluid or fire-starters, and using just one match.

One of my once-a-year-indulgences at the lake is to start and tend these cooking fires, listening to the crackling of the burning wood, smelling their smoke, and using the coals to prepare our food.

And yes, sometimes I find myself watching the flames like when I was a little boy.

But I am not a curious or wayward child in need of firefighter counseling. I am a man, who is appreciative and thankful for his time in the wilds of New Hampshire every year, picking and pondering sticks at his own pace and wishing that the spiders and their allies return soon.

{image_3}Scott Turner is a Providence-based writer and communications professional. For more than a decade he wrote for the Providence Journal and we welcome him to GoLocalProv.

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