Matchboook Memory
A wooden matchstick outperforms a flimsy cardboard book of matches every time. The sharp strike of sulfur gives off a scent that overwhelms odors, even the stench of a South Dakota outhouse on an August day. The stick burns slowly compared to matchbook, as the flame turns it to char. As a child, five or six maybe, I liked to test the matches. I’d light them, watch the flame eat away the stick, then, before the flame wicked to my finger, I’d rest the stick against a wall to watch the triangular singe mark appear like a shadow of the flame. A negative reflection of the light. A time or two a flame connected to flesh, a flash burn, before I dropped it to the floor and it burned out.
Not once did my little experiments land me in hot water. No one caught me. The house didn’t burned to the ground.
We didn’t have a fireplace, not at that house, but Mom preferred sticks to matchbooks, so there were plenty of the larger stick matches on hand to light her cigarettes. The red box with the black racing stripe down the side sat like a deck of cards in the center of the pine picnic table in our kitchen. The pine logs were split, flat side up and round log facing the floor. It was varnished to a gleaming golden yellow, with none of the raw edges or splinters of an outdoor picnic table. It was smooth, almost soft, and cool despite the heat outside. In winter, the cold seats made you dance until your body heat warmed them.
Once, on accident, Mom lit the table on fire. It was game night, between hands, so the red-backed playing cards lay in an uneven stack on the table near the matchbox and ashtray. Somehow she’d spilled her drink and was in no hurry to clean it (because it wasn’t near the cards and she needed a cigarette), so the beverage oozed across the smooth tabletop as Mom lit the Winston. No one knows how, for certain, but somehow that match caught the Peppermint Schnapps on fire. It burned cleaner than anything in my experiments. The smell was like Christmas, a mix of pine and peppermint. The flame rose off the alcohol in white and blue, higher in some parts, lower as it neared the edge and the end of its fuel.
Later, in high school, I thought the flame of the Bunsen burner was almost as pure, but that night, I had never seen anything like it. Like watching fireworks, we turned out the lights and watched as it ate the thick liqueur from a large center pool before following the shallow rivulets to the edge of the table. The little streams of fire reached outward until the fuel expired and the flames extinguished, leaving us in darkness.
The tabletop was warm to the touch, and nearly dry, unharmed by the flames as if the varnish acted as a magical barrier.
Mom was in her fun stage. A reluctant, dirt-poor single mom with four kids to raise and no idea how to do it alone, never wanted to do it alone. She abdicated adulthood for a time. Drank cheap wine, the occasional schnapps, and played cards half the night with her kids.
That night, she spilled more schnapps, on purpose this time, multiple times, straight from the squat, clear bottle, lit it so we could watch the blue flames eat schnapps again and again before she called it quits, turned on the lights, wiped up the table, and shuffled the cards.
I was too young to understand the pain of her loss, the uncertainty, the abject terror of providing for four kids. Especially I didn’t understand the anger she swallowed and didn’t digest before she died decades later. I simply recall the fun and games of that time she remembers as the worst time of her life.
I took joy in the light show.
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Fire is a source of light and warmth and community. In it, you can cook, make coffee, and roast marshmallows for S’mores, and the sweet, toasty smell will take you back to every camping trip from the time of your first blackened marshmallow.
Fire is a force of nature that can neither be predicted nor inoculated against. Controlled, it’s that communal campfire. Out of control, it’s a 50,000 acre wildfire that will not be tamed. No wonder early man was fascinated by it. No wonder a six-year-old girl was mesmerized.
Fire is a miracle, something to protect and to be protected from.
It’s too late to protect Black Forest. The flames started around two o’clock on a Tuesday. By four, the plume of white, gray and black pushed into the sky over Colorado Springs like a mushroom cloud. It’s a familiar sight. A year ago, Waldo Canyon. We know before the smoke turns the blue sky to haze and bites at our eyes. We know.
Fire. The black smoke means structure.
The first photos I see online are from Black Forest Road and Shoup. When I was a baby, we lived a few miles from that intersection. A small strip mall with a few country stores sits on the spot. In the online photo, the red and orange flames are chewing up forest like a cheap matchbook while a police cruiser is set on the road with the stores in the background. The driver’s door is open and a Deputy is standing in the street with a bullhorn.
The intersection of memory and hot news, the building is a backdrop I had forgotten until the moment I see the photo. It succumbs to the fire in a dark, black funnel until the propane tanks blow, then for a moment, the smoke turns a translucent blue.
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In 2009, a year after the great escape, the fear still haunted me. It surprised me, the way it knocked me down when I thought I was standing strong. At night, I lived my OCD moments, checking the door locks. I’d get up, go downstairs, check the front door, the sliding door in back, and then the windows, ot afraid of random strangers, but a man I had married and who now lived a thousand miles away. And I’m still checking the locks.
My friend Sandra never knew about my crazy internal dialogue. What she knew was that when Invisible came to town to pick up the kids, I was a different person. Face pale and drawn. Silent. No longer married to him, I was still trapped in the same sick cycle, not wanting to provoke him, afraid to see him angry. Terrified he would follow me.
She tossed me a couple red-hot fireballs and told me to grow a pair and I wished I could be as ballsy as that mouthy Southern wench.
Then one night after our Friday night daiquiri, she grabbed my scrapbook albums and told me to burn them. Not the whole albums, just the pictures of him. It was like she’d suggested a blasphemy, that I alter history. After another drink, Sandra lit a fake log in the fireplace.
Somewhere in those scrapbooks, in the life lived between the pictures, I had lost sight of who I was. He followed me. Everywhere. To scrapbook retreats and women’s retreats and work conferences. When my sister or best friend came to visit, he slept on the floor in the living room while we talked so that we never had a moment to ourselves. When I went to the neighbors, he knew the moment I left and demanded I come home. Demanded.
I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know how, but I lost myself.
The first picture I burned, he had that look on his face. Smarmy, self-satisfied arrogance. God, I hated that look and the cluck of his tongue and wink that said, “Gotcha.” The edges singed before the picture melted onto the log. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t pure, but it made my insides glow like a Peppermint Schnapps fire.
I tore through the book, strawberry daiquiri in hand, until I had a pile of old photos and ragged holes in the scrapbook. I tossed it to the fake log in a pile so high it smoked rather than burned. The edges curled, the images bubbled and the color leached away until they looked like negative images, until the fake pine smell burned through, until the flames leaped and engulfed the memories.
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During the Black Forest Fire, at one on Wednesday afternoon, I leave work to see a new plume blooming in the north. It looks like it’s centered over the city and I can’t stop myself. It is a compulsion, like a six-year-old playing with matches.
The fire feels personal this time. I follow the library road north, and then east, take a left and head north again. It is farther out than it appears in the hazy sky, but still close. Ten minutes from work, I pull onto Highway 83. A long line of vehicles on the south side of the road looks like the street ringing a park during a soccer game. Bumper to bumper parking, off to the side, out of traffic.
People, no, not people, but mismatched individuals that don’t belong in the same venue. Men in suits, some in paint-spattered jeans; women in dresses, skirts, and shorts; a few kids. Fresh from work, I join the mismatched crew. Together we climb a hill covered with native grass. My sandals slip on the uneven, sandy soil, while the pokey weeds stab at my ankles.
I have never done this. Never followed trouble. Sure, I’ve gotten mixed up with a wrong group of friends, made bad choices, trusted the wrong men—trouble, all of them—but not this. I don’t rush headlong into the unknown, I run from it—am better than anyone I know at hiding from it—but last year I watched the Waldo Canyon fire threaten memories I need to reclaim for myself. Flying W Ranch burned. Santa’s Workshop, the Cave of the Winds, and other memories threatened. This time, I watch it eating away at my earliest memories. I need to know what’s next.
The smoke plume rises over a section not-quite in town, no longer confined to the forest. The afternoon storms are changing the wind direction. The wind pushes the smoke—the fire—over a section of McMansions on large, wooded lots.
I snap pictures, for no reason except the compulsion to document.
Back at the car, I move down the road, as a fire truck blares past me in a whirr of lights. National Guard troops in camouflaged vehicles and muted uniforms block every road South.
I pull into a subdivision and step out. Across the highway, high-end homes on large lots with small clusters of trees dot the hilly landscape. The gray smoke turns black as I watch. Another structure. Such an innocuous term for the destruction of someone’s home. More pictures burning.
I don’t chase fire trucks.
But my house is on fire. Not my literal home, but my city, the repository of my memories, my safe place, no longer safe. It is hot, and windy, and filled with smoke and uncertainty. My security blanket is on fire and I don’t know how to define myself without its protection.
Traffic heading north comes to a standstill and I take it as my cue to leave. When I get home, I turn on the TV. Highway 83 is now closed and the subdivision where I parked is in evacuation. The fire, an entity of its own, has left the forest and stormed the city gates.
The media coverage is better since Waldo Canyon. Everyone has experience now. The television personalities, the officials, the firefighters. Those of us not on the frontlines watch it like the TV drones we are. We view the pictures on Facebook, and catch raw footage on Youtube. It has its own hashtag: #blackforestfire.
We douse ourselves in it, like a table covered in schnapps, and watch it burn. It is a morbid sort of pleasure, yet we cannot turn it off nor stop the deluge on the Internet. Photos, updates from evacuated friends, postings of lost animals and livestock. It never ends.
We haven’t had fireworks in years—drought—so we turn out the lights and watch the smoke. And we don’t stop watching.
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Power is seductive. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis. Fires. They release pent-up energy. Our adrenaline takes charge.
Fight or flight?
We fixate on fire coverage in the same way we watch horror movies. It is not us facing the fire—yay!—but we watch to see how others handle it. We want to know humans can confront the horror. We want to know they can survive their homes burning. We want to know they overcome the loss of safety and security. That they will rebuild.
We are called upon to rebuild and recreate time and again in life. Marriage, death, divorce, relocation, natural disaster, when the kids are born, when the kids leave. Fire.
Experts say it will take seventy-five years for nature to recover from the Waldo Canyon fire. I don’t have seventy-five years.
Like a TV drone, I watched a series of personal fires devastate my life, leaving me bereft of security. I can’t hide from it anymore. I don’t want to hide the pain, loss, uncertainty and all-consuming terror of being a dirt-poor single mom. I don’t want to chew on undigested anger for decades before I die.
I don’t want to become my mother, drinking cheap wine and playing with fire. I can’t opt out of adulthood.
I came home—Colorado—to find myself in the setting of my childhood and I can’t find me. The city is burning, a 15,000 acre campfire without the pleasure of pure blue flames.
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The local fire department posts a video on structure protection during the Black Forest fire that adds to the fascination. They condense two and a half hours of firefighting into a five-minute video. The fire eats away the forest floor like a lava flow at a speed of six inches per second, standing several inches high, the frontline red flames, leaving a trail of scorched earth in its wake. It feeds on brittle pine needles that bed under the grass. The flames lick at the trees, but find no low-hanging branches, so the trees live to fight another day, like triangular singe marks on the horizon, charred but standing.
The firefighters wait until the flames hit the mulch around the house to aggressively attack, holding the line and saving the house. One house in over 13,000 evacuated. 72,000 man-hours spent. Nearly 15,000 acres charred. 511 homes and buildings incinerated. Two dead. Untold loss of pets and livestock. More than $90 million in property loss.
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The flames flow like lava. They are beautiful.