We had borrowed a two-person tent from Aunt Janice, and while Marty set that up, I rummaged through the single bag of food we had brought with us. Marty drew his hunting knife from a leather scabbard hooked to his belt, cut open the bag of ice, and dumped it in the cooler over the cans of beer. I remember thinking that Marty loved to use that knife. He always wore it on his belt. It had a six-inch blade which was hooked on the end and a row of jagged saw teeth on the top side. The blade was flat black and the handle was oak with ivory inlays and grooves for easy handling. When unfolded and locked into position, the knife simply looked dangerous. I had no idea what a person would do with the hook and saw features, but Marty was adept at handling the tool and used it whenever he could.
I ate a powdered donut and then went looking for some kindling with which to start a fire while Marty finished arranging everything. When I got back to the site with an armload of twigs and small branches, Marty and his fishing gear were gone. On the face of the hatchet, Marty had left some stick matches with which to start the fire. The day was growing dark and cooling off, and I arranged the kindling over some newspaper and lit the paper with one of the matches. We had stopped outside the park and picked up a bundle of firewood from someone who had had it stacked in parcels in his front yard beside a little box in which to deposit money. I remember thinking about that box of money sitting there unattended and wondering why no one took it. I would have taken it myself, but something about the set-up prevented me from doing it, almost like instead of just stealing a few dollars from an unattended till, taking this money would be dishonorable, almost shameful. If the honor is in the hunt, this system, by eliminating the hunt, eliminated the honor. It even created the opposite effect. Instead of stealing the money, it felt good to do the right thing and pay for the bundle. I remember liking the fact that whoever had stacked that wood was trusting me.
It was good dry wood we had purchased, and I started a decent fire without much trouble. To build a fire like that felt good, like I was a pioneer living off the land or something. The flames warmed the air around the fire, and the heat brushed against the skin of my face. I sat on the ground and looked at the fire for a long time. The orange and red flames danced around the crackling wood and every so often a small ember would shoot out of the rusty metal ring like the last act of an old circus performer, its red tail quickly evaporating behind its arced path, its intensity quickly fading into darkness. I sat there and watched that fire for a long time, and when I eventually looked up at the sky, I saw the millions of stars which only seem to shine way out away from the city, away from the houses, and like the embers which popped and arched out of the fire on that night, I watched a meteor shower with hundreds of streaking particles burning blue into the atmosphere.
The memory of that fire, those stars, and the meteors seems strangely magnetic to me now, and, on cool fall nights, I often long to go back to that site and light another fire and look at those same stars, and watch the particles of dust and rock incinerate as they try to break into our sky, but I know I will never go back. Perfect moments can not be fabricated––they just appear and then they are gone. The real trick is to recognize them when they are happening, and what I most regret is that back then, I hadn’t, and that now I long for that moment that has grown to become better than I knew it to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment