Williamston, MI

The women have settled into their evening talk. They’re passing the youngest of the cousins around to be burped and baby-talked and calmed and at last put down. The other children tear through the house with X-Wings and dinosaurs and swords, occasionally catching sight of me and shouting to be tickled. The Tickle Game is endless. It has neither halftime nor final buzzer. I can’t win. I’m like that sorry team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters. I grab one of the twins and make fast work of his thighs and ribs until he grabs himself and sprints for the bathroom.

In the living room the conversation continues, but my ability to feign interest has been weakened by overuse. I look out the back window across a field of snow illumined by a cold indifferent moon. The woods call to me in black vertical lines.

“I have to see a man about a horse,” I say to no one in particular. I button up a quilted flannel shirt. There’s a corncob pipe and a pouch of pipe tobacco in one pocket and a hip flask in the other. I grab two sections of the newspaper on my way out the door. It closes decisively behind me. I’ve traded warmth and noise and joy for an icy cutting wind, silence, and my favorite brand of misery, which looks for all the world to me like bliss.

I lean into the west wind. It plays through the woods and across the swale to the percussive crunch of the snow beneath my boots. Off in the distance a dog barks and barks again. Deer are afoot. I pass the horse barn, the tree house, the salt block, and come at last to the woods. A shovel leans against the small shack I rebuilt a few summers ago. I grab the shovel and head to a stack of wood cut and split and waiting for a flame. I clear a spot on the ground with the shovel and then snap some small dry sticks into a pile. I crinkle some newspaper and build a teepee over it with the sticks. I protect from the wind this small creation, made specifically for destruction, and touch the paper with a single match. The wind I’m blocking must be emblematic of something, for it can both extinguish and fan a flame, depending on the flame, which also must be emblematic. I’ll work on these tonight once the fire is going, the pipe lit, and the flask a little lighter.

And soon the fire is going. I’ve built it up slowly with bigger sticks and then small logs and I’ve let the west wind breathe heartiness into it. In the distance I see the lights of the house. It’s altogether possible that someone will flick a light on and off, on and off, in the hope that I’ll be able to translate this inscrutable message into something meaningful. If this happens, I’ll pretend I didn’t see any lights flicking on and off. There’s a good fire going and emblems that need to be worked out. Anyone who wants or needs me badly enough can walk out here and get me.

No one will walk out here and get me.

The moon has been obscured by clouds, and now a light snow is falling. I can’t understand why anyone would want to be indoors on such a night. I walk back to the shack, swing the turn-button latch I rigged from a deck cleat, and reach in for one of the two lawn chairs I keep in that small beautiful barnwood shelter.

Back at the fire I sit and stare at that most mysterious and alluring of the elements. What is it? How does it work? Why is it so hard to walk away from?

It is nourished by what it consumes. So said the great bard. It dies at its own cost, said another. Yet another mused upon “the blast of death’s incessant motion” fueled by the “exhalation of all our crimes.” That blast and those exhalations–too nearly do they resemble the wind that increases the vigor of my coals even as it hastens their expiring. Too nearly do they resemble my every breath.

My fire and I, we are both of us dying. For to live is to be dying; to live is to consume life, to use it up; to live is to kill oneself. It may be that the world can be carved up into what lives and what doesn’t, but tonight in the woods, far from the warmth and noise and joy, I doubt this easy taxonomy. It seems to me there is only death and dying–dying and, after it, death. In the house the children are running and laughing; the women are passing a baby and discussing bargains. Uncles are tickling rosy-cheeked kindergarteners, and bubbles are rising to the brims of champagne glasses. If the house throbs with life, it throbs with dying also.

I tug at my pipe. The smoke vanishes. As for me, my days are as grass.

The wind hits my back and the fire warms my face. I am at once cold and warm. I like this feeling. In the house there is general agreement that I am nuts to like this feeling, this being at once cold and warm.

Smoke from the fire draws back on me momentarily. Sylvan smells, sylvan smells—it’s Christmas time in the country.

Yonder, across the field and over the swale, it is held without dissent that I am a bit touched. Perhaps I am. No matter. I cannot look at a fire in a meditative hour and not think of the flux of all things. I cannot see the elm turn to dust or the ash to ash and not think of that spot which no vicissitude can find. This fire will get pretty low before I’ll walk away from it tonight.

I sit for a long time, at once warm and cold. The flask lightens. The smoke, the sounds, the tickling and the laughter, the falling snow, the black verticle lines, the perplexed woman now waiting for me under a thick comforter, waiting in a deep and faithful sleep–these all have to be worked out before time runs out.

But at length the fire gets low; at length I walk away from it. I crunch my way back to the house, now dark and quiet, to slip into a brief and fitful sleep, death’s second self, from which I have some hope, perhaps unwarranted, of rising again.