Pyre

He dreamt about a dead former best friend. Brett, twenty-two, overdose. It was one of his first nights here, and already he - like I have upon so many other transitions - was looking into the past.¹ But, of course, so was I: even as he told me about the dream, I remembered that phone call; he was in Wisconsin then, alone - our parents off on a trip, with the Golden Agers, probably - and I was in Idaho, feeling likewise alone. Seemed once more we'd somehow failed at brotherhood. A correspondence of stops and starts, that call, and more was said in silence than aloud.

I said brother you know, you know
It's a long road we've been walking on

The next night, amidst fires and dreams of orange skies and memories of flames before, I dreamt of my own dead former best friend. Brothers, we follow each other; so too did he and I. I remembered, and remembered, and remembered more. The trailer we'd shared. The fire that with a rusty gasp sent an old pine through the Airstream's already dented roof. Miles we'd run, shared notions, this idea of family, bloodborne (half pathogen, half legacy, half all the unknown variables known to mathematicians world-over) and otherwise. I woke, shakily; she asked in the thin light what I was thinking. "Transitions," I said. "I was thinking about transitions."²

You who are my home
You who are my home
And here is what I know now
Here is what I know now
Goes like this

Two brothers and the woman I love - whom my father has twice now in the confusion of either age or desire has named "your wife" - we three share a home now. The grass in need of mowing, the dishwasher always in need of running or emptying, the wisteria in need of trimming and the deck in need of repairing. The list ever lengthening. Procrastination in the name of fire's hazards, busyness, laziness. Also currently shared: a great deal of smoke; these burning hills; the trails once - and perhaps sometime again - held therein; the promise of adventures to come. He's always been afraid of heights; I'm perpetually afraid of the future; she's afraid of - i'm not sure. Perhaps that I'll never stop withholding. Two brothers and a better half, and we're completely unalike. We're not so different, we three. Which is essentially the same thing. We're the most familiar of strangers. We're home.

And your red sky at night
Won't follow me
It won't follow me now

Just the other day this image: sprouting through charred black earth, a jack pine rising in northern Minnesota, a year past fire.³ She saw consolation, hope; I saw a year of inpatient waiting, of slow and toiled recovery. I think of my favorite alpine trails, how many of them still show scars of a fire twenty years now past. The earth is fragile, and relationships more so; fire is necessary and change more so; family is a chain that binds us. I may yet learn to accept things for what they are, rather than fear what they may someday be.

Control yourself
Take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanting to be haunted

Thinking about futures: from youth into adolescence, adolescence into maturity, maturity into sepia-toned recollection. How when we're young the future's all promise and opportunity, awaiting the day we seize our destiny, live up to - and beyond! - our expectations and dreams. How in maturing our gaze lowers: we experience life; learn our shortcomings; fall short; gaze backwards, get stuck in the past; fail to appreciate the present, much less look ahead. We settle. For better and worse. Insert cliches, idioms, mail-order jokes. We are who we are and who we will be and on and on it goes as the years pile forth as always they do - and then we're old, and sentimental or jaded or somehow simultaneously both - but there's oh so much past, past, past. Tenses mix. We're easily confused. Hopefully we make peace; if not, maybe we're bitter. We've all that grandfolk hidden in our family mess⁴ somewhere. I'm projecting myself into greater and greater disarray.

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

The sun's a ghastly shadow first thing. These smoky mornings, there's but a slightly warmer circle, dim in all the gray. If the smoke'll clear a little, by mid-day that'll be an angry red orb staring down. So much haze: a sea of charred gray and small ashen flakes. She speaks of watching extended family deal with a river aflame and I remember the winds that came up from the Atlanta blaze a few years later, folks on a high vista watching a sunset of oranges and purples and reds that could only rival Denver smog, the smoldering soup illuminating the Sawtooths even as it burned their mostly inaccessible slopes. I think of fires lit by the careless, fires ignited by the sky, fires that have been blazing all the while undiscovered. I think of light and dark and the interplay of fire and wind, nights spent lost beneath the moon and big alpine sillhouettes, wandering blindly and half-drunk back to a jeep parked in a flooded meadow beside a raging creek. I stumble on the poor air of these days. I wonder - even as my head aches from all this smoke, more than a few steps slow, zombie grogged - at how much direction we maybe don't need. Wonder if half the joy of living isn't in being lost and finding ourselves anew, something different and brighter and more resilient than we might have hoped. We're each in Wenatchee, after all - more beautifully lost than we could have dared to dream. Trails above us are blackened and charred and both behind us and ahead, future smoldering still into whatever it'll someday be. I think of the jack pine. The forest that'll grow. The original phoenix. Growing up from ashes.

I felt a rush of trust--felt that life might be not just tolerable but beautiful, if I could only remember to find the bare Present.⁵

1. Evidences of such backward focus here and here, just for starters.
2. In particular, this one.
3. Minnesota Public Radio has more to say here.
4. Tolstoy: "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
5. David James Duncan, River Teeth.