Fire

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In 1989, when I was in my late twenties, I saw a magazine photo of half a dozen forest fire fighters taking a break on the fire line. They wore yellow Nomex shirts and hard hats and had line packs on their backs and were leaning on their tools in a little meadow, watching the forest burn. In front of them was a wall of flame three hundred feet high. There was something about the men in that photo—their awe, their exhaustion, their sense of purpose—that I wanted in my life. I tacked the photo to my wall and lived with it for a whole winter.

It was an uninspiring time in my life. I was living in a grim little apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, I’d quit waiting tables, and I had vague ideas of making my living as a writer. The only good thing I had going on was an intermittent job—more of an apprenticeship, really—working as a climber for a tree company. I’d met a guy in a bar who showed me an enormous scar across his knee from a chain saw accident, and offered me a job. He said he’d teach me to climb if I worked for him whenever he needed someone. I agreed. I climbed trees over houses, trees over garages, trees over telephone lines. I climbed trees that were twenty feet high and swayed from my weight; I climbed others that were 150 years old and had branches so big that holding them was like hanging from the neck of an elephant. Some of the trees had to be taken down; some just had to be pruned. All of them terrified me. I learned to work without looking down. I learned to work without thinking too directly about what I was doing. I learned just to do something regardless of how I felt about it.

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