Through Fire

In the very early 1980s I rode to Boise with my younger brother and father. Dad had a blue pick up truck that we would fill with any can on the side of the road.  There was a certain start and stop quality to the trip.  I was along for the ride.  Dad wanted to take Alex, but he needed time to work in Boise.  I came as childcare.  Also. Adventure.

There were potholes, chuckholes in Dad’s parlance, in Red Desert, Wyoming.  No seatbelts.  Alex hit the top of the truck and knocked the shifter out of whack.  We made it to the migratory bird refuge near the great Salt Lake.  Start and stop there too.  Pheasants cross the road randomly. Alex and Dad were birders.  I was a teenager.  If I had had a smart phone back then I would have been the worst possible teen. As it was, I was as limited a person as I possibly could be.  We saw ruddy ducks and phalaropes and coots.  I was dying inside.

We got near Idaho and there was a brush fire that crossed the highway.  I held Alex in my lap as we drove through the fire.  A couple on a motorcycle in front of us worried me.  The woman was in a tube top and no helmet.  Driving through the fire we couldn’t even see them in front of us.  Visibility was so bad. I was frightened. Dad was calm.

We spent our time in Boise uneventfully.  I think there was a fair we attended and I played my recorder and Dad worked and Alex and I just hung out.  We stayed at a house of some random journalist Dad worked with.  I remember too little.

I remember the fire.  We were frightened.  Dad was calm.

In late 2006 or early 2007 Will and Charles and I visited the North Park Nature Center in Chicago. We went there often.  It was the closest nature we could get to. Charles could handle it even when he was most frightened of the world. I didn’t expect the controlled burn would be completely unannounced.  But it was.  We got there as usual and went into the woods, but within a very short time I just realized we were surrounded by flame and smoke.  I did the only thing I could think to do.  I picked up Will, I grabbed Charles’ hand and we just ran. I stayed as calm as humanly possible in the moment.

There have been times when life experiences felt like walking through fire.  But there is nothing really comparable to ACTUALLY walking through fire. 

The boys were so little then, but they remember it.  Both of them have written about it for school projects.  Alex was so little on that trip to Boise, but he remembers too.  And I remember thinking about how Dad must have felt inside driving through that fire.  The way I felt in the nature center.  All the power of that fire and as a parent we have to sometimes just hike a kid up under your arm and run.