A Sense of Place: Home Is Where the Hearth Is

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, dusk. Hunched like an old woman against the chill floating in from across the lake, I sprinkle twigs over the little mound I've made from crumpled paper and bits of bark. I circle the tinder with sticks, leaning them inward like stiff soldiers sleeping on a hill. I light a match, hold it hopefully to the base of the heap. Tendrils of smoke and flame lick the edges, explore the twigs, stretch out to the dusk, beg for more. My numb fingers comply, feeding the flickers with ever-bigger offerings.

After fits and starts, the fire finally settles itself into a comfortable complacency. Warmed inside and out by its glow, I am suddenly and surprisingly at home in this place I have never been before.

Fire as home is an ancient equation, far older than written records, perhaps older than consciousness itself. In ritual and legend, through all time, fire has meant: You Are Here.

Moses found God in a burning bush. Sam McGee found eternal rest in a flaming ship. Somewhere in our history, we humans traded an instinctive fear of deadly fire for a deep longing for its life-giving presence. And so we yield, over and over again, to the perverse and pervasive urge to invite it into whatever space we happen to occupy. Hence we have campfires, cookouts, birthday candles. Hence we have hearths and Heat-N-Glos.

Last winter my husband, our son, The Dog Who Eats Sofas, and I spent the good part of a Saturday morning together in the woods in a place that was not a place, turning an old, downed granddaddy of a dead willow into fodder for our hearth back home. By noon we had a tall stack of fat logs to show for our work. Wet and weary, with sawdust and brush cuttings strewn around us and lunchtime approaching, we figured it was time to either leave or find a good excuse to stay. So we decided to build a fire.

But where? Looking around, we searched for some self-evident center to this place in the woods, but found none. Undaunted, we gathered a few slabs of thick wet bark and laid them side by side on a randomly chosen patch of snow in the middle of the trail. On top of them, we crumpled a pocketful of paper, perched tiny twigs from a nearby pine, and stacked bigger sticks from our logging leftovers.

My pyro-apprentice begged to light the match. I let him, and I let him again, and eventually spark and paper met and became a flicker, and the flicker grew into a healthy orange spire. We watched first in pride and then in dismay as flames grabbed the edges of the old news, ate the pine bits, leapt at the dry sticks propped about them, then faltered and faded.

Like anxious parents, we scurried from one brush heap to another in search of something to feed this hungry infant. It ate and grew, until eventually it turned into a teenager of a fire, and we were content to leave it at least partly to its own business, intervening only occasionally to feed it, prod it, keep it from straying too far outside our limits.

Finally, we felt at home. We knew where we belonged: We Were Here. This random act of fire gave us a focal point. It gave us something to hang around, something to look at, something to come back to after we went somewhere else.

We warmed our fingers, chewed an apple, admired the morning's work of fuel for future fires.

"Should we cook a potato?" I asked. Pyro Boy thought that sounded like a good idea, and went to fetch one from the house. When he got back, we poked holes into it with a stick to keep it from exploding and wrapped it in tinfoil. Reaching down into the pit the fire had carved out for itself in the snow, we buried the potato in the white-coated coals.

Pyro Boy and Sofa Dog wandered off to do whatever it is that boys and dogs do in the woods. When they were sufficiently cold and snow-covered and hungry, they wandered back.

"Is it time yet?"

"Not yet." Wandered off again, shook a tree, followed a trail, wandered back again.

"Yet, Mom?"

Over and over the fire and the potato drew him, a yo-yo of a kid tied by an invisible string to the fingers of flame that held, for the moment, our place in the universe.

Finally it was time, and we dug the smoking, black-shrouded lump from the coals. Together we peeled back the foil to expose the fire-charred skin. When we broke it open, fragrant steam burst from the innards. With sooty fingers we shared the sacramental potato--half-cooked, ash-covered, and still so very good.

We finished the potato, crumpled the foil, licked our fingers, then watched the fire burn down to nothing, and with it, our ad hoc home in the woods. We admired the crater it left, decided we'd tell anybody who asked that a spaceship had landed there. Loading the sled one last time, we headed toward the house and the fires we would make there.

I hiked out to our makeshift hearth last week. The ashes remained, rimmed with a tangle of gooseberry and woodbine. But the place no longer beckoned.

Still, I know that the next time I touch match to tinder, whether on a wind-blustered rock on the edge of nowhere, or under a government-issue grate with Pyro Boy and Sofa Dog and the whine of mosquitoes and tent-trailer occupants all around, I'll be mindful of that hearth in the woods. And I'll be mindful, in some small way, of all the fires that have burned and burn and will burn, in lantern, stove, and imagination--fires that reassure us, wherever we may be: You Are Here.

Mary Hoff is a free-lance science writer from Stillwater and Production Coordinator for the Volunteer.