The Fire Within
Field Notes IV.I: On the terrible and exquisite beauty of fire
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The smoke is long gone after a couple of days, but an acrid smell clings heavily to the ruined structure. It’s the sharp scent of something burnt, and of something not good. This is no campfire smell. It tells of paint and plastic. Of fabric and yes, of flesh. This was a house fire, and its charred remains crunch underfoot as I carefully inspect its perimeter.
The house itself was old, as evidenced by the bones of its walls. Modern buildings have sheet rock. This had slats and plaster. It was abandoned. Abandoned as a legitimate home, that is. Squatters tried to heat it by building a fire inside. Now one of them is in critical condition and the house is destroyed. What is left is an ashen abstraction of irrational angles, brittle textures, and intricate splinters. It is strangely, disturbingly beautiful.
An extraordinary duality exists within the nature of fire. It can be the most destructive force, consuming the familiar, rendering all we once knew to ash. As such it is a harbinger of pain. A herald of loss and grief. What some consider their own- a house, a car, their life, can be utterly destroyed by fire. In a conflagration of light and heat, it transforms what once was and releases it into the sky as ephemeral smoke.
A memory
It was the small hours of the morning, 03:00 or 04:00, when the call came out. I slowly cruised the empty streets, more in effort to stay awake than to search for any wrongdoing. “Assist the fire department with a structure fire.” It was an apartment building in low income housing, and I was a block away.
They called this ‘The Island’ because it was the only building set apart from the rest of the complex. I pulled into the parking lot and exited my patrol car. Before me a massive plume of black smoke billowed from the back of the building. It rose, twisting and swirling. Unseen flames cast orange highlights from below while street lights back-lit its nebulous form before the dark skies. It was a living monster, escaping its earthly prison.
A couple of people ran from the building. “Get out!” I shouted. “It’s a fire! Get out!” A few more emerged. Sirens cut through the night. The fire station was only a few blocks away. Help was coming! But I looked across the street to see the trucks enter the gates of the main complex. They did not realize this was The Island. How will those engines turn around in that tight parking lot?!
I grab the PA microphone in my car and announce “Fire! Get out of the building!” More people stumbled out in confusion. As understanding hit, they poured into the parking lot.
I turned to see a young woman approaching. Eyes wide. Hands clutched meekly before her chest. She walked with a spectral grace. Amidst the clamor of sirens and shouting, her whispered words rang with clarion precision. “There’s a woman over there who has been burned.”
I followed her like a glimmering apparition as she led me through the chaos of the parking lot to the far side of the building. A female figure lay there in a bare, dry patch of dirt. She was moving. Writhing. Her entire body was burned.
Flames spewed from one particular apartment at the bottom of the back side of the building, propelled with fury as if from the maw of a dragon. My training as a paramedic told me I had to triage. I had to find other victims, and couldn’t focus entirely on this one tragic soul. Stooping down, I asked what happened. The woman reached out her hand and grasped mine. She would not let go. She drew me close and I saw she was trying to speak.
“He burned me. He threw kerosene on me.”
The night was suddenly silent. Brilliant flames danced from the apartment in slow motion, ecstatically reaching for the heavens. Despite the heat, I felt freezing cold. “Who did?” are the only two words my stunned mind can make me utter.
She said his name.
The fire department was battling the blaze. EMS rushed up to me with their stretcher and packs of medical equipment. They immediately began working on the woman and sedated her. Those were the last words she ever spoke.
I relayed what she told me over the radio. And the name. As soon as I said it an officer down the street saw him and approached him. He reeked of kerosene.
Hope. Comfort. Safety. Herein lies the other half of fire’s incomprehensible duality. Its glow repels the shadows that gather around us in the dark. Its warmth drives away the cold. These are the qualities that draw humanity around a fire, a tradition that unites us and persists with us through eons of nights.
At a campfire we sit, transfixed, and spin imaginative stories for one another. We don the cloak of the shaman. Or of Homer. And while our tales perhaps do not carry the same weight, they uphold the sacred heritage. They make us smile and laugh in the midst of the murky woods. The stories burn memories that last lifetimes.
Singing, dancing, celebrations. Is there a better context for this than around a bonfire? People gather in friendship, bonding, and in reverence of the human spirit. Flames jump and spin, casting light and passion upward towards the night. Towards the heavens. So we move with the fire, dancing with reverence.
A memory
I did not yet know that early May was still way too early for rhododendron blooms in the mountains. I traveled to the Middle Prong Wilderness in Western North Carolina to find them, but at this elevation the trees were still mostly bare. A bitter wind greeted me as I began my hike. I wasn’t prepared for this cold.
The trail to Green Knob was hard to follow. In the wilderness there are no signs. Few trail blazes on the trees. The climb upward very often became a bushwhack through dead brambles clawing at my clothes.
I reached a campsite as the moon rose high overhead and the last light of the day lingered across the valley on the peaks of the Shining Rock Wilderness. The temperature was dropping fast. Sure, I had a sleeping bag. But it was decades old. Was it still rated for these temps? Were my clothes adequate?
But there was a ring of stone here. A fire ring. Next to it, someone had stacked a provision of collected wood. Was it left over from the fire they built? Or did they gather it out of goodwill for the unknown next person who may need it? I chose to believe the latter, because it was invaluable to me as the evening drew in.
A memory
That night a bear, or bears, came into my camp. They lurked in the darkness at the periphery of my light, but I heard them treading through the dry leaves. I heard them sniffing for my food.
Though I was able to keep them at bay with my voice, I did not sleep. And I continued walking the next day. Nearly 20 more miles, up and over Wayah Bald, a 6000ft peak.
Exhausted to my bones as evening approached, feet and shin protesting in pain, I wondered where to camp that night. Would a bear come again?
I found a campsite near Lake Nantahala, in a cove by a stream that may have been an ancient road bed. A recently used fire ring greeted me there, along with plenty of downed wood nearby.
Rarely in my lifetime have I felt so comforted in spirit as beside that small fire where I sat writing into the night.
For thus continuously you will look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if you reflect at the same time that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time.
But you, in what a brief space of time is your existence? And why are you not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?
What matter and opportunity for your activity are you avoiding? For what else are all these things, except exercises for the reason, when it has viewed carefully, and by examination, into their nature the things that happen in life?
Persevere then until you shall have made these things your own, as the stomach that is strengthened makes all things its own, as the blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10.31 (tr Long)
Fire. What a terrible and exquisite thing. With its potential for both ultimate destruction as well as for the most uplifting support conceivable for both the body and the spirit, it can be nothing less than divine. A true gift from Prometheus.
And so, we arrive at the sublime. The ultimate human motivation and creative energy. Can we think of this as the fire within us?
Take your challenges and your hardships. Take your tragedies, terrors, nightmares, and memories. Toss them into that fire within. Drop them reverently, one by one. Or cast them by the armful. It does not matter. The fire will consume them all. It will burn them to cinders, transforming them into light.
That is the light of humanity. That transformation is the source of art and of goodwill and of achievement and of simply becoming exceptional at being human while we walk this earth. That is the light we all need to shine in the darkness.
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Transfixed to your writing as if hearing you tell this over a campfire.
Heart wrenching to read of this woman set on fire. Horrendous.
And the juxtaposed events of warming to the fire, protection by the fire that in the previous story brought utter destruction.
I remember last year, my thoughts were similar of water after Hurricane Helene dumped trillions of gallons of water and took away entire towns. She ravaged and left us with no running water. So much water in a short time and then none worthy of drinking. From that point we went into a drought which was great for those with roofs torn off and people displaced and living in tents.
My family relied on Dustin or heroic FEMA water tank driver for months. Water, precious water. I went to the tanker every couple days and it literally became the well in which townspeople checked on eachother and talked through the process of shock and grief.
Sorry, didn't mean to go off on this tangent. Your story of fire brought back my memory of water.
As always thank you for your contemplative writing.
Wonderful reflections and observations Erik. Fire is such a powerful and evocative creature. I am at once in love and at war with it. It can bring life and death. Comfort and pain.
During the years I served on submarines, fire was the enemy we most feared. We were all trained in advanced firefighting techniques. A fire on a submarine is almost certain death if not contained quickly.
Yet in returning home we would often gather round a bonfire in someone's yard and drink to the success of the mission. Here fire was the bond, the altar upon which we gave our thanks.