The Circle of Death

There is a loud train outside of my window. I suppose it is filled with hot, steaming coal from some strip mine in Wyoming, but it is too dark to tell right now. It blends into the night. The thing thunders by, the cabin shakes, and it blows its horn. Why blow the horn here? Maybe fifty years ago, when people lived in this town, working at the sawmill, but today, I think the only people left are buried behind a church. The ground behind the church shakes but nobody knows a thing.
As always, I am a moment away from joining in their silent vigil. In fact, sitting here, I am living in a space not much bigger than a coffin. And I don't know much more than they do. So the line between us grows thinner. At least my space has a window, although it is barely large enough to squeeze through. This is an advantage when the thing squeezing through is trying to get into the vehicle rather than out.

A fly fisherman three miles upstream bumped into a grizzly.

This is recreational vehicle life. I think I understand, as I see seventy year old men around me in white knee socks and baggy shorts and feed hats with military slogans and toy poodles and stories about the glories of war. I have no such stories, but being here, I make up stories about life on the open range. The blizzard of '49 that swallowed up our town and we had to dig a tunnel all the way to Texas to find daylight. Branding cattle in a pouring rainstorm with two broken arms, a case of typhoid, all the while fighting off eight wolves and seven rustlers. Mom was too busy tending the milk cows to give birth so the kids all borned themselves. Putting water in the Bank because it was the only valuable thing we had. Going without air for a summer because dad said so, besides, it was too thick to breathe it anyhow. Times were tough but we rode it out. Can't say that for peoples nowadays.

Anyhow, there are fires in the mountains tonight. Dry lightning they call it. Where the storm doesn't send rain, it sends lightning. It's virgo, where the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground. So the lightning hits an old dry log in the pine forest. Pine, just a form of hard gasoline, if you ask me. Then the log smoulders for a day or a week. And then one hot, dry day, the humidity drops as the temperature goes up and at 1:43 in the afternoon, the log bursts into flames. The trees above it catch some of the fire and carry it into the canopy and it races across the treetops like a long haired sunburned surfer. A child of the stylized Sun seen in children's picture books.

The smoke today looked like the wall cloud of a thunderstorm. But it wasn't blue or black, it was orange, brown, like dust; it could have been mistaken as dust by a homesteader. All day long the smell of rich roasted pine was in the air, sweet, like pipe tobacco, and at this intensity, as alluring as fresh coffee grounds. Maybe it is nicotene in the air. Maybe it is instinctive hunger, the sense that there is a porterhouse steak somewhere out there on the spit. The legend is that buffalo would follow the smoke in the air to find, after a few weeks of walking, fresh green grass where the fire had been.

The moon is red, filtered through the combustibles of a million Douglas fir and lodgepole pine and ponderosa pine. Too quickly they died, if they had only waited a few eons, they might have turned up in a coal mine.

The train sounds a bell as it crosses the highway. The horn fades in the distance, the horn descending in pitch as the sound waves stretch out. Like firewood, coal heats us twice: Once when it is burned for fuel, twice when it burns the planet.