the roof, the roof, the roof was on fire

One weekend this past summer we watched a house burn entirely to the ground. Usually that kind of statement evokes images of tragedy and loss, but this particular house fire was no accident. It was more like a party - there were muffins and juice, lawn chairs and rain umbrellas, and a general mood of excitement as a crowd of over 50 people gathered to watch the local fire department and its trainees set fire to a residence.

Earlier this spring, our friends seized an opportunity to buy the nuisance property immediately next door to them. The house, or more correctly – the shack – had been the rental home of a drug dealer and rabble rouser for the past few years, and once the landlord evicted him from the run-down house with the trash-strewn yard, he was ready to be rid of the whole property. Our friends jumped at the chance to improve the aesthetic value, and the morale, of their neighborhood.

They bought the property and then donated the structure on it to their local fire department to use for training purposes. At 8:00 on a Saturday morning, two fire departments arrived with 3 trucks and about 2-dozen firefighters and trainees. The fire fighters did some training and maneuvering inside the smoky structure before letting the fire blaze to full force. After the fire got going, their main work was to protect the neighboring houses and nearby trees from getting unintentionally scorched.

Watching the house burn was like watching scenes from the movie Backdraft, but more thrilling because these fire fighters were training for real-life versions of the scenarios that were so stunning to watch on the big screen. Their bravery and fortitude were something to behold, and I felt honored to be able to watch them at work.

And it was exciting to watch a house burn down from the safety of being across the street, but it was also nice to calmly watch something take place that we are conditioned to consider an emergency. Normally, if you see flames billowing into the sky out of a sunken roof, someone calls for help, right? But this was a completely intentional, controlled fire, and it was arrestingly beautiful to watch. A thunderstorm happened to roll through just at the height of the burn – the sky turned dark, bolts of lightning were visible and peels of thunder clapped overhead - but the flames showed absolutely no sign of abating in the rain. Once the fire was going, it was going, and no other force of nature was going to stop it. Witnessing the roaring, destructive power of the flames was a humbling moment.

We stayed into the afternoon, until the house had become a smoldering, smoky pile of rubble. The friends and neighbors who had come to watch the house-burning eventually dispersed, but the fire department would be on watch over the next two weeks to make sure the embers eventually went cold. The husband and I had once upon a time been certified wildland firefighters, so we felt a faint sense of familiarity with the clean-up operations we watched the fire fighters perform. Nowadays I’m happy to leave that important work to the professionals, but there was a little part of me that wistfully envied them the excitement, adrenaline and sheer brute labor of a blaze well contained. My time doing such work, however, is over, so I mentally saluted the fire fighters as we left and returned appreciatively to my own, totally not-on-fire home.

girls gone wild

My friend Z and I went camping last summer in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The trip mirrored one we had taken five years earlier to celebrate Z’s passing the bar exam. Much has transpired in the intervening years in both of our lives – marriage, Peace Corps, childbirth, relocation, home ownership – so it was all the more significant for us to pull ourselves away and go back to the woods, which is where we first met.

Z and I began working together as counselors at a French immersion, wilderness canoe program for 14-18 year olds in northern Minnesota in 1998. We lived in tents out in the woods for 10 weeks at a time. We got up every morning and went to bed each night outside, among the stars and the mosquitoes. We cooked and ate all our meals outside. We taught French songs and outdoor camping skills outside, and when it rained, we put on our rain gear and remained - outside. We were pretty tough when I look back on the experience, and I’m sure it helped make us who we are today. We even had contests to see who could go the longest without bathing, a true test of toughness, but we’ve outgrown that particular brand of bravado by now. (OK, sometimes Z thinks we’re still having that competition in the middle of the winter when no one in Minnesota really likes to take off clothes for the mere benefit of taking a shower, but she’s running that race without me.)

In the early aughts, we eventually stopped spending our entire summers camping and speaking French with teenagers in the wilderness, but we never stopped canoeing or francophoning. Our 2004 trip not only celebrated Z’s scholarly and professional achievement, it was a chance to relive our glory days, but with the novelty of being just the two of us; no teenagers to be responsible for, no schedule to keep, just two girls, our boat, our paddles, and our packs out in the wilderness. It was great, and we did it again in 2009. Taking these duo trips tests how soft we’ve gone as a result of living the civilian city life, with all our adult responsibilities and routines. But in our collective past, Z and I have toughed it out through lightning storms, the 1999 BWCA blow down, medical evacuations, heat exhaustion, hypothermia, black bears at campsites, and whining teenagers. It’s good to find out periodically if we still have that toughness in us. Our 2009 trip confirmed that we do.

We did a four-day paddle out of Ely, and even though the weather was entirely cold and rainy, my raincoat leaked, my feet got soaked on the first day (and in a fit of minimalism I hadn’t packed enough socks), it was a fun trip. Faced with less than ideal camping conditions, we called upon our arsenal of outdoor skills; Z spent 3 hours making a campfire in the rain over which I eventually dry-roasted my soaked socks. I dusted off my knot-tying/rope skills and set up a tarp to shelter our stuff from the incessant rain, and I hung the bear bag each night. (OK, the first night’s bear bag was a joke but that’s because we didn’t get to our campsite until 8pm and we were in a hurry to get into the tent to get dry.) When we went for a paddle in the drizzle one evening we saw an astounding number of birds along the shore of an island – more birds than I’ve ever seen in one spot. There were eagles, osprey, loons, gulls, and probably some teals or mergansers – it was like the Noah’s ark of bird species. They were the only creatures showing any signs of animation out there in the wet cold, them and us, two girls who defied the weather and our wetness to paddle in the evening rain and earn the privilege of seeing them.

The trip presented us with other challeges aside from just being waterlogged. On our last big day of paddling we accidentally took a wrong turn after finshing the Canadian portage. We weren’t exactly sure where we were, but we knew we weren’t on the lake we needed to be on in order to take out the next morning. So we used our (only momentarily-lapsed) map reading and navigation skills to take an un-marked portage back into the correct lake. Problem solved.

The moment that confirmed our un-faded glory for me was when we pulled up to an overgrown portage at a beaver dam. There was a group of wet, bedraggled, unorganized, unhappy-looking teenage boys milling about in a stupor at the portage landing. They were pacing around disgruntled in the calf-high water, submersing their plastic raingear and boots uselessly in the muck. Then here we came, two thirty-something women breezing past them in a rush of competent, unfazed efficiency. We just paddled by, went further up the creek to a second opening onto the portage trail (probably the original landing that had since been obscured by the beaver workings) hopped out of our boat and shouldered our light-weight, minimally loaded packs off across the portage. For logistical reasons we double-portaged, but we finished up our two runs before the first batch of boy scouts reached the other side.

It’s reaffirming to know that even though we don’t lead canoe trips professionally anymore, and we’re girls, our camping mojo is alive and well. Z hadn’t been wilderness canoeing at all since our 2004 trip (and I only make it to the wilderness once a summer these days) but she could still steer the canoe and build a camp fire. More importantly, we knew how to function and have fun in the rain, and we enjoyed our precious days in the wilderness undaunted – something those boys definitely needed to learn how to do. If they had come to our camp we could have taught them a thing or two.










Girls can portage and steer the canoe.








Girls can cross international boundaries in the remote wilderness.











Girls can make campfires in the rain and conquer their own islands.








And girls can tie boats securely onto vehicles.


Here’s to girlfriends; here’s to the wilderness; and here’s to these girls who can still go wild.

Z & me, summer 2000










Z & me, summer 2009

goal posts

2010 is well underway, people, so it's time for me to get busy. Blog-wise anyway. I have a window of about two weeks here before my spring semester class starts (and before LOST comes back on the air for its final season, ahem). I have a back-log of blog post ideas that need to be fully developed and shown the light of day. I carry around a little notebook where I jot down insights and ideas to use later in blog posts, essays, what have you. But that elusive 'later' never seems to materialize! It's already an uphill battle to get my ideas from draft to post, and we can see from my track record this past fall that my blogging frequency seems to diminish while I'm taking a class.

So, my goal is to get cracking here and put up several posts over the next two weeks. They will be out of chronological order, perhaps, and seemingly unrelated, except for the fact that they have each been burning a hole in my little notebook for months now. My own lack of holiday festivity aside, it would be nice to start out the new year with a clean slate, or at least a little more room in my notebook. That's the wonder of the Internet - it will enable me to transfer the cloggy contents of my writing notebook over to the seemingly limitless storage vault provided by its minions of servers. Then my load will be that much lighter for the year ahead.

That's the goal anyway.