I should probably begin this at a more distant period, and I  will eventually gather up enough of the current updated and edit them into chronological or some other order, but right now,  we get 'Fire'.

Fire. The thing that separates man from animal, since before the mammoth walked,  the only truly terrific alchemy that remains unexplainable,  inexplicably linked to the rise of men and their civilizations, the Red Flower that destroys what it wants, flames and sparks and cinders, coals and blue cores and green tinges, all fading to white ash and blowing across the sky, returning what it destroyed to the earth.

Fire.

As a logger’s daughter,  as a sawyer and as a woman who lives in daily contact to controlled and necessary flame, I do not fear it. Respect of danger is what determines the courageous from the foolhardy, and fear cripples active and brilliant minds, turning men and women of high quality into gibbering messes when thrown up against new, unknown danger and situations, and in my line of work, gibbering mess equals dead, if you're lucky.  If you're unlucky, it means physical crippling and the remainder of your life in pain, trapped inside and the only wind tasted filtered through the doors and streets and windows of population, laden with the the stench of people and loud with their interminable blathering noise, the wide open ridges and clean pines lost to you forever,  the sun dappled clearings and wild forever gone.

Fire.

In hindsight, fire is always expectable, it's always explained in long words and soothing legalese. But in a fire, near a fire running rampant and the dry wind it makes, there is a magic, an old and primal terror of the burned and left behind rises, and only training and conditioning to it allows you to remain, the flight survival instinct strong, ever there, in the ancestral memories carried in us.

To me, fire is a tool. My father burned charcoal for his living, and now, I burn waste wood in the burn pile, ringed on three sides by massive burms of dirt and half burnt sawdust. We burn inside the house for heat, the sparks popping out of the stove and shooting down the hall, sometimes fifteen feet.  Brush we piled, taking days, and even years, goes up in hours into long columns of smoke and floating cinders, and the field burning farmers who watch as the grain stalks flash and lick out, the fire gone from them before the fragile ash falls, the smaller bonfires made with my family and the booze shared over it Saturday nights, marshmallows and chocolate dripping and flaming into it. 

I've never wondered at pyromania, for the flames catch and dance in my eyes with a fascination born of long hours spent working with it.

I do wonder at fools, who do not show the respect that danger demands to fire, setting garbage cans alight in class with a nicked lighter, throwing Molotov cocktails into people's yards, into children's playgrounds and dropping cigarette butts into gasoline puddles, or, as the above picture shows, setting a fire intentionally in a logging machine on National Forest Park lands.
Friday, this past, we woke to a call from the ranger in charge of our job, telling us the news of a fire that had gotten out of control on our jobsite, and  preliminary investigation tallied up our loss, one skidder, one shear, and a calculated 20 plus acres of forest damaged by the fire.

Someone set this. Someone annoyed, someone furious,  someone sick, we don't know. Likely, we'll never know.

But allow me to show you the cost of this fire in years. 

The machine in the foreground is a Cat tree harvester. The first day of 2017, we bought and unloaded her at a friend's lowland parking lot, to test her and to put her through her paces.

It took fifteen years of dedicated, unswerving work to get this piece, and we were so ecstatic about finally having an actual harvester  I couldn’t keep the camera steady. But that's too generalist, too broad a sweep to fully comprehend the loss. 

I'm taking you back. Back to 2011. Back to the day we bought our very first in this business as a whole skidder. Our first real piece of logging equipment. Out first manifestation that we could do this as a family and succeed.

My brothers were so proud, so relieved,  so possessive of their  two forty Jack my older sister and I weren't allowed to touch it, much less run it, and the braying mule emblem on the hurricane deck was lovingly polished by my brother's careful hands to a gleaming silver.

He tightened all the lugs, and he babied the rims because they'd been neglected before we bought her and she'd have to run years yet before we could afford to put new rims and rubber on her. They both went over her from stem to stern with a grease gun and when they were done, they pulled out the soap and scrubbed all the oil sludge out of the belly pan. The day she rolled up onto the yard, she was shining, spic'n'span, and ready to rumble.
And oh, God, did she rumble. She coughed once and rolled over, and the full throated roar of a Detroit diesel engine shook us in our shoes. She rumbled up a FULL GOOSENECK LOAD OF LOGS   in less than an hour. To us, that was gold in our hands, our hands, battered, sliced, swollen with last week's loading tears and scrapes, black with pine tar, and so thick with callouses when we shed, we peeled off our whole hands worth of them and had to regrow them from scratch.  She roared up with the last two log skid that day and there wasn't a dry eye on a Copeland that day. Hell, Dad cried. My sister and I wiped our tears off and we threw straps, fresh tears running as our brothers checked and rechecked every connection, hose and cable on her as Dad watched, his hand  coming out of the truck window with a six pack and his 'kill it' earsplitting whistle when we finished clicking the straps tight. 

That night we carefully checked our hands for slivers and small chunks of pine bark that lodge into the paper thin slices and go putrid if you didn't prize them out with a needle, and wrapped them up with duct tape and carbolated salve, which is the only reason  we all have all ten of our fingers and  toes. If you've never heard of it, you're a lucky human. And for the last time, we checked our necks and shoulders, and I carefully taped up a raw scrape on my brother's neck. He swatted at me when I poured the alcohol in it, and I winced with him. That hurts, on your neck.

Friday, we lost her. She's irreparable. She's a smoking hulk, useless. The new rubber and rims we'd bought specifically for her last summer are so much ashy wire. Her rims, the ones I'd so carefully sanded, wirebrushed, and repainted grey rings of overheated steel alloy, unreuseable.

Her winch is locked up tight, and her drive motors sucked dry by the inferno four burning tires cause.

And I'm sick. Sick at heart, sick in my belly, low, and I vomit my breakfast by the mill building, the tears run into my mouth, and my brothers' grief sweeps over me from where they stand talking to my sister and brother in law. Wet streaks are on her face, and her hands are clenched so tight on the wheel of her rig I can see her knuckles go white, thirty yards away. 

This is what we lost. Because someone wanted us to know they were discontent.

And there's a hollow spot underneath my ribs when I look into my family’s eyes,  and they, when they look onto mine. 

Fire.