Memories of Fire and Ash
“Endings, beginnings—people are so certain it’s one or the other,” she had told me, staring at the flames. “How can they be so sure?”
The mountains had been burning for about a week. Christmas was in less than two. Those days, ash rained from the sky, covering the trees and cars and sidewalks in a thin layer of dust. I remember driving through the center of town, the streets empty for a mid-December day, usually crowded with holiday shoppers.
That was the winter when you could drive down the 101 and see the hillside charred into a blackened wasteland, dead and crisp. It was the winter that people would turn their faces to the sky and plead to no one in particular, We need rain.
That night, I had heard a crowd had gathered up on the bluffs to watch. It was one of the few places you could see the entire breadth of the city—to the right, the broad expanse of dark ocean, and from the left, the backlit mountain ridgeline puncturing the night sky like an abnormal heartbeat. Between the two, white and red and orange lights flickered in the darkness like gemstones.
When I got there, people were lined up along the bluff, silently watching the flames. You could hear the sound of the waves below, the smell of salt and ash thick in the air. I remember that December, it perpetually smelled like an ocean campfire, regardless of where you went—a trip to the gas station, the grocery store, a walk around the block.
I saw her come into my periphery, on the ocean side to my right. Something made me turn toward her. Her shoulders were slumped forward and shrunken from old age. She was a good six inches shorter than me and slender, her hair falling in wild grey waves around her shoulders. Her wide eyebrows and sloping eyes at the corners gave her a kind but weathered look.
We stood there in silence, watching the flames furiously lick the side of the mountain, the smoke wildly billowing upward. The air was crisp and cold—normal for a winter night in Southern California except for the blanket of grey soot coating the sky.
“Nothing lasts,” she said finally, not speaking to me but the flickering mountainside. “It’s not meant to.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I stared at the jagged cut across the face of the mountain. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it looked like an open wound, hot flames tearing into its flesh. Where the earth had split open, the neon orange glowed and smoldered, dripping down the side like lava.
“The irony is that the mountain needs it—to regrow,” she turned to me. “Some seeds can’t sprout without it, you know.”
I looked down, a few flakes of ash settling lightly on my arm like snow. I wondered what the ashes had once been—perhaps even as recently as a few hours ago. A home? A book? A garden?
“The seeds are dormant until they burn—only then can they sprout new growth,” she continued, looking back at the mountain. “They need to burn alive in order to live.” She cupped her hands together and blew on them for warmth.
“Don’t you find that strange—how something can only begin once everything has ended?” I said, mimicking her with my own hands and watching the small puff of white breath mushroom into the night air.
“Life, death,” she shrugged. “Which is the beginning and which is the end? Like a phoenix from the ashes,” she said smiling.
We were silent then, watching the world burn away. The flames spared nothing. I thought about how the fire was hard at work consuming the world we knew—entire homes and photos and closets full of clothes. I thought about how it burned it all, only to return it to us as tiny, useless flecks falling from above.
I looked up, pinpricks of stars and ash dotting the sky. It was hard to tell which was which.
“The healthiest forests are the ones that have had fire burn through their centers,” I heard her say. “People think fire destroys the mountain. But it’s the fire that saves the mountain in the end.”
I thought about how the earth would scar over eventually. Blacken. How it would begin to bud and bloom in time.
Nothing lasts. It’s not meant to.
She said it so softly, it sounded like a whisper. Or perhaps it was the wind.
I looked back at her—or, where she had been. There was no one, save for the ashy flakes sprinkling down from above. I glanced around me as the wind whistled through the tops of the trees, my hair blowing in swirls around my shoulders. The crowd still stood mesmerized, eyes transfixed on the mountainside.
Endings, beginnings—people are so certain it’s one or the other. How can they be so sure?
I stood there and watched until the crowd had dispersed, until all that was left was me and the mountain and the ocean beyond—the ash raining down from the stars, earth and air all mixed into one. Besides the reflection of the flames flickering in the blue-black of the ocean, I couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began.