The BonFire

Standing in the twilight at the end of a fall day, the fire brings forth ancestrally engrained memories long past. Modern men call this a bonfire. Our allure to its burning is gentile and domesticated. We see the fire as celebration and reason for gathering. Long long ago it meant something entirely different. “Bon” means good in French, but that is not the origin of the root word in bonfire. In darker times it was called banefyre, bane the old English word for bone. Literally it meant the burning of bones, a ceremonial practice whose origin goes back to our prehistoric beginnings. Tonight it is the bones of dead trees I am burning. Their brothers tower over me, watching me in silence. The previous winter was cruel to these woods. Winds roared down from the north and giants fell, even their roots were ripped from the ground. We had their trunks and stumps removed, but piles of their dead branches lay scattered. Time to burn the bones.

As the sun sets the fire begins, slowly, cracking in the dark crevices of the dead wood pile.  Sparks like sprites fly upward into the dwindling light. Pieces of their souls disappearing into the night. 

I wondered what was in the minds of our ancestors as they watched the bones of their own fallen wisp away. When they first ventured into virgin forests of the north and wandered under the canopy of the giants, was it foreboding they felt? Fables of western culture use the metaphor, cementing in our adult minds a buried fear. But in these woods tucked among silvered granite mountains and crystal cold lakes of the north I am reminded of something else. The last ice age carved this land and when done, laid it bare. The trees were newcomers. As the ice retreated, the trees advanced and over the subsequent thousands of years they dominated the landscape. Fire was no stranger. First through lightning strikes and later with the arrival of Native Americans who used fire as cultivation, a balance was struck through the burning of bones. The procreation of the trees themselves required there be fire, it made space for the young and initiated the maturation of the seeds to sprout new life. The arrival of the western world was like a human glacier. This present day forested land, as as far as the eye could see, was once farm field, all the post glacial wood felled by farmer axes and the glacial rocky debris rolled into neat patchworks of stone walls to imprint a man’s permanence. But like the glaciers before them, the farmers’ time on this land too has past. Unlike stones however, men die. Their bones rest in the corners of wooded fields in abandoned cemeteries. When the trees returned, their roots intertwined with bones of these forgotten dead over the ages and now our bones rest together on common land. No, the trees are not looking down at me either in fear nor anger. If they also carry memories of their ancestors maybe we are recognize the bond that exists between us.

All around the bonfire, In the open space created by the now gone trees, saplings have already taken root. They are only knee high, but pines grow fast. Also among them are skinny shafts of maple and elm who were growing among the giants before they fell. They were thieves of what little light existed among the giants, their departure are the elms’ and maples’ chance to thrive and assume the forest crown. But there is an interloper about. The bittersweet; an insidious vine whose roots course through the woodland floor and whose multitude of tentacles snake up the trunks of all others. It steals light, water and can even constrict life out of young trees like a python. It’s near impossible to eradicate, but I intervened anyway. I pulled away its web of roots, cut away its stranglehold on the maples and elms and even rescued the young pines. I added the bittersweet to the fire. My contribution to the cycle and balance of life in these woods. 

With the growing darkness a cool wind has blown in from the lake below, the tops of the trees sway, the sound a whisper that winter is on its way. I move closer to the fire, now just a pile of glowing ash. A harbinger that someday, I know, the north wind will blow and I too will pass.  

This rhyme is an instinct buried in an emotion buried in a poem buried in a story.  Perhaps epoch ago a particularly bold ancestor watched a tree struck by lightening burst into flame, the ancestor stole the fire and made it his own. Or perhaps another ancestor standing at the edge of a glacier picked up a sharp shard of granite to cut an edge to stick that made a spark that burst to flame. These ancestors were the survivors against the odds. We are progeny between chance and inspiration. The memory of those moments in time forever in our brains.  

I throw a few more branches on to glowing ash. Let it live a bit longer, damn the cold.  This is not such a bad place to have that fall, here among my forest brothers I thought. Better still I mused, if not too macabre, would be for my bones to join my brothers’ in a bond of fire. Yes, toying with the word in my head, bond seems better than bon or byne. Perhaps our ancestors understood that, all those years ago.