Trouble

"There's a fire starting in my heart"

-Adele

What does fire need to survive? Oxygen? Fuel? A spark.

For camp fires, we typically use dead branches, logs, and leaves to feed our fires. Camp fires (or fire pits, for backyards) are used to create. An atmosphere, warmth, a s'more. Camp fires bring. They unite. They sing and play guitar. They take a dead night and make a night full of life to remember.

For wild forest fires, the flame feeds on live foliage. A tree, green and full of life, now turned to ash and smoke. Something once beautiful, strong, tall, now destroyed, forgotten, and dead. The fire rages. The heat is much too intense to handle. Everything in the path of this Wild Thing is eaten, used to destroy more. Nothing is gained. So much, too much, lost.

Once a camp fire turns wild, there is no bringing it back. You cannot tame a wild thing. Once out of control, a fire continues until the oxygen or fuel is taken from it. The spark cannot be revoked; the damage undone. All there is left to do is save what is in front of the fire. A tree already infected with flame will never thrive like it once did; the cancerous heat overtakes and squeezes out all life.

In a forest fire, fuel is plentiful. There is no hope of removing the fuel. Not like turning off the gas in a living room fireplace. One must rid the fire of the oxygen it depends so greatly on to survive. Water and fire retardant are spread to choke the fire; create a void in the needed elements for the blazes. This work requires endless effort and hours; the fire cannot be allowed to take an intermission to take hold on life again. Until the fire is completely destroyed, the forest dies, either little by little, or all at once.

When the flames are through dancing across the earth with a mocking tone, what is left is desolate. Bare. Uninhabitable. A blaze may only take minutes to destroy what took hundreds of years to build up. How much longer will it now take to recreate what was taken. The hurt cannot be undone. Not in a lifetime. The dead, naked, charred ground will not recover. New life will come in time; but the previous state that existed is no longer, nor will it be again.

Fire.