Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
No one can talk about summer anymore without also talking about fire. It’s the common denominator. Europe, Africa, Australia, North America—fire, like disaster cartography. It’s too huge for the news to put a frame around, and yet they have to try. I mean, this has to be reported.
What happens, though, if the citizens don’t listen? And what happens if the ones they vote for listen even less?
I don’t want to wait for an answer. And stories—I believe this is true; I’ve seen it happen—stories can zoom in on details that help us understand, help us enter and experience, and therefore help us care, and caring might lead to action and better results. I mean, if the old results are both bad and predictable, then maybe setting, plot, and character can reach more people than facts can. Or just help the facts have an impact when the news turns to fire:
“Break a Leg, and They Put You Out to Pasture”
“Take everything you don’t know, line it up, you’ve got the horizon. But get your head in a book, you’ve got a boat.”
That’s the kind of thing he’ll say between two bites of an apple. It’s one of the reasons I don’t mind him crossing the street when I’m watering the yard. He’s earned these analogies: worked 23 years as a fire jumper, wound up with seven breaks in his ankle and leg, a whole scaffolding of steel inside.
Another reason is the cider he brings me—“Easiest way to deal with the apples.” He says, “I ought to just burn the damn tree, but I’m too used to putting fires out.”
≈
“Maybe not a boat, exactly. But an oar, for sure. Or a spyglass.”
By now he’s wielding the hose while I follow and watch, fake professional interest. He’s spraying at the bees around the flowers like he’s putting out sparks. He’s probably right about the spyglass: You open a book and draw the distance nearer, the words inside it help clarify, and it’s all done with mirrors, by reflection. Not a bad trick.
It makes me wonder sometimes if a tree he saved became paper, or a hundred board feet of pencils, or a chair in a bookstore café.
≈
I imagine the heat, of course—everywhere-pressing and heavy as water—but the roar of standing in a world of fire, not a pulsing and pausing like the shoreline’s heartbeat, a constant sound swallowing all sound, that’s harder to do.
And thirst. I half forgot about thirst: all those back-to-back shifts drinking nothing but smoke.
“I could’ve retired,” he says. “No one expects more than 20. But it felt like jumping into empty air and then landing with nothing to do.”
The hose is rolled up by the side of the house now, the whole yard shining from sunlight on water, and we’re standing on the porch, drinking cider, talking about raccoons. They’re his only regret, he tells me. Not the leg; he’s seen tree trunks more shattered. Four baby raccoons, maybe five months old. He saw the flames reflecting off their eyes, pulled them out of a hollow, shoved them in his coat, got them down to the base camp, poured iodine onto the bite marks and scratches, went back in.
He found out the next morning.
“They just took ‘em to the county pound and put ‘em to sleep.”
≈
There’s a field I pass by on my way to work so out of place in the landscape—too close to new tract homes and cul-de-sacs, shopping, a thousand miles from Texas, a hitch in the step, a break in the usual line—where they’re grazing all these longhorn cows.
I love that part of the drive. I don’t belong here either. My neighbor and I, we’ve got that in common, enough that we never have to talk about it, enough we just wave in the winter while shoveling snow, unburying sidewalks. It’s how I know that he really will burn that tree, yell out at me to come on over.
He’ll hand me a last jar of cider, then stand there, probably with pain in his leg. And I’ll stand there too and help him watch the fire.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by L-N, courtesy Shutterstock.
