Chapter 8 #4
I’d never been a big praying person before.
I’d grown up outside any praying tradition, and as a general concept I found it a crude idea.
The asking for favors, the wishing away of guilt, it had always seemed childish to me.
I’d worked instead on dwelling in gratitude and acceptance, living inside the mystery of existence as it actually was.
I’d become a ponderer of koans, an acceptor of unexpected fate.
Maybe occasionally I’d put my thoughts toward manifesting some goal, but never anything irrational or desperate.
If anything, I’d worked to expunge as much desire from my body as possible.
I’d tried to reduce my sense of selfhood into the smallest particles and let them blow away in the wind.
But now, thinking about Sarah trapped on the mountain, I prayed with a selfish, desirous vengeance.
I wanted Sarah to be all right. I had no idea who I was praying to.
Be alive, I prayed. Be safe. That night, I sent hundreds of prayers up the mountain, in hopes any of them would find Sarah and give her some comfort.
I sent my prayers streaming into the inferno like little missiles, seeking contact with her terrified mind.
I sent prayers of protection, prayers of safety, prayers of love and survival.
I talked to the mountain itself, imploring it to help her and to give her shelter.
Over and over, I silently called out her name, thinking as long as I kept talking to her, she was still alive.
I’d feel it if anything was wrong. I didn’t feel anything yet.
I was still praying when Gary sent out a call to come back to the main lodge.
He and the other guys had been laboring under the notion that if we could only guard the lodge until morning, the structure could be saved.
The new day would bring rain, they believed.
Even a shift of the wind would be helpful.
If we could make it until sunrise, all agreed, we’d be okay.
We doubled down on protecting the area just around the mansion.
We doused the whole building again and widened all the firebreaks.
We stockpiled water so we’d be ready in case any fires erupted inside our cordon.
We arranged our barrels and hoses and shovels in neat rows.
We really thought we were getting somewhere, but when the sun finally began to rise, we could see we’d been fooling ourselves.
The sun was brightening and the flames were only getting bigger, the flying sparks becoming more crazed.
And it was even worse than we’d realized: it turned out the sun wasn’t even rising.
The morning hadn’t come. The light we were seeing was only the main body of fire.
Through the bands of trees, we were finally seeing the raw plasma itself, a wall of coursing orange, rising from duff to crown.
The fire had arrived, pitiless and hungry for more fuel.
We all staggered from our spots and gathered on the front deck and simply stared.
We were too exhausted to move anymore. Yellowjackets riled by the heat were buzzing and attacking, but all we could do was lean on our shovels and watch the flames come.
The fire was like an orange waterfall flowing into the sky.
A terrible, shaking beard. A thousand golden snakes writhing out of the earth.
The sound was like a gang of 747s pummeling us at takeoff.
The heat was brutalizing, wave on wave of crackling fury.
We had a decent path of escape behind us, and enough buffer that we weren’t in imminent danger, but within an hour, the lodge would surely be vaporized.
The whole mountain would be ash soon enough.
I stared into the fire, hypnotized. The flames blurred between orange and yellow and blue, bending into delicate new forms with every riffle of wind.
Here it comes, I thought, the thing that arrives for everything, the thing that remakes the world.
It’s all fire in the end. The violent transmutation of one substance into another, the liberation of energy from one form into the next.
I stood before the ravenous, annihilating essence and watched it feast.
I barely noticed when the guys all around me started cheering.
At first I thought they were seeing something I didn’t see, like a battalion of helicopters, or some thundercloud massing, but it turned out they didn’t see anything.
They were watching exactly what I was, but to their credit, they’d already given up.
As it turns out, this is what you do when a tsunami of fire is cresting in front of you.
You give up hope. You welcome whatever is on the other side of that curtain.
I joined in, screaming at the top of my lungs.
And then, incredibly, the fire paused. The sparks slowed their zigzags in the air.
The falling ash ceased. The smoke suddenly thinned.
We all stared in disbelief as the flames began pacing back and forth, like a lion at the limit of its hunt.
We looked at each other down the line, confirming what we were sensing.
Was it possible? It didn’t seem possible.
But it was true, the wind had shifted. The fire had turned.