The Trout Would Have A Different Take

In the night, with stars searing silver in the black sky, I crouched next to the small bed of orange coal and thick smoke I had been trying to nurse into a heating fire. The cold wind blowing up over the rim of the Mesa, the largest in the world, and over the lake had quelled the flames piled high into the quarter moon night earlier. Then it had blown the ash into the cool tuft of ghost pine and cottonwood it was now. The air was cold, alpine regions in November are not the warmest. Above ten thousand feet, the ice comes early and visits often.

The coals gave birth to a wispy yellow flame eating at a feathered strip of spruce bark I had prepared for this purpose. The light ate at the dark around the ash pile and shut off the stars in its flare. The flame crept slow up the bark's feathery inner reaches and then found the pine needles, heavy with oil and dessicated brown, flaring brighter, it found the pile of hatchet chips I had made earlier in the night. When the fire was still a living thing fighting back the night and me and my brother had sat on logs with our boots in front of the fire and meat frying in the iron skillet. I knew the heat would go away and we would need the chips. While I worked a pine log into a necrotized mess, Sean fried our food.

The fire eventually returned to us with my prodding. The light crept out over the ground in waves from the pit as the fire grew strong. The first of the pine branches caught and I sat back on my haunches. The heat came to me, driving out the cold that had awakened me. The undulating ring of the fire reached out to encapsulate all the rocks of the pit and then me and then our two bedrolls laid out on the ground, one full. The air glistened and condensed into a heavy cloud under my nose as i lived and breathed. Not too far away, people slept in their heated rooms, cocooned in their bedding. Me and Sean were planted thousands of feet up, near Leon Peak, ice crust on our bodies and beds.

He was across the flames from me curled in a ball snoring like he always has. The house we were both raised in did not quite have a thousand square feet to itself. Sean and I and one brother who ran from Colorado for good slept in one small bedroom with a bunk bed on one wall and a half a bunk bed on the other. The fire my dad would build on all the winter nights in our cast iron stove kept us warm against the tide of high Colorado cold.

While the fire built itself into the potential it had, I cajoled it along with food and air. Off in the trees, something big moved.

Sometimes I wonder if in the processes of the night, the foreign night that happens in the throes of discomfort to most, but the night that me and Sean can find solace in, some greater God comes to be. Not the creator of hominids who shit on their floor and cringe in anger at the unkempt dirtiness of nature around them and want to mold it into another floor to cover in their waste, but a greater God. One who has no idea that here in this galactic backwater, there are apes covered in skins they did not earn with flashing steel tools carving from the life of the wood fuel for meager comfort. The ground, heaving and beautiful covering the true iron nickel heart of this earth wrinkles and splashes onto itself with ferocity, but with a scale of time we can not even ponder with any skill. The universe stretches into what we can only behold as forever and we find in it's tidal backwater of time, our few years our few years, our vapor that flickers and fades, a reason for all of this.

I heard the hiss and gurgle of boiling liquid and saw the fire had gotten close to the enamelware coffee pot. I helped myself to a dirty cup of it and sat staring at the fire and across it my brother having a vocal dream.

Here in the city, the stars are not visible for the orange glow of our lights and the smoke of our heat. We are wrapped in our bedroll hiding from the cold current of nightsky that sparks on the flint of time and light and we hide in our beds and snore.

The greater god may come and go in the dark, but that night, I felt only the cold and the heat of brotherhood ownership and the stomach full of fish we had pulled out from under the ice of the stream. Greater truths may have been lost as I sat there in the dark happy and missing someone beautiful.