To Build a Fire

Elmer and I descended to the Coos Bay beach adjacent to the boat ramp. The path down was a bit tricky because of the logs and rocks thrown up by a recent king tide. This particular event had washed away the homeless encampment and launched pieces of driftwood the size and shape of telephone poles and Mini Coopers into the general area where tents and tarp shanties had been erected. If anyone was in residence when the king tide hit, they would have been either drowned or impaled. Maybe someone was killed. The receding tide would have carried them away into the bay for a burial at sea. Would anyone ever know?

So the king tide had obliterated the encampment.

I didn’t give a shit. No, that’s wrong. I was relieved.

It was 38 degrees and light rain fell. One the morning boat ramp regulars vaped weed in his truck and stared out the bay. There sure a lot of people who drive to this bay to watch sunrise and vape weed (or watch pornography or listen to right wing podcasts on their phones).

We reached the sand and I saw a homeless person wearing a hoodie, headlamp and backpack huddled over a tiny fire burning inside at the base of an upright cinder block. Something appeared to be cooking in a metal bowl resting on the cinder block.

I didn’t want to spook the person so I circled ten yards to his/her right. A profile came into view: a man in his early 20s.

“Hey,” I called out, “I didn’t want to spook you.”

He turned slowly toward me. I saw his face—half there—but not wrecked by meth or fentanyl.

“What are you cooking up?” I said.

“Nothing, just burning stuff.”

About dozen metaphors for the crisis of homelessness and the American experiment exploded in my mind after hearing that statement.

“Okay. Sounds good,” I said and that sounded dumb when I said it.

The man didn’t respond.

Elmer and I did our bay beach thing.

Upon our return, the man was stripping scraps of wood apart with a knife and feeding them into the fire.

I didn’t say anything to him. What was there to say?

My mind instantly went to Jack London’s short story, “To Build a Fire.” In this masterpiece, set in Alaska during the Gold Rush, a soaking gold digger tries to start a fire to ward off hypothermia and keep a wolf at bay. I don’t recall how it ended. I read it one time, in junior high. I never taught the story as an English teacher. No, I didn’t google to find out how it ended. I think the gold digger wasn’t able to get the fire going but the reader never sees him actually die.

This young homeless man got his fire going.

Yet another metaphor.