Good Friday, Good Fireday

"Let's burn the evidence. . ."

Good Friday, April 12, 1963. A mixed sun-and-cloud day, very windy with flashes of light and shadow, where you felt warm in your jacket one moment and chilly the next. I was standing in a 10-acre field with John Lane and his younger brother. The field separated a residential section from a highway and the shopping mall. John and I were almost 11, playing one of our kid adventures with John's nine-year-old younger brother. We had packed lunches of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and cookies.

When we had  finished our sack lunches, John produced a book of matches and said, "Let's burn the evidence." We crumpled the paper bags and tried to light them. Because it was windy, it took several matches to get the paper bags to catch and they did eventually. Our plan was to burn the bags and then crush them out by stomping on them. It seemed like a good idea . . .

But it didn't work.

Because it was pretty dry for an April day and very windy and new brush hadn't yet sprouted in the field, so the field was mostly made up of the dry brittle grasses that had died in winter. A few flames caught these grasses and they leaped onto other grasses---it was incredible how fast it happened, and we continued to try stomping on the flames, but the flames grew larger and kept spreading.

I wrote about this day many years later, and it was a fairly accurate impression of the trauma. . .

Like some mutation grafted onto itself, the fire grew, a long serpent spine of flame crackling over the brittle grasses. It devoured the remaining dead wood and stalks and seed pods anticipating spring warmth. It was a huge hot whisper, an arid bellows. It rolled a swath through the meadow and headed for the woods, flakes of ash eddying in the coils of smoke. We ran. Fire reached the picket fence, lapping into the wood, crawling up the slats until sections collapsed in rectangles of hectic flames. It streamed towards the backyards and houses beyond the fence, a charred crunching fanning out with violent bursts of orange, green and yellow, blooms of thick black smoke choking off the day. Where were the firemen? Hadn’t anyone called yet? We had to escaped and ran, and took refuge in a woods nearly a mile from the scene. We finally heard the alarms and knew they were meant for us. In the woods we prayed for forgiveness. The fire would find us, its creators, and destroy us. We would burn to death as punishment for what we had done, or at the least be caught and sent to jail. It was Good Friday, a dark day, the darkest day in the Christian calendar, and we had done a terrible thing and God was punishing us. We saw Him in the changeable April sky, and his accusing presence filled us with terror and guilt. He judged us in a loud, condemning voice: YOU HAVE PLAYED WITH FIRE AND LOOK AT THE EVIL YOU HAVE DONE! YOU ARE TRULY SONS OF THE DEVIL AND I WILL PUNISH YOU!

In the woods we prayed. We cowered and shook and our hearts were pounding and there were knots in our throats. What if someone accidentally died in the fire? And why had this crime become enlarged by it being Good Friday? We should have never gone out in the first place. Some of the Catholic kids that we knew had not been allowed out of their houses after Mass; their parents were making them stay in and fast and pray for the entire afternoon (lucky for them!) And instead of acknowledging Jesus Christ's death on the cross, we were destroying property, acres of it. Even if our crime was unintentional, and even if we weren't going to be caught (perhaps no one had seen us, and the three of us made a pact never to confess or tell anyone) we would never escape the judgment of God. He had watched us burn down that field.

We hid in the woods until late afternoon, and then decided to risk heading back to our homes and facing whatever awaited us. I split off from John Lane and his younger brother, and as I approached within two blocks of my house I saw some neighborhood kids standing on the corner and talking. The kids had just gotten back from watching this fire over in the fields. Their talk was animated as they described the many fire trucks and firemen who fought the blaze. The fire had consumed the entire field, and had taken considerable time to get under control because of the wind, and of course it had drawn a crowd. I asked if anyone had seen who started the fire, but no one had been seen. The kids asked me where I'd been. Still amazed at my luck, I told them I'd been playing in the woods all afternoon. I felt extremely relieved and grateful that no one had been hurt (I'd imagined horrors much worse), but I was also shocked by these kids. They had been entertained by the fire, they had enjoyed watching this conflagration a few blocks from their home, and I realized I would have felt that way too had I been with them and ignorant about fire, but I would never feel that way again; fire would never be something separate from me, would never be a voyeuristic carnival of disaster, but something to be feared and respected. I knew I wouldn't sleep later. I was sick with fear and guilt, and the whole day for me had been a sad tragedy, which in the Christian calendar it was. Thank God no one had been hurt, but I still was accountable and so were my friends. We were pyromaniacs. We had caused unnecessary human peril.. If caught I would certainly face juvenile court and sentencing.  


The field was also the locus for a half dozen other stories, a few of which may follow later in this blog. But some time in the 1970s the big field was turned into yet another mall as rampant development and mercantilism blanketed much of the county, destroying the scant open land that remained, concrete spreading like . . . like . . . an out of control fire.
 

 

pre-digital

In the mid 1970s I was living in a large house in Portland Oregon with a group of friends. Five or six of us lived there permanently, but at any time there were as many as 10 people crashing on the couch, or porch, or in the attic, and there were other friends who had their own places but came over to hang out with us. This was near the dawning of the digital age and mass electronic consumption, but at this point in time no one had ever even heard of a PC. There was no cable internet, satellite TV, iPods, iPhones, cell phones, Xbox-64, Blackberries, Pay Per View, TiVo, On Demand, DVD Players, Flash Drives, BlueRay, Netflix.... We had 1 TV set in the entire house, and a couple stereos that played vinyl of course. It all sounds so quaint 35 years later, but we listened to radio and albums at night around the fireplace. We had a ping-pong table that we used religiously, and every couple weeks on Saturday night the ping-pong table would be converted to a poker table. On summer evenings we often played volleyball and drank beer . . . or we played music on the front porch and drank beer . . . or we drank beer . . .

The TV set belonged to my friend Mark and was located in his bedroom instead of a shared communal location, which was actually preferable.to some of us literary anti-vidiots and emerging Luddites. Mark liked to watch TV until late at night and he didn't mind other people stopping in to watch a show as long as he wasn't sleeping. I usually skipped viewing on weeknights but occasionally I may have been visiting, or eating a late dinner and confess to watching -- yes -- "Welcome Back Kotter" or later in the evening, "The Rockford Files" or "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" but I usually didn't stick around for more than an hour or so.

But weekends were something else, more of a social event.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7S_XWuKpHc

On Saturday night we would watch "Saturday Night Live," which was only in its second season at the time, and felt like revolutionary television. A group of us would gather in Mark's room sitting on extra chairs or the foot of his bed, drinking 3.2 beer (Olympia, Bohemian -- no one touched Rainier), smoking cigarettes or maybe a joint or two if someone had pot. In this same year, we saw an episode in which Paul Simon hosted and his guest was George Harrison. Simon and Harrison played some of their songs as a duet and that was quite wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P88kd3coahE&feature=related

And it's interesting that the first clip above with Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin is discussing nuclear power plants in light of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and how these events have mandated the U.S nuclear power industry reexamine the safety of its earlier power plants.

Funny, that point-counterpoint parody was actually a segment that appeared at the end of "60 Minutes" with the liberal, Shana Alexander, and the conservative, James Kirkpatrick. On Sunday nights, after we had ordered pizza or picked up Chinese food, my friends and I would sit in Mark's room again and often watch "60 Minutes" Afterwards we'd usually go for a long walk, or work in the vegetable garden, and then later on, at 9:00 we'd settle down again in the TV room to watch "Masterpiece Theater" usually "Upstairs-Downstairs"  I may not have watched any other shows with my friends for the rest of the week, but Saturday and Sunday nights in 1976 and early 1977 had become something of a ritual.

During this "Dark Ages" I recall a conversation with a friend in which I had said that we shouldn't be at the mercy of network programming---what they made us watch---and that in the future you would simply be able to choose and order the movies or programs you wanted to see on television at any time. It was hardly a brilliant prediction: Early cable service was in the offing and thousands, maybe millions of folks were already sharing my wish. But the fact that the choices were so confined and narrow unintentionally led most of us to some positive, non-isolated moments worth mentioning here.