Sketch #1 - March after the Fires

Although this is my first entry, I don't really want to put up much of an introduction, I just want to jump right in. I will say that my name is Erica Eller and I helped to form some of the ideas for starting this 'writer's notebooks' project with Scott Lambridis. This is a little sketch that I wrote this morning.

Stones, fire burned stones. This was not the first time fire had spread over this hillside where the rock surfaces from beneath the earth. The earth was marred, although fresh growth of green had begun to lift from under the black soot that remains since last year's fire. Fire spread over the hill fast, late last summer, eating up the dried out weeds and the dried out bark of the pine trees. Then winter froze over the trail of the fire and now it is March. Rain falls and washes out the remaining slush of winter. It is sunny today and the wind is fierce.

We came to build a fire on the cliff that overlooks the Spokane Valley. John and I. We could have cooked hotdogs on the kitchen stove-top, but we preferred coming out to the cliff, where we could see the long stretches of train tracks and see what the forest now looked like, since we were not allowed to hike here last year. We brought our own kindling, in case the logs and the sticks around the cliff were all charred. We brought the Sunday comics as starter and we brought some lighter fluid, to help get the fire going.

The trees that used to line the cliff are broken spires, singular lines that jut out of the earth like black hairs. Their broken arms and limbs crumble down and land in angular formations on the ground. The black grid-pattern of wood clusters shows the fibers that were destroyed, burned, dried. Once strong limbs and branches now collapse at the touch. John kicks at every burnt out log he finds. They only the tip of his hiking boot black and send soot fly up in the air.

When we got to the site where we planned to light our fire, we collected large rocks to sit on, because the logs on the ground were too week to sit on and they would have turned our jeans black. John began to build a teepee of kindling to guard from the wind after I had formed a circle form fist-sized stones. The sky was blue and the little clouds travelled fast over our heads, racing towards the nearby mountains. In the distance, we could hear the sound of the train humming, grinding its metallic wheels over metal rails. Due East. Lines of cars on the highway parallel to the train sent my eyes following them one way until they disappeared into the periphery and then turning back to follow them the other direction, until they disappeared around a bend in the road. We were high up from anything below, high up away from the valley neighborhoods with above ground pools that were still empty from the winter and high up away from the churches with filled parking lots, this Sunday morning.