The World’s Best Fire
Campfire Storyteller: Rick Colbert
Seated in the dark on a 2-foot chunk of log under an ancient Doug fir, I stare blankly into the world’s best fire.
I'm aware of the conversation of my three companions lounging around the blaze, even absently responding here and there. But this oval of carefully placed rocks, narrowed on one end to hold a cooking grate, is the center of my universe. My mind floats above the present, reflecting on the day, the season and the past. The dancing flames and swirling smoke and sputtering sparks, chronology ignored, reveal a stream of snapshots of the many seasons I’ve passed here and my hopes for many more.
Years ago during my second elk season, there were just two of us in camp sitting 8,500 feet above sea level. Back then, my mentor Mike, 10 years my junior, had just decreed our blaze "The world’s best fire!"
I looked across the pit and responded simply, "Let's get old together doing this!"
And each year that ticks by, we meet again around the firepit he deemed the best in the world, sitting around a new blaze.
Back in the present, the guys crack jokes and laugh at some gentle ribbing. The camaraderie at camp, around these unmatched flames, is unmistakable. It cannot be left behind, nor should it be. It resides within the elk hunter, wherever he or she may go, nourishing their spirits. It’s as if part of us is always in the mountains engaged in this revered pursuit.
Over the course of the hunt the cleansing flames have incinerated all vestiges of job stresses, family squabbles or political disagreements. Only inspiring images of the hunt, the mountain, or the company are deemed worthy of rising on the smoke.
The fire is a flashback machine. A kaleidoscope of memories escapes the flames, randomly flickering and quickly replaced. We toast elk and deer encounters past, some successful, most not. Or sharing lunch with a chipmunk from my shaded ambush above the wallow. The curiosity of a pine marten on a frosty morning. The color burst of a Steller’s jay flushing from a limb. The trail dust, the fragrant sage, the indefatigable burs.
I see the faces and remember the names of wranglers who have come and gone. Some brief acquaintances, others who have become good friends. There's the rookie who hunted with us one year, his efforts with his bugle tube still humorous to this day. There's the day we spent riding out a freak, early-season blizzard in the cook tent, and the tales told of mountain lion encounters by two hunters on successive days. I recall the giant muley I stalked stocking-footed to near the edge of arrow range, only to be busted by his smaller wingman. And the two dusky grouse that fell to my judo point, 30 yards apiece.
Like cloud animals morphing in the sky, shedding embers chisel new shapes into the receding logs. We watch a blackened chunk of aspen with huge gray scales like an ancient alligator being consumed from its belly by the inferno. A coal drops out, leaving flame to lick through a perfect eye hole in the reptilian head. The burst spirals skyward, rotating its blue side for its orange, and there from within, stares the funky five-by-three bull I encountered high on a bald saddle seasons ago, his deformed right beam jutting horizontally to the side. He busts me as I reach full draw, and now as then, the moment our eyes meet he's gone, disappearing in a single downhill bound.
I'm reminded of a Tennessee William's quote I once jotted down because I thought it profound at the time: "Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?"
Now the evening’s flames have revealed to me the hollowness of that quote. Life is but half memory. The other half is full of our hopes and dreams and plans and goals, whether high in these mountains or back home in our daily lives.
The hum of a jetliner, so distant it sounds as if Mother Nature has pressed her finger to her lips, telling her babies to "Sshhhh!" is the only motor vehicle we've heard in 10 days. In the morning, the pack string will come clomping into the bowl to take us on the three-hour return ride to basecamp and the truck. But tonight we'll linger outside the tent, savoring every last minute before the world's best fire burns out for another year.
