Wasn’t I still the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray – I wore the garb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped and on the verge of tears.
As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes who got serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. Dandelion-root soup and duck calls were my specialties, and I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire.
Furiously I rubbed twigs together. No smoke. I tossed the twigs out with a shower of curses and began tearing through the underbrush in search of drier, more flammable fuel. I failed miserably. Livid, I gnawed at the twigs, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, only offering young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth – old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family.
Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fish, my brother and boy cousins swaggered into the campsite. They immediately noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit, and, assuming the worst, called to me, their voices sharp with teasing.
“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having trouble?” With a few seemingly effortless scrapes of wood on rock, they sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame.
In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? So incapable? I remembered my hands, how calloused and invincible they used to be, how tender they had become. It had been a while since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers or scaled a white pine. Instead, I’d practiced different scales, my hands softening into a pianist’s tools – fleshy and sensitive. And I’d grown horrifically nearsighted and gotten glasses after long nights of dim lighting and thick books. I couldn’t remember the last time I had laid down on a hill, bare-faced, and observed the stars without needing to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed the transformation – it disgusted me, and I felt an urge to squash it.
I’d become the girl on the other side of the window. Yet I realized I hadn’t really changed; I had just shifted perspective. I still explored worlds – but through poems rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood. I was now a child of pencil and paper, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses.
That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I tolerated it just barely, only shrieking on the occasion that it jumped. It helped to watch it decorate the corners with its delicate webs, and to know that it couldn’t start fires either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked. My hands burned from all that scrawling, and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking. I was on fire, always on fire.