Playing With Fire

The Night the Cottage Burned

With my friend Meghan

I love to play with fire. Sage, sweetgrass, palo santo, incense and beeswax. Dried wood piled high upon the sand. Lanterns which lift up into the night, though I’ve been told those are now banned in Canada. You can’t trust fire to land safely on the wind. You never know what will catch.

They say fire is a transformative element. It burns, it scorches and it makes light, allowing us to love the darkness, so long as we have a torch in our hands.

And what of the inner fire? When we ignite a truth, that which is most terrifying, that which we would rather have kept dark, after all? What do we do with the wild fire, as it seems to eat up everything in its path?

When I was a young mother, my older brother accidentally set our old cottage on fire for a second time. It was a simple wooden structure, one that had been rebuilt decades ago, after he had burned down the original cottage as a child while trying to light a camping stove. My brother is a powerful, beautiful soul and he has fire karma.

The night of the fire, the rest of our family was sleeping in a newer cottage next door, and we were awakened by a massive boom which rocked the entire lake, heard by people miles away. It was the sound of all the windows in the cottage exploding outward simultaneously, when the carpet fire inside reached its peak. We ran out onto the deck to witness the sight of the old cottage where my brother was sleeping surge up in a towering wall of flame, three stories high.

Half dressed, my father ran wailing toward the inferno, my mother following behind, dragging a hose that wouldn't reach. I staggered after, holding my sleeping toddler close for fear the flames would quickly spread and engulf the whole area. My father tried to ram the back door of the sizzling building to get in, but it exploded against him, spewing like dragon's breath, throwing him back and burning his face. My brother was gone.

Time stopped. The roar of the fire was so hot we could not hear our words, could not stand within twenty yards. Everyone was forced back and we gathered sobbing amongst the trees while burning embers rained down from the sky. Then, like a dream, like an impossible imagining, we heard a voice, my brother's voice, calling my father's name. Rising from the darkness by the lake his face appeared, unholy and shocking in the dim light, as he climbed up from the water's edge. He had taken the canoe for a midnight paddle, forgetting a towel draped over a lamp. Out on the lake, lying down afloat in the canoe while looking up at the stars, he had heard the explosion, and my father calling for him. My brother was alive. I will never forget my father's voice, and the look on his face as he fell into my brother's arms.

My brother and eldest son

The second miracle of that night was that there was not a breath of wind in the air. The raging tower of flame went straight up, far over the tops of the trees, and with the help of every neighbour in our bay passing a chain of buckets from the lake, we contained the fire and the forest did not catch. It had been one of the driest summers on record with a strict bonfire ban in place. The solitary fire truck which managed to get to the scene through the tiny back roads arrived hours later. If there had been any wind at all, the fire would have certainly spread rapidly, and an entire lakeside community engulfed and destroyed.

The next day as we all nursed the burns on our feet, through tears of shock and relief we looked at one another with new eyes. It was as if years of comfortable assumptions were washed away. The burn site stood dark and smoking in the daylight. What once was, was no more. In the moment my brother emerged from the shadows like a spectre, the dance of life and death spun around like the illusion it is. From loss to rebirth, from horror to joy.

The old cottage, holding so many childhood memories, would not be rebuilt again. Years later, when my father was dying of cancer he would help my brother build a small cabin nearby, an act of creative commemoration, leaving the original site empty and naked of trees, a shrine to the miraculous night.

My father and I at the cottage

I can never go back to that place, that world where we spent summers close to the wild lake with her thunderstorms, living off picked blueberries floating in milk, eaten as we sat on the bare rocks. One of the many fires in my life had transformed me, and turned those days to ash, making way for an inner light I had never suspected would come.

I still play with fire and do not fear it. I trust it to burn what is meant to burn, nothing more, and nothing less. I do my best not to pull away, but to surrender to the heat, to become the ash. I bow to what I cannot resist, and dare not deny, for one day I too may be consumed and alight.

much love,
Adi