NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/946863
MARCH 2018 • NEBRASKAland 49 Flame, Smoke, and Stories Our primal connection with fire. By Roger Welsch W hen my family moved this old 1890s house onto its new foundation here on the north bank of the Middle Loup River and set about rehabilitating it to our lives and needs, at the top of the list of features I insisted on was a fireplace. Oh, I know fireplaces are inefficient, even counter to my tendencies toward the eco-friendly. They are dirty, dangerous, unnecessary polluters. We did what we could to mitigate these issues by building our fireplace around an "insert," which makes it a little more efficient as a heat generator, but the fact remains, any fireplace is a totally unnecessary anachronism. But a fireplace is in fact only one manifestation of our primal connection with fire. Something more is going on with man and fire than any rationalization about "what happens when the power goes out in the middle of a blizzard." When my buddy Mick comes out to visit, even during the warmest evenings of summer, we sit around the fire pit in front of the cabin, wasting wood, sucking in smoke, staring at the flame, sometimes in dead silence. There has to be an etymological connection somewhere along the line between "heat," "hearth" and "heart" because there does seem to be a deep, social and psychological relationship. In some Native religious ceremonies a pipe of sacred tobacco is lit with a coal from the fire in the middle of the worshipful circle and passed around to everyone, thus uniting the congregants with each other and, more importantly, with the fire. I am writing a book about a British artist who visited this area in January 1870, and I am especially drawn to his etching titled "A Smoke With Friendlies," an image from an evening he spent in Pawnee Chief Crooked Hand's earth lodge. That's him (see photo) leaning on a lodge pole, his back to us, as the pipe comes his way from the hands of his traveling companion Lord Flynn (the dude with the fancy hat!). When I fantasize about where I would like to have been at some point in history, it's here, in this circle gathered around the fire, celebrating a new friendship, soaking up what warmth they could from a Nebraska deep winter fire. And – I put good money on this – telling stories. My theory is that our usual form of conversation is person to person. That is, we talk, often as not, to – someone. But around a fire we talk to – the fire, just as mankind has done for tens of thousands of years. Look again at the people in A. B. Houghton's etching. See? They are looking into the fire and almost certainly someone is telling stories. In my long life I have enjoyed more campfires than I can count – along Nebraska rivers, in Pawnee, Omaha, and Lakota circles, with old friends and new, summer and winter. It has become clear to me over the years that one of the most distinctive features of a fire, in a fireplace or in a camp, is the evocative nature of the flame and smoke. It never fails: give me a fire, a cup of good coffee or tin cup of whiskey (good or not!), and we'll have stories. In Crooked Hand's lodge, Houghton and Flynn were perhaps telling about the wonders of London or New York, while Crooked Hand and his kin recited old legends of battles against the Lakota or maybe the origins of humans when the moon and sun consorted and gave us – us – we human beings. As the Pawnee have it, chaticks si chaticks – we "men among men!" And fire, because it, too, is a divine gift. All around us animals are born with innate vestiges of ancient abilities, fears, history, knowledge and memories. Why not us? According to recent theory, we partnered with fire almost two million years ago. Surely that's long enough a time for us to have developed something more than a naked utilitarian relationship with this most primary of tools. I can't be the only one who stares into a fire and realizes that this heat and this light are nothing more than the liberation of energy stored in a tree for years, perhaps decades, in some cases generations, and now called on to release once again that energy for another turn in the cycle of life, not just warmth and light but also the renewal of ancient memories and tribal narratives: "Okay, Mick, I've probably told you this before, but I was once camped on an island in the Platte River somewhere downstream from Grand Island when I heard, for the only time in my life, the insane cry of a loon. I said to Dave, 'Did you hear that?' and he said ... " ■ Roger Welsch is an author, humorist, folklorist and a former essayist for CBS News Sunday Morning. He is the author of more than 40 books, including his most recent Why I'm an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales available from University of Nebraska Press.