With the wildfires still raging across Southern Georgia it seems like now might be a good time to talk about fire.
A frequent subject of song, poetry, prose and cinema, fire provides fodder for the world of ideas and writers like myself, but it also consumes fodder in the real world.
Man has always had a difficult relationship with fire. You might even say it is something of a Frankenstein scenario. Like Dr. Frankenstein and the power to give life, primitive man saw fire as something occurring in the natural world and sought to control and harness it.
Warmth, light in the darkness, a way to ward off wild animals, smoking and preserving meat, the benefits of fire probably seemed limitless to cavemen. Even the spears with which they hunted and fought other tribes became stronger and more useful once hardened in a fire.
I can only imagine what those early efforts were like; the burnt hair, scorched hands, even lost lives and untold acreage of land laid waste, as our ancestor’s worked out exactly how to properly handle fire.
You see, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, fire seems to have a life of its own and a tendency to turn upon its creator. However, lest we forget, Frankenstein’s monster turned “evil” through the neglect and inattention of the “good” doctor. Which might be how we got in this mess with the wildfires to begin with.
Tin foil hat types have already been hard at work connecting the dots. Everywhere a wildfire has emerged, they say, is also where a data center was proposed. Unfortunately, they neglect to mention two other huge factors wherever these wildfires have sprung up; months-long drought conditions and an abundance of pig-headed Southerners who think “no one tells me what to do, I’ll burn this stuff in my yard if I want to”— some of them even after a burn ban was put into place and wildfires were already ravaging the countryside!
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity is a popular saying on social media these days.
How many of those little yard fires got neglected and before you know it a Frankenstein monster-sized blaze was the result? Maybe that isn’t how the wildfires started, but I can easily imagine it contributed to them. Some might have even been well-intentioned. Thinking to create a homemade fire break by burning some old, dry brush before the wildfires reach their home, some hapless soul ends up making the problem worse.
Lest anyone think I’m victim blaming, I’m not. There are plenty of other ways these fires could have begun; sparks from a train or a chain dragging behind a trailer or truck, a cigarette flicked from the window of an automobile, a campfire not properly doused. The list goes on and on.
The point is, these conflagrations don’t require some overarching conspiracy to have happened. According to the old story, the Great Fire of Chicago, which killed 300 people and destroyed much of the city back in 1871, was supposedly started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocking over a lantern. Others say that, in reality, it was a man who knocked over the lantern, but why take the blame when there is a convenient cow nearby?
Sometimes bad luck is all you need to explain a tragedy.
Even so, fire has a slippery, mischievous, even evil quality with the way it dances and flickers, constantly seeking to escape confinement. The Norse knew this very well, which is why Loki, popularized by Marvel comics and movies as specifically the god of mischief, was also a god of fire.
The vikings recognized the duality of fire; sometimes the warming, helpful flame which baked bread and helped forge sword and sometimes, the raging, devouring inferno that consumed everything in its path.
Currently, we are faced with that second form of fire, the raging, consuming flame, but what we cannot allow it to consume is our capacity for reason.
If there is proof these fires were started deliberately, as a journalist, I encourage anyone with such proof to step forward immediately. My email is right there by my picture.
