Elements of Me
Thinking back on childhood, I very much had a stereotypical Gen X-type of play experience with my friends. I tell people I don’t like generational boxes but I’m in the “Xennial” age group and the response is usually, “Oh that makes sense.” It’s because I had an analog childhood and a digital transition to adulthood. So the mythology goes, we are the few with the ability to bridge and translate the universe for older and younger alike. We understand both reel-to-reels and touch screens intuitively; can troubleshoot a VCR and debug an iPhone with ease. It’s an immense power I know, but I try to wield it for good. That analog part of our lives meant riding our bikes all over town and playing roller hockey on schoolyard playgrounds after hours. We could go down in the usually dry riverbed or build ourselves a treehouse to hangout in. We had the freedom to explore the world, though we all know it was more likely, “Get out of the house so I can have some peace and quiet,” because yes we grew up with Nintendo and Sega consoles. We knew how to burn a whole day staring at a screen before it was really cool.
But outside, I was a child of fire foremost. I loved playing with it. Fireworks were phenomenal, Estes rockets were a blast, hairspray and matches were a fun toy. Magnifying glasses were light- and mind-bending. I made treasure maps and burned the edges. Pyrography made its way into my life for a school project in which I decorated a miniature wood sarcophagus with hieroglyphs. I will happily build, light, and tend a campfire for anyone that wants to join me in the circle.
That love for fire stayed with me, but it’s an element that has moved to the side at this phase of my life. Ten years ago, Carrie and I rescued a greyhound from a race track. His track name was Viper. There was no way we were going to call him that so we christened him Hank. Hank was easily frightened by two of my favorite fiery things: thunder and fireworks. Like, try to squeeze behind the toilet on Independence Day or shivering violently when a thunderstorm would roll through, very frightened. I grew to loathe fireworks because of his suffering. And as a Californian, the increasingly extreme wildfire season and resulting smoke have come to be a sad inevitability. On top of that, our old house was threatened by two fires, one of them a massive house fire that nearly set our 100 year old neighborhood ablaze; spotting fires the next block over and torching two adjacent palm trees. I was about 150 feet away (on the phone with 911 dispatch) when the palm trees went up and still ducked for cover because of the heat blast. Needless to say, I’ve had too many negative interactions with fire since my childhood to be quite as captivated by it. Though, my respect for it has only grown.
Outside of fire, I loved digging and still do. My brothers, friends, and I dug holes and hideouts in our backyard as frequently as we were allowed, and sometimes clandestinely when we had been forbade. I was a big reader of WW II non-fiction and immensely fascinated with escape tunnels. The Great Escape? C’mon. But even as a child I was far less enthralled by Steve McQueen than I was by the engineering of the escape. I had a bug for vegetable gardening from early on, furrowing plots in the backyard. I wanted to be a landscape architect for a while too, managing to construct a small, decorative brick patio and a larger flagstone patio in the intervening years. Add in a good dose of childhood awe at California mineral miners and the state’s natural cave systems in general. And what better place to push your hands into the earth than California’s beaches? Beaches are what the Etch-a-Sketch aspires to. Dig a six foot pit, write a proposal to your lover in the sand, build a fortress with moat. Whatever you do, the wind and water will erase it all soon enough.
I enjoyed a good pillow fort growing up, but better than that was the air-supported structure. The idea is that you take a box fan, the biggest not-fitted sheet in your home’s linen closet, some clothes pins, and all the cushions and pillows you can gather to assemble an air igloo. Clip the sheet around the box fan with the airflow blowing in, then place pillows and cushions around the edge to enclose a bubble. Instant private space, white noise machine, cool breeze generator. One of my other favorite ways to experience the wind was to climb to the highest point in our black walnut tree, well above our treehouse in the big branches closer to the ground. The branch where I perched was near-vertical with a Y-shaped crotch that I could rest my foot in. Above that, where I clasped my hands was maybe 1 1/2 inches in diameter and where my foot rested was about 2 inches in diameter. It was about 20 feet above the ground, gave a great view of the neighborhood and would sway back and forth in the breeze, maybe 18 inches each way when the wind gusted. It offered a fantastic sensation. Trees and wind are wonderful combination. One of my favorite sounds in the world is the whoosh of the wind as it blows through the pine needles of a stand of conifers.
One cannot grow up in California without having a very up-and-down relationship with water; from our section of snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains to our rivers and human-made reservoirs to our canal system to the shoreline along the Pacific Ocean. Wading out into the rolling waves of that huge water, bobbing in the swell, feeling the kelp brush against your legs, is a life changing experience. There is a connectivity arising from contact with the briny body that touches so many other places thousands of miles away and contains so much unexplored volume. A vast mystery where humans play in the shallows around the edge.
On the opposite side of the scale, I have walked across the face of what was once Lyell Glacier at the highest summit in Yosemite and drank ice cold snowmelt from the source. And every time it rains, I have to be in it. Even if for a moment, I will step outside the house or the shop to let raindrops hit me. Some years you never know when you’ll see it again. I played in gutter water! If it rained hard enough to fill street gutters, I was engineering dams in the current. And water is what gives us petrichor. When I work with cement, when it rains after a dry spell, that instant earth smell is glorious. I’ve kayaked over kelp beds, canoed across lakes and down rivers, rafted over whitewater, grilled food on a lake boat, and gone swimming in dozens of backyard pools. Speaking of Xennials, I witnessed one of the earliest occurrences of a person being pushed into the pool with their cell phone still pocketed, must have been 1997-ish and uncooked rice in a bag hadn’t been invented yet.
Having such an analog focus in my early experiences and that push to explore so many aspects of the natural world certainly played a part in my staying connected to the art of woodworking. I will always feel the call to be outside rather than inside. And we certainly can’t have trees if they don’t have access to fire, earth, air, and water. We’re kindred spirits then, trees and me.
