The Fire Ring

It's a textbook autumn evening, the kind I find myself pining for all through the long, hot summer months. My wife doesn't understand, and I can't really explain it in a way that makes sense to her, but I prefer sweatshirt season over swimsuit season, and October will always be my favorite 31 days of the 365 we're given each year.

I'm reclining fireside with Dad at our small northern Michigan cabin. The sky is clear – dashed and dotted with brilliant stars that I rarely register until I'm back in this place. A subtle south breeze tickles at my neck, carrying the pungent scent of dying leaves that tumble down from their warm-weather perches.

Seasoned wood, hand-cut and split from these twenty acres, sizzles and pops – flames licking greedily at the dried fuel. The rampart of weathered rocks still stands guard in a protective circle all around, charred black from fourteen years of fires like this one.

Here, warmed by the heat and lost in the sway and glide of the orange flames, I take a long drag on my cigarette and remember this fire ring – built stone after stone by Dad and the boys and me. Each unearthed from the dirt and particularly placed.

It was the first thing we did when we made camp on this land so many seasons ago. Back when the musty Shasta trailer, a few mouse-chewed folding chairs, and the garage-sale picnic table were our only comforts. Back before the cabin and woodshed and hunting blinds. Before the cushy Adirondack chairs we now sit in. Back when the white pines casting long shadows in tonight's firelight were barely knee high, and the boys weren't much bigger.

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This fire ring has always been our hub. Our gathering place. Where dinners have been cooked and consumed, drinks poured and polished off, stories told and retold, and riotous laughter echoed like spring thunder claps. Here, Dad, the boys, assorted friends and relatives, and me, gathered 'round together in the glow.

It's opening weekend of Michigan's archery season, but Dad and I won't even hunt. We're just here to spend some time together in a place that means so much to us both. We brought the fishing boat as an excuse, and tomorrow we might actually use it, but today we simply busied ourselves with chores around the place.

We trimmed overgrown branches around the nearly dilapidated "tipi" the boys built one afternoon a dozen or so years back, replaced steps that had grown worn and cracked on the blind we put up with the neighbor in '16 – the one Blake shot his first buck from, and cleaned out sheds that had gradually accumulated years and years of this and thats.

A toss pile, a burn pile, and a sell pile.

Some choices were easy. Crumpled cardboard boxes and random wood scraps quickly found their way to the fire. The ratty old ground blind, busted-up deer target, and moth-gnawed hand muffs got tossed. And a few still-in-the-package items like the duplicate Dutch Oven, unused auxiliary tank, and extra battery charger were packed away to take home – bound for Marketplace and a deal-hound to snatch up.

But others were more difficult. The first camo camp chairs Dad and I got for hunting 40 years ago - they hadn't seen use in long, long spell, but somehow we were both too nostalgic to let them go. Or the bright red wiffle-bat-and-ball set Dad bought for midday hunting-camp entertainment back when the boys were just 10 and 12 and required such distractions. Unused for over a decade, but in current use or not, a memory we simply weren't willing to toss away just yet.

Here around the fire ring I contemplate all that has changed.

How the trees are so much taller now along the path we travel to the blind. And how the old Shasta camper and rickety benches around the fire have faded off like a time-yellowed photograph. How that clunky two-man ladder stand we used to sit in together with the kids finally gave up the ghost. Or how my limbs ache after a day of chores in a way I don't remember in years past. And how the wiffle-ball bat and camo camp chairs are now just dusty mementos of season's past.

How those who once shared this fire with us are no longer here. Like Butch, my friend I spent so many fall seasons with in these big woods. And Johnny, who built this woodshed – as close to an older brother as I ever got. Both gone, well before their time.

Or the boys – Kyle, now 26, married and living in Montana, and Blake, 24, grown and busy with the happenings of his own life. No longer the little kids in oversized camo and face-paint they once were.

The years and moments and memories rise up and slowly drift away like woodsmoke on the wind before I can grab hold. I steal a glance at Dad, wipe an embarrassed tear from my cheek, and flick my cigarette butt into the glowing embers.

Rousing the fire I once again take notice of the stalwart ring of charred rocks – still here, the same as it always has been – like my love for the season and the days I have been blessed with in this place.