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HOME FIRES Essays on roots, restlessness and renewal A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by Bobbi Marie Maiers May 2013 Thesis written by Bobbi Marie Maiers B.A., University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, 2004 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2013 Approved by David Giffels, Advisor Robert W. Trogdon, Chair, Department of English Raymond A. Craig, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements.................................................................................................iv Prologue: Left to Burn.............................................................................................1 Maple Hill Farm.......................................................................................................5 Leaving: Wildwood................................................................................................22 Arrival: Top of the Mountain.................................................................................28 Summer of Solitude...............................................................................................32 Arrival: Waldo Canyon Hike.................................................................................43 Edge of the West....................................................................................................46 This Place is Yours.................................................................................................78 Ladder to the Moon, Part 1....................................................................................99 Leaving: Pikes Peak Morning..............................................................................108 Arrival: Bed on the Beltway.................................................................................112 Big City, Small World..........................................................................................116 Leaving: Match Day.............................................................................................131 Arrival: Rootless..................................................................................................135 Dr. and Mrs. Dungeon Master’s Dinner for Dorks..............................................140 Ladder to the Moon, Part 2..................................................................................154 Leaving: Little Tree..............................................................................................164 Epilogue: Home Fires..........................................................................................169 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my writing mentor, D’Arcy Fallon: for being the first person to tell me I was a writer, encouraging me in the pursuit of both a journalism career and an MFA, reading so much of my work and, always, listening. To my parents: for teaching me the value of roots, instilling in me a love of the outdoors and a respect for rural places, letting me go when I needed to go, and fielding my endless questions about our life on the farm. To my fellow writers Katie Trook, Amy Creelman-Purcell, Maria Varonis, LeeAnn Marhevsky, Chris Drabick, Jack Boyle, and Stephanie Kist: for providing thoughtful and intelligent feedback, much-needed workshop humor, and friendship. To my thesis director David Giffels: for saying yes, investing valuable time, teaching me to kill darlings and capitalize on nonfiction gold, and for knowing too much about me and liking me anyway. Last, and best: to my husband, Jarrad, for generously giving me the time, support and encouragement I needed to produce this collection, along with a great love story to tell and a beautiful setting for it. Mere words can do justice to neither, nor can they suffice in relaying the depth of my love for you and the life we share. Here’s to all the stories awaiting us. iv Everyone carries in them an image of an ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary...A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country. There is no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.” -- Edward Abbey I have left everywhere that I have ever been. -- Ani DiFranco The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes. -- Henri Frederic Amiel v Prologue: Left to Burn June 2009 The house is ready. It stands alone and empty on the green, sunbathed lawn. A few days ago, men came and ripped away the dirty white slate siding, and said so many bats flew out as they worked. Now the house stands naked, a large, solemn tarpaper square before a dense grove of oak and ash trees. Some of the paper pieces flap and flutter like burned bits do as a campfire dies. Or they hang, haphazard, exposing scars of weathered wood beneath. The clothesline my mother used when I was young still stands, forlorn. The front porch screen door is open, swaying in a lazy breeze. It is eight a.m. on a clear Saturday morning in May. This is the Midwest, rural Minnesota, where many farm houses stand miles from neighbors. To reach this one, you drive eight miles south from the town of Starbuck, population 1,200. You hang a left on Highway Sixteen and drive past the Ferraro place and the Thompson dairy farm. After the large pond and the Opdahl family’s pasture, you turn south on a gravel road, push up the hills and past the fields, toward the trees. The sound of diesel engines drifts through those trees this morning, growing steadily as the vehicles climb the first big hill. Dust billows. A team of three, they emerge through 1 2 the stand of trees and into the yard--a ladder truck with STARBUCK FIRE DEPT. #2 on its doors, and two lumbering pump trucks, one red, one silver. They station themselves on the circular gravel driveway in between the horse stable and the old white garage. Firemen spill out and begin their work, setting up a giant yellow plastic holding tank and filling it with water. They run thick gray hoses across the yard, calling to each other in excited voices. Many of them are familiar faces, people in town my family has known a long time. Over the years we have made a habit of burning down structures on the farm to replace them. More than a decade ago we burned the chicken house and corn crib with the falling-in roof. The sagging granary was next. The old red barn with the milking area in the basement and the hay mow upstairs was the largest fire--it was torched and then buried to erect a new pole shed. Now, the house. Before they begin, the firemen break every window: the huge sixteen-pane windows in the living and dining rooms, the small leaking windows above the breakfast nook, and the wide window above the kitchen sink we called the Hollering Window, where my mother yelled outside to my father as he worked, to let him know he had a phone call. The men tromp upstairs, the steep uncarpeted steps creaking beneath their heavy frames weighted down with oxygen tanks, axes and thick suits. They break every whistling old bedroom window that should have been replaced decades ago. Glass shatters and old wood groans, splinters. Air comes in. 3 Once finished, the men roll a wheelbarrow of bright yellow straw bales to the farmhouse front door and lug them down the staircase to the musty basement, where we spent hours stacking logs in the wood room and where my mother hid the blue doll house I discovered on a Christmas morning treasure hunt in 1989. Where the dark monstrosity of the wood stove lurked, the old freezer with the creaky lid, the root cellar where we stored canned peaches and tomatoes from our garden. The firemen light the bales on fire. They climb back up the stairs, go outside. Wait, and watch. Smoke appears first. It grows thick and oily, billowing black as fire spreads around the basement. Through the broken windows on the lowest level, the first real licks of red and orange flame show themselves. The wooden benches from the breakfast nook have been left behind, unwanted, near where the wood stove used to sit. They burn, and the shelves in the root cellar burn, and bits of wood littering the wood room floor burn. The fire moves up the stairs to the main level. The house is utterly dry. A tinderbox of wood, plaster, some carpet. In minutes, ugly black smoke plumes rise into the clear May sky. They can be seen for miles--from the Thompson farm down on the highway, the Olsen place several miles east of there, even from town. Campers and hikers in Glacial Lake State Park adjacent to the farm will see the sky turning colors and feel fear or worry. No one will know that it is not an emergency but a deliberate choice made because a house has been deemed too far gone. A carefully monitored, managed catastrophe. 4 Minute by minute the fire eats, grows and climbs up walls, burning hotter and hotter. It reaches sixteen hundred degrees at its roaring center. It takes everything--the creaking screen door and worn carpet, the painted kitchen cupboards. Flames dart through the main level, snaking upward to decorate the wide arch between the living room and dining room. They find added fuel in narrow closets--magazines, letters, cards, old clothing, decades-old bank records. So many unwanted things, left to burn because no one knew what else to do with them. Because flames consume, erase. They leave a blank slate. The fire sweeps up the wooden staircase, consuming the rail and eating up stale bedroom carpets,