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These hot, dry nights in the Iraqi summer have an endearing quality that grows on you. Step outside into the dwindling desert heat to relax and maybe catch a bat performing aerial gymnastics as it helps keep the environment relatively free of insects. You can lose yourself watching the little flying mammals entertain themselves chasing prey like cats toying with a mouse. The cartwheels, corkscrews and loops seem to be effortless as they leave a doodling trail in your line of site against the diminishing twilight; the evening sky filled with hues of purple, orange, yellow and red.
Attention fades to the task at hand which is to burn paper marked with my name as a standard precaution around these parts. Every unwanted scrap of said paper gets set aside for the burn barrel; a blessing to the homeless in the cold but around here serves nothing more than to make smoke and watch all the dancing flames morph into incarnations of various figures in your imagination.
With a slight westerly breeze kicking up, the metal butane lighter emblazoned with an HK MP-5 comes out of my pocket to ignite the first scraps as they build heat in the perforated barrel. Keeping the flow of documents up to feed the growing inferno is crucial to a complete burn. Too slow and the flame doesn’t build intensity making it tedious to complete the destruction. Too fast and the flame is smothered leaving your hand an ashen mess when you have to reach in and reignite the unburned materials. Gradually increasing the rate to build intense heat is the ideal in order to reach a tipping point where you can just dump everything in for immediate combustion.
When I reach the ideal burn temperature, it is like meditation and I am transported to a zone that fills some kind of primeval void within me. It is something akin to the primitive clan transfixed around the campfire while the elders pass along legend and spoken entertainment knowing that danger lurks at the fringes of the light emanated by the fire. Looking back at the forest or the steppe or the desert reveals the reflection in many pairs of eyes observing the strange event in which man controls fire. The animals themselves appear to mimic the humans by forming an outer perimeter like a second concentric circle around the central source of light.
The night sky here is something that many urban dwellers have rarely seen and makes for an easy distraction as a backdrop to the hyperactive bats at feeding time. Looking up at this segment of sky helps one understand how astral navigation could be so effective for early explorers before GPS rendered it obsolete. It is a constant, predictable way to map one’s travels and I believe it will one day return to real importance in the event of a technical snafu.
Footfalls snap me back to reality as people shout “fire, fire, fire†and I wonder what is going on. “Hey, get away from there, call the fire brigade.†Who are they yelling at I wonder? Then, I turn to look back at the barrel only to see that the wooden shack beyond it is totally ablaze. A complete inferno has engulfed it apparently from the embers expelled from my burn barrel. It seems that in my daydream-like state of consciousness, the breeze gusted and created the perfect firestorm for what was once a recreation room for the residents of the living area nearby. So long to the foosball table, ping pong table and flat-screen TV set. A flaming deck of playing cards gets shot out of a hole in the roof and comes raining back to earth in pirouettes and acrobatics mimicking the flight of many bats on the hunt.
Lights and sirens augment the lightshow put on by the burning shack which is by now a blazing skeleton and a disappointment to see extinguished by the underutilized but enthusiastic members of the fire brigade.
Attention fades to the task at hand which is to burn paper marked with my name as a standard precaution around these parts. Every unwanted scrap of said paper gets set aside for the burn barrel; a blessing to the homeless in the cold but around here serves nothing more than to make smoke and watch all the dancing flames morph into incarnations of various figures in your imagination.
With a slight westerly breeze kicking up, the metal butane lighter emblazoned with an HK MP-5 comes out of my pocket to ignite the first scraps as they build heat in the perforated barrel. Keeping the flow of documents up to feed the growing inferno is crucial to a complete burn. Too slow and the flame doesn’t build intensity making it tedious to complete the destruction. Too fast and the flame is smothered leaving your hand an ashen mess when you have to reach in and reignite the unburned materials. Gradually increasing the rate to build intense heat is the ideal in order to reach a tipping point where you can just dump everything in for immediate combustion.
When I reach the ideal burn temperature, it is like meditation and I am transported to a zone that fills some kind of primeval void within me. It is something akin to the primitive clan transfixed around the campfire while the elders pass along legend and spoken entertainment knowing that danger lurks at the fringes of the light emanated by the fire. Looking back at the forest or the steppe or the desert reveals the reflection in many pairs of eyes observing the strange event in which man controls fire. The animals themselves appear to mimic the humans by forming an outer perimeter like a second concentric circle around the central source of light.
The night sky here is something that many urban dwellers have rarely seen and makes for an easy distraction as a backdrop to the hyperactive bats at feeding time. Looking up at this segment of sky helps one understand how astral navigation could be so effective for early explorers before GPS rendered it obsolete. It is a constant, predictable way to map one’s travels and I believe it will one day return to real importance in the event of a technical snafu.
Footfalls snap me back to reality as people shout “fire, fire, fire†and I wonder what is going on. “Hey, get away from there, call the fire brigade.†Who are they yelling at I wonder? Then, I turn to look back at the barrel only to see that the wooden shack beyond it is totally ablaze. A complete inferno has engulfed it apparently from the embers expelled from my burn barrel. It seems that in my daydream-like state of consciousness, the breeze gusted and created the perfect firestorm for what was once a recreation room for the residents of the living area nearby. So long to the foosball table, ping pong table and flat-screen TV set. A flaming deck of playing cards gets shot out of a hole in the roof and comes raining back to earth in pirouettes and acrobatics mimicking the flight of many bats on the hunt.
Lights and sirens augment the lightshow put on by the burning shack which is by now a blazing skeleton and a disappointment to see extinguished by the underutilized but enthusiastic members of the fire brigade.
