As my son Colin and I packed the car with camping gear and headed toward Coronado National Forest, south of Tucson, the familiar discussion had already begun — basically about him being the best he could be. This topic always seemed reasonable, even essential. But we faced the usual barriers, one of which was my stubbornness: I was a dad stuck in the son- launching mode. When would I just let him write his own script? Actually, even then I trusted his judgement and the directions he was choosing, but I had orders from my genes to share lessons my lessons learned. I probably thought I was going the paternal extra-mile, still dispensing Band-Aids to store up for all those times when things would really suck.
“You have to love the work you do,” I said, for probably the hundredth time. “And If you find the right work you’ve just given yourself five days a week.” (He’d surely auto-memorized this one.) Then the voice of stark-reality came through my vocal chords. “It’s also true that you may have to bump around a little to assemble all the tools you’ll need,” I counselled. “You may even hate your work sometimes, but you still have to pay the bills on your way.”
Twenty-one years-old and six-foot-four, he spelled it out: “I don’t want any part of a desk job. Period. And I don’t want anybody looking over my shoulder to see how fast I’m working.”
“I get it. I understand.”
“I want to be like climber Jimmy Chin, doing what I love because it makes me feel alive,” Colin said as we drove through a landscape of saguaros and creosote bush. A large part of me was in synch with Colin and his hero.
But in today’s world, everybody wants your job. Everybody wants your money. How do you find your signal in all the noise? Colin’s patience was wearing thin. “Don’t worry, I got this.” Eyeball-to-eyeball, he convinced me he had the right stuff to create a lifetime. So I deliberately, strategically backed off, better late than never.
We set up camp, discovering how close we were to the Mexican border; a patrol blimp hovered silently above the desert canopy. He had recently led a group of fellow Prescott students through this same Arizona terrain, and on a walk to stretch our legs from the travel, he said, “I want to show you something, I think you’ll like this.” Standing next to a ten-foot-tall flower stalk (sotol, in the agave family) he cut a walking-stick length of the stalk, about the diameter of a fifty-cent piece. He carved a small section into a platform, and then added a notch in one edge of it. As we gathered clumps of sunbaked grass and he set the tinder ball aside, I could tell he was excited about demonstrating his fire-making skills. His intensity and focus were so familiar!
“Can you help with the drilling?” he requested. “It takes a lot of energy, but there’s a sweet payoff when we get fire!” I stepped into the heart of this ancient, treasured craft: he would waggle down the shaft with the palms of his hands, then I’d quickly take over at the top. The friction we made bored a tiny hole in the platform, and I announced from my hands and knees that we were getting a wisp of smoke in the borehole. He responded in a grunt, “But no coals yet, right?” I wanted this effort to be successful for many reasons. I wanted to celebrate a skill he’d perfected and in a wider sense, I wanted to join the ranks of so many ancestors, hungry and cold, desperate for fire. I felt like a son of many fathers.
Eight or nine minutes went by, no coals. Finally, after my own arms were exhausted, he rubbed sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and tried one last time. At last, a tiny coal fell down the carved notch and into the warm mound of sawdust. “This is the moment I like the best. I can take a little break now, the glowing coal will spread into the sawdust. If we’re lucky.” After a few catch-up breaths, he grabbed the tinder ball and placed it over the tiny coal, softly breathing fire into the bed. I was so proud of this tall, confident senior in college, crafting a fire inside himself that would surely last a lifetime.
David Wann – Guest Contributor Award winning film maker and author davewann.net
