Fire on the Foundation

“Are we there yet?” Amazing how simple a question can elicit the worst in the best of us. I had already answered it many, many, many….many times in the course of this trip, taking Junior to see his grandparents. My only comfort lay in the fact that once I had dropped him off, the drive back would permeate with pure silence…or pure heavy metal, if I wanted. Nooo, the wife said, you can’t play that stuff around my son! Funny, HER son always wore a Precious Moments halo and wings. HER son didn’t try to flush the cat down the toilet. HER son didn’t throw rocks at traffic until he broke the windshield of a Special Olympics van. MY son didn’t get straight A’s on every report card for the last three years of elementary school. MY son didn’t learn to catch a baseball before he could walk. MY son didn’t learn to read a year before entering the school system. Yeah, I’m proud of my boy. Wish the little woman would share the wealth every now and then. However, after winding my pickup through the wilderness for hours, I just wanted to have a break from the little guy. Given that my parents lived out in the middle of nowhere in a little log cabin that kept them fit and self-sufficient, I found the timing extremely fortunate.

My truck rounded the last curve onto the home stretch, the final ten miles of highway, and a red speck off in the distance caught my attention. An old ’67 Shelby Mustang GT. What I can say, anything with Shelby on it makes the male heart all a-quiver, though of a different sort when the Shelby has enough dents to make it a compact. The driver seemed to burn rubber all the way, the bumper hanging off to create even more dents as it pounded along. The back seat had tried to eat in excess; a motley assortment protruded a dangerous distance outward from the rolled-down back windows. Closer, and I saw that the trunk had made the same mistake to the point that a rope secured the lid to the car’s frame. The Mustang passed us, and in the half-second of proximity to the truck, I caught sight of a grizzled beard, a bald head, a black leather jacket. The kind of guy I wouldn’t be caught alone with.

We turned from the main road onto the dirt path to my parents’ cabin, a labyrinth of twists and turns, false trails that led to sheer drop-offs, and fallen trees which all made for one hazardous drive if you didn’t know your way. The final winding straightened, and where cheery window lamps should have waved in the breeze to welcome our arrival…nothing but a wall of smoke over a flat stone slab greeted us with all the delight of an open-casket funeral. I slammed on the breaks, causing my son to lurch forward against his seatbelt. “Daddy, what’s the matter?” I could only shush him, and reach for the Winchester lever-action rifle I kept behind the driver’s seat. Checking the ammo, I rolled down my window, propping the barrel on the door as I opened it, and stepped out of the truck. The silence in the area, occasionally punctuated by the crackling of residual cinders, disturbed me more to my core than anything I saw. A wildfire would have carved out a chunk of forest the size of Rhode Island. Even their propane tank remained intact, as smoldering embers replaced the house and barn which my parents had sacrificed much of their retirement money to build. Even as I pondered these things, the smell smashed into me like a grim giant’s fist. Death; burned hair, seared flesh, and terror pervading all else. I doubled over on the spot, prompting squeals from Junior’s side of the truck.

They had burned. Their home had burned. Burned to the unforgiving ground, with maybe only a single soul to see it.



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