the river...

       We lay in our tent by the Williams River.   Stars by the thousands above us in the sky, the locust wood fire burning hot nearby, and the song of the river flowing.   I listened to that river song and thought of how long that sound has filled this river valley.   I thought of the thousands of years this clear water has coursed over and through the boulders here and of the many people before me who listened to this same beautiful song.    Long before the timber companies came through to clearcut the ancient hemlock, chestnut, oak, hickory; Long before the road builders came with their dozers and backhoes to grade and blast the steep rocky riverbank;  Before all that, someone lay here on this riverbank, looking at those same thousands of stars in the sky through a wintergreen canopy of rhododendron and hemlock and listened to this river's song as we did.    I hope that thousands of years from now, when the ancient trees have grown back, and the road has long since disappeared, that someone will lay here, in this spot, listening to this same river's song, and give thanks. 

       I got out the bow drill and began cutting a new notch in the fireboard.   U* asked what I was doing and I told her that I was preparing to make a fire.  She watched as I cut the notch deeper into the board, then placed the cedar spindle on the notch's point and began to burn it in.  The notch filled with the dark brown wood dust and began to smoke as I worked the bow.   I carefully removed the spindle and let our tiny coal burn while I told U* how the coal was like a fragile egg that needed a nest so that it could grow.  We made a nest for it, our tinder bundle, by shredding up some toilet paper that was close at hand and then carefully tapped out the coal.  I gently enveloped the coal in the tinder and we took turns blowing life into it, watching the coal grow and glow red in the center of it's nest.   
Every stick holds a fire, each twig carries the stored energy of the sun. 

       This is freedom.  A wild river, a cold morning, chasing the long rays of the sun for warmth.   I was told the other day that if we stopped using electricity we would be living in the dark ages again.   I think the opposite is true.   If we turn off our lights, our appliances, all the screens that fill our collective nightly vision - TV, computer - imagine what we might begin to see, to hear, to experience.   The world is out here, waiting, if we don't destroy it first.    The happiest times of my life have taken place in the absence of electricity - a  month walking the high mountains of New Mexico;  Sharing songs and stories around a campfire in the cascades, defending a tiny piece of the forest I love;  Dark nights in deep Utah canyons, singing with coyotes under more stars than I knew existed.   It isn't the lights and gadgets that give us happiness.   Electricity is irrelevant to our happiness, inconsequential as a measure of our well-being.   Happiness for me in those times was found in community - in shared purpose, shared song.