All about them stood people warming cupped hands,
watching the flames and talking.
In summer, the campground would have been full of amplified music
and the harrumphing of camper generators
producing heat, light and noise.

But there was no bottled music here, no gray glow of television.
People were bathed in the healing yellow balm of firelight,
at peace with one another and the night.
They had come to the mountains for this
ritual of fire and reveries and shared story.
They had come for the fragrance of wood smoke and the holy warmth.

Man has always wondered at fire.
Early peoples put it on the edge of nature,
believing that an ancestor, like Prometheus, stole it from the gods.

 We still approach fire with near religious devotion.
We choose wood carefully.
We lay it out according to rules.
Perhaps a green maple log for the back of the fire,
to burn slowly and support other logs through the night.
Kindling is carefully stacked in ricks over crumpled newsprint or pine shavings.
Ash, yellow birch or oak is pyramided on top,
perhaps with some apple wood for aroma.
It is a ritual as rigid as communion.
A firestarter is like a priest,
and it is a breach of decorum for anyone else to tinker with his fire.

We are finicky and ritualistic because fire is unusual in its power over our minds.
Fire is a strong stimulus to dreams and poetry,
the things that make us human but are often locked out of our minds
by our avidity for wealth and power.
Fires loosen the hold of events and open the gates of feeling.
We look into the coals, where flames are flirting into blue,
and wood is changing magically into light and smoke.
We grow heavy-lidded watching the pulsing translucence of velvety embers.

It is not the primitive of tooth and claw,
the fear of animals in the night,
but the primitive of reverie and companionship.
The warmth of a good fire is remarkably like the warmth of love,
and makes us think about our connections with one another.

That link between fire and faith has been broken in modern times.
The break began when medieval alchemists,
seeking to transmute base metals into gold,
put fire inside furnaces,
where they could no longer see its dazzle and sensuousness.

By the mid-18th century, household fires were being enclosed as well.
A stove kept more heat in the room and sent less up the chimney.
From stoves, men moved on to furnaces and hot-water pipes.
Fire lost its hypnotic power.

As working fireplaces were found in fewer homes,
we adopted depressing substitutes:
the ceramic log that cleverly conceals a gas jet;
the fireplace of fake flagstones and celluloid,
lit from behind by amber-colored electric lights.
We still want to look into flames.

Perhaps the attentiveness carved in our minds
by millennia of firewatching is what makes us stare vacantly for hours
into the television screen.
A software producer capitalized on this by marketing a video fireplace.
You just pop a cassette into your VCR
and curl up next to a blaze crackling on your television screen!
No smoke. No ashes. No heat, either.

But fire will never lose its hold
on those of us who seek its contemplative glow
-- and find within its dancing flames a renewal of our faith in one another.