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Show _ ~ POINTBLANK "| WAS A TEENAGE PYROMANIAC! Coe | By Evan Cantor I rose with the sun and donned a pair of thin leather gloves. The tent was still in frosty shade, but the bonfire ring was not. 1 worked up a sweat flinging the smaller stones into the woods. I lugged the biggest behind nearby groves of spruce and limber, dropping them with a thud. I carried flat ones down to a muddy section of nearby trail. More thuds. Then J rolled a pair of couch logs to the edge of the woods. Standing them on end, | flipped them over into darkness beneath the forest cover. Warmed up, | used a half-burnt arm-thick pole to stir up the ashes. I launched the pole into the forest, my task complete. A beautiful campsite was cleaner than I had found it. I wasn’t always such a destroyer of human works. I was once a teenage pyromaniac, fascinated by anything that burned, fizzled, sizzled, exploded or shot flames. I fashioned my. own home-made "snakes" and smoke-bombs. This career culminated at Pickett Fields. Bruce, my partner in youthful hi-jinks, had swiped some 4th-of-July fireworks from a local high school. We determined that a neighborhood ball-field would be a good location for performance testing the items. Since we didn’t have Jaunchers, we fashioned some very long fuses. Setting up the fireworks on a pitcher’s mound, we lit the fuses and ran. To our great delight, mayhem ensued. Bombs exploded, whizzers whizzed and flamers flamed, big-time. The police arrived shortly thereafter with bright lights and sirens. We hid beneath a bush as spotlights flashed in the trees around us. We never got caught and, of course, my parents never heard the story. Bruce and | moved on to more ambitious projects before parting ways, but, luckily, never lost any body parts during the course of those incendiary misadventures. ; Soon after I was introduced to backpacking during a Thanksgiving blizzard on the, Appalachian trail. My new pal swore that he could make hot chocolate over a can of Sterno. He was wrong and my inner pyro knew it. I quickly mastered the art of the one-match fire and became expert at piling up little twigs into pyramids. The next step was a little splash of Coleman fuel and one-match. Whoosh! Instant camp-fire. _ But times changed and so did I. No-trace camping was all the rage. I was older and had embraced 1970’s environmentalism. I learned how camp-fires sterilize soil and encourage over-use damage at established campsites. I also discovered that drugs were not the only way to disengage from the civilized world. I listened to the quiet symphony of the woods and learned to love starry nights unfogged by bright lights. Succumbing to the wild, | came to regard civilized works in the wilderness with The last fire-ring | ever made, failing to un-make, was beside Stone Lake, just south of Rocky Mountain National Park. I pioneered this remote campsite in the early 80s, leaving a fire-ring with a small hearth and a keystone rear. It may still be there. The only way to-find out will be to return and check up on it. I can’t go back, though, as the same young man so intent on drinking late into the night around the comfort of a cheery campfire. I go now as an aching curmudgeon in need of physical and spiritual restoration. Evening will come quietly while the light lingers and the breeze shifts. Birds will celebrate the end of day, singing to the music of nearby streams. The moon will rise, shining white on boulders by the lake, and I will destroy again. | haven’t abandoned the idea of fire entirely, but 1 am not afraid of the dark. I was once a teenage pyromaniac, fascinated by anything that burned, fizzled, sizzled, exploded or shot flames. dismay. | discovered that fire-rings, and the ubiquitous trash found in their vicinity, — were simply everywhere. And they were always the first stage of greater impacts to come. So | started taking them down. Restoring the wilderness restored my spirit, scarred from too many hours in the office. Once | started, | couldn’t stop. I anointed myself white-knight on a quest to destroy. This year alone I dissembled a monster ring in Grand Staircase-Escalante, six fair-to-middling rings in Lost Creek and a leviathan astride the Indian Peaks. In October, I took out a fire-ring full of trash somewhere southwest of Hanksville, Utah. While others bag peaks, I keep my own strange count. POINTBLANK SUBMISSIONS Submissions to The Zephyr may be on any topic even remotely relevant to its readers. They must be between S00 and 1000 words. Authors of essays printed in this publication receive a five year subscription and our gratitude. NEW WEST “If we build them, they will come.” BLU ES... ZEPHYR > CLASSICS #1 FROM MAY 1992 oy ie a 1 ly lena 774 Back in the winter of 1991-1992, Moab 7 went mY / into a motel-building frenzy and we all wondered when if it would ever end... PM « Z cu Hie ie Z (il ffl y Way, Wy, oy om OA AY) ® : “iy ey, GY) pit es a ‘7a pel Id : if AMO-TEL-AB : Z While visitation to Moab has increased Ai ile ie ; LY, We're still wondering. He }Neat re there's plenly of Rooms y) 5 Ly) Ne oo dramatically, we've g built more motels at an even more nent dramatic rate. And Tere ain) Ge ae Ei OME: 4 LI Sy ee om nat VLE LEE : i] | HY A As oO ah ig y are on the way... Are we overbuilt? Is a bear catholic? Does a fish have lips? - Will common sense ...prevail? ye f me if even more = : — 4 : ee A E I 2 \ fib — 2 io Gl: AM ap |