Around These Fires, We Find Meaning

There are places in Yosemite National Park, many of them, where you can walk a few hours, pitch a tent, cook dinner, and stare at the most famous granite in the world without ever seeing another soul, even in the high season. On one cloudless summer evening, pressed gently by the inertial hand of post-supper contentment, my friend Sinuhe and I lounged in just such a spot, at the very crest of a hogback of rock bound on one side by forest and on the other by air. The sky was a deep purple, and Half Dome was a shadow you could almost touch. Our fire, still in its early stage, hissed and creaked and popped.

No tent this time. We sat as if on a couch, our backs against a bulge of igneous intrusion, sleeping bags for padding, legs splayed in front of us, him to the right of the fire, me to the left, and debated what to do about the bear he was sure he’d seen. Wasn’t much to be done, I thought. There’s never been a fatal bear attack in Yosemite. Bears want your Skittles, mostly, and ours were in a canister in a tree 200 yards away. Still, I’d helped gather a heaping pile of wood so Sinuhe could stay awake and keep the fire going all night.

Darkness didn’t really fall so much as slink in quietly while we were absorbed in conversation, but then I looked up and saw the halo of firelight falling softly away into blackness. The line between us and the night was less a boundary than a continuum, and it was this space, this penumbral zone between the sources of light and dark, that Roman soldiers called inter lupem et canem—between the wolf and the dog. On the one side, the great wilderness. On the other, the warmth of domestication. Within the ring of light, safety. Without? The imagination runs wild.

Scientists working in the field of cognitive evolution think the protective light of fires enabled early human brains to get more R.E.M. sleep and thus develop better long-term memory and problem-solving skills, effectively making us, well, human, which is cool to ponder but is just one of many fascinating threads that Craig Childs explores in his cultural profile of the campfire, “Magic Circle of Light,” elsewhere in this issue. What I thought most interesting in his reporting was the finding, gleaned through studying the San people of southern Africa, that conversation takes on new tone and purpose and timbre at night around the fire. It serves, effectively and intimately, to strengthen the bonds we form in the day.

Fire makes us human, but campfire talk makes us family.

When I was a teenager and finally old enough to drive, my buddies and I would leave D.C. and head south to the Tidewater area, camp along the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and build fires the size of our adolescence, throwing all manner of irresponsibility into the coals. On my first backcountry ski trip in the Sierra after moving to California, camped a little below 10,000 feet, I experienced wind of such strength that it blew the flames sideways off the wood, and I was so cold that I stood close enough to melt my fleece pants and didn’t care. When I was dating the girl who became my wife, we camped on Utah’s Gooseberry Mesa long before it was a bike mecca, and after our fire burned to nothing the sky was so dark that I could see, for the very first time, the faint fuzz of the Andromeda Galaxy—not stars, but an entire galaxy.

It is in these moments, around these fires, that we find shared meaning, that we build upon the foundation of friendship, of love, of all kinds of goodness. It is impossible, I think, to share a campfire and not feel closer, and while closeness isn’t unique to humans, it’s certainly one of the best things about being one.

In Yosemite, far above the valley and well below the stars, I knew that Sinuhe would probably drift off to sleep, the fire would burn down to a smudge of pulsing red, and we would be left to the world of wolves and bears. The next day would bring new adventures, the next night’s campfire new stories. As he poked at the fire with a stick, I slid down into my bag, turned away from the light, and fell into a dreamless sleep.