Kristina, the birthday pirate

Amber sat beside the fire pit for ten minutes, coaxing the tinder and paper into sporadic sparks so that it can turn into the campfire for Kristina's thirtieth birthday at Ferncliff Forest.

"The fire likes chaos," a newcomer tells Amber. As an afterthought, he adds, "I'm Alex."

She does not take his hand, though I introduce her in a perfunctory way. Amber does not need a man explaining fire to her.

In a moment more, the fire finds its vitality, which it will keep for seven hours before we extinguish it beneath the remaining ice as a parting consideration. I do not think anyone else, Alex in particular, is equal to the task.

In advance of this party, I asked Kristina who she had invited -- I messaged a half dozen people whom she tangentially knows to increase the tally and because it threatened to be wholesome fun worth sharing further -- and she said she invited whoever will end up coming, a contemplative but perhaps not useful answer. It is her party, though, so let her be cryptic.

Kristina's family attends, though I only know one of them on sight (largely because he looks like the lead singer of a mid-nineties alternative band and works at the local grocery store). I have met her mother at least once (she knows me, and we have commented on the same social media posts, but that doesn't mean I don't ask the air who this blonde woman is when I first catch sight of her. I do not think I have before met her father, who is blind and seems to know who I am on voice, putting me at a small disadvantage (though he is the only man present the right age to be her father and plainly the only one who conspicuously listens to rather than sees the party; it wouldn't be difficult to suss out his identity).

Kristina's elder brother is also here, but we do not interact beyond his wave from beneath a consuming vape cloud.

Dead pinata

Everyone disperses to find more wood to feed the fire -- not damp wood, as Kristina originally attempts with her hatchet. Though Amber refuses to cede her fire stick, Alex lectures those around about the nature and quality of firewood, putting some near the fire that it might dry. Amber jabs her stick into the fire so it releases feet of cinders into the air as if in response to it being told what to do.

Kiila, Kristina's boisterous best friend, has her two children with her. I engage them and watch over them like a designated adult. They respond in the sort of twin gibbering I would expect of cartoon imps, though they are not twins by several years difference; they have simply developed a mutually comprehensible pidgin and have little use for our standard English, though it is plain they understand enough of what the adults are saying. Their yes and no are clear, but everything else is non-grammatical pointing accompanied by an almost melodic babbling. The elder one indicates the fire and proclaims "Hot!" I nod. This interaction satisfies her. They understand Kiila's cursed directives, but they pretend not to until they are crying from having ignored her and suffered some natural consequence of skinned knees or lost food.

Us

Hours before this party, some of us had taken a boat tour of the lighthouses on this section of the Hudson River, which Amber partly ignored catching up on Pokémon Go -- though she has decided one of her character traits is "cares about lighthouse." One derives more satisfaction in one's life spending money on experiences rather than possessions. Anyone could have the same car as you, but no one will have the same cruise as you do, even if they were by your side, poking invisible monster in a cell phone app. Amber's experience with this trip on the boat is already destined to be different from mine due in part to a small headache that blooms into a cranial limp by the time the tour is over, fed on roaring engines and burning fuel.

As someone with a winter birthday, the idea of a cruise to celebrate my birth is close to an impossibility, or at least would not be attended by people who value the integrity of their skin. I used this ride as an excuse to practice my photographic skills. Since I have learned Amber wants few pictures of herself when she is not in a cheery mood, most of my subjects were Kristina and the girls exchanging Kristina's near trademark tri-corner pirate hat, along with the requisite scenery (though I couldn't get any worthwhile pictures of the bald eagles the captain kept pointing out and thereby startling to new perches), and an engaged couple whose friends decided "take engagement photos" translated to "click your iPhones three times and trod back to the bar."

Though I am a thirty-seven-year veteran of the Hudson Valley, occasionally living as close as a bike ride to the titular river, most of my exposure is driving over the river and otherwise paying it little mind. The Hudson River offers some views that almost justifies the cost of taking a boat to see historical estates from the other side.

Amber

Exiting the boat, I had mental unease because I cannot get a knack for sleeping on days where I work and have yet to make up any of my sleep debt. I'm okay, but I am not myself, not the self I would like to be. When Amber and I returned home to plan for the bonfire, I heard the siren call of just staying home so my wife and I could nurse our respective head issues. Blessedly, a pill or two soon set us right enough that I could ignore the burgeoning pathological introversion, sinful when fire and s'mores beckon.

As Amber finds her place beside the fire, I come and go as I please, eating a bit of what I can find on the table. Night settles heavily in the forest, blanketing everything enough that the red glow of the fire is frank insufficiency. We resort to a couple of flashlights, one a bike light I had the presence of foresight to shove into my bag before we left home.

The sounds on a night that is blessedly warm but not hot kindle a spark in me. I need nights were the space of the night swells and it is easy to find one's place within it. The world outside doesn't leave us. Every few minutes, one of us removes a phone from a pocket, sometimes to use the flashlight, sometimes just to see what else is going on in the world as though we could not be satisfied with the night offered. Though they do not come by often, we are only a few hundred feet from a road on which truckers with bad transmissions test the decibels of their mufflers.

Seeing the site, and learning that we would not have to share it with anyone else for long, I wish I had given more consideration to camping. However, tonight does show me things I might otherwise have overlooked and regretted, primarily a lantern that I didn't have to hold a flashlight in my mouth to create a shifting island of light. There can never be enough water. Though a wooden lean-to exists, there is also a vacant cabin, which would afford us more protection for the elements and better proximity to the Port-a-Potty, always a consideration while adrift in the wilderness with nothing but an orally held flashlight or a dying cell phone to light the way. Also, I should have chosen the cinnamon graham crackers for my s'more-making rather than the traditional, a truly rookie mistake.

Amber's fire

There is a part of modern people that wants nothing more than to cease being modern. I am often happiest when furthest from a computer, though the prevalence of smartphones means our next hit is always within arm's reach. Camping reminds our souls what they once were, untethered from the demands of connectivity. For a night, we belong to the woods and one another. We gather around open flame and cook food as our ancestors did, within a tolerance lacking freshly killed squirrels and the addition of forks. We well stories. We are reminded of the tribes to which we once belonged, the racial memory buried within our double helices.

Camping resets us to a mindset before we were domestic servants of our convenient machines. Our circadian rhythms realize the natural flow of light and dark. We breathe easier and, I'll hazard, anxiety and depression turn to lighter burdens. We step away from our lives and are more present in living. We make memories as the world slows. We are no longer as rushed to the morning, to another day of work.

Amber and I asked for and received a tent and good sleeping bags for Christmas years ago, then left them in my closet to accumulate dust because we did not have the motivation to part from our digital umbilicus and find a green plot which we could set down and reconnect with nature. We live in the Hudson Valley, rife with opportunities for camping, but we simply don't.

All that said, I don't know how long I could deal with being rustic. Hot showers are one of the delights of civilization and my hunting skills go no further than foraging and maybe fishing. Kristina has prepared baggies of fresh cut veggies, individually wrapped salmon and perch, hot dogs, hamburger meat, and spices, the idea being that one could combine these in whatever fashion struck us, wrap them in foil, and toss them onto a grate in the fire. Flashlight in mouth, I put too much food in a foil packet. When Amber sees how poorly our food is cooking, she reorganizes scalding hot potatoes and fish, offering me bites off a hotdog on a stick she already roasted to tide me over.

Kristina's father reaches into the air and I am uncertain what to do. He is blind, but I do not know if he would welcome the direction of a near stranger. Finally, it is more awkward to pretend this is not happening.

"What are you trying to find?" I ask.

"The table."

I weight my options and direct his hand toward it and, when the distance is not decreased quickly enough, knock on it. I don't know if I would mind the aid, but I also don't know what it would be like in his shoes. I am inclined toward being helpful whenever possible, but I am not keen on being perceived as condescending in thinking I know better than someone who has lived with this condition much of his life. (I think he was not born blind, that this was something that found him later in life, but I am incapable of citing why.)

I gaze up at the stars until I am half-convince that what I took originally for a binary set is slowly moving in opposition to the tree line, a plane or maybe satellite. When I share this insight with Amber, she tries to slowly explain to me that stars don't move, but the Earth does, as though this were my first night looking at the sky.

I have heard that, before the prevalence of electric lights, the Milky Way was a bright band in the sky, easily seen with one's naked eye on moonless nights. There may be a few places on Earth where this sight is still possible, but it is unlikely I will ever have occasion to visit any of them. I still react with envy at the idea that my ancestors may have seen this. Though, given infant mortality rates and subsistence farming, it is likely they didn't spend too much time contemplating something that wasn't magic or gods.

We are not far removed from nomads around a campfire, brashly keeping the night at bay, and only a bit more removed from hominids who understood the challenge of the night could mean hidden death.

As the number of guests decreases to an intimate few - Kiila must get her children to bed, Kristina's family just want to head home to the light of civilization, Alex needs to rest his mouth before work tomorrow - Amber decides it is about time to investigate the alcohol, leading Kristina to question my making a mixed drink with unsweetened iced tea. I point out that rum is made of sugar, so it is as though it had been sweetened. In reward, Amber offers me a sip and I recall at once having watched her make it. It is less tea with a splash of rum as rum to which the thought of tea may have briefly occurred.

Amber holds her liquor, but this means that she will be well into her drinking before it starts to hit her. She will comment as such, but will at least finish the drink in her hand, if not testing her tolerance with another. She doesn't drink often or to excess, so she is more of an endearing drunk when it does happen.

Kristina leaves for half an hour to pick up some friend who did not respond in time for Kristina to get them a parking pass, nor could they make it here within five hours of the party starting. She implies she wishes Amber and me to join her on this chore, but Amber must tend the fire and I am disinclined to leave the campground until I have to, having decided there is therapeutic value to sitting near a fire in the otherwise darkness.

We are alone, and I almost invoke terrors out of a sense of habit. "Hey, Amber, could you imagine what it would be like if there were monsters just at the edge of where the light reaches? Maybe Kristina never made it out of the forest. Maybe they are watching us right now," I manage not to say. Likely, nothing would happen. Amber and I are the ones who tried to liven up a haunted murder house with proper Ouija technique. If I said anything, Amber would have said she would hit the ghouls with her fire stick and there would be nothing else on which we could worry. But, again, best not to chance it.

The retrieved friend is a sedate woman named Kara and her boyfriend, who does not seem to think much of anyone else at the party and does not wish to engage with us. We might be wasting an evening he would have preferred spent somewhere less rustic. Kara, it is half-joked, might simply be too high to care, though I see no evidence she is inebriated and not merely of a phlegmatic temperament.

Facilitated by night and alcohol, our interactions with Kristina take on intimacy. Kara and her boyfriend are self-contained and quiet within that, so I find them easy to forget. The three of us cavort in the lean-to, in part cleaning up the trod upon candy Kiila's children did not rescue from a piñata long rendered to ash, but otherwise scanning for striking graffiti and relating memories and joke. I miss this closeness when life gets in our way. We love Kristina, and her life is busy and filled with far fewer glories than it owes her.

After midnight, my body starts wearing down. I have not been sleeping well and have been trying to arrest any coming mental health issues with a liberal application of dreams. However, I would be abandoning the sort of memories I want to build with people for whom I care, so it is counterproductive to make an issue of momentary weariness when the night has been one I would otherwise covet. The next day is Sunday and it demands nothing of me, certainly not early enough to make staying a mistake. Also, tipsy Amber is cuddly, happy, and affectionate, her mind relaxed away from the necessities of her work, class, and kitten with feline leukemia. Let her enjoy this.

When we reach the parking lot, Rummy Amber is so talkative that it is another half hour before she can be coaxed from reminiscing about high school misadventures. I tolerate this for a while, not wanting to spoil things, but eventually sit on the ground with my eyes closed to rally enough energy for the drive home.

Amber, even after soaping and shampooing the next morning, smells of tinder and smoke, but the scent suits her.

Soon in Xenology: Sleep

last watched: iZombie
reading: The Sleep Revolution
listening: fun.