Smokey Shower

Mid-afternoon shower. What a blessing. I stand under the falling water sealed away from the wild Alaskan experience from which I've just returned. Warm water washes over my forehead and down to my toes. Not until this shower have I noticed how the water will trickle through my beard in droplets like Plinko chips. I think of the slender mountain streams which meandered down rocky cliffs in cascading torrents. They were ice cold. I waded into the Chilkoot River and quickly returned to the fire. The air, thick with steam, doesn't raise a mountain-fresh scent. Instead a smokey cloud hangs about me. I peer into the fire from the shower closet. The glinting embers dance in my mind.

Who is not drawn in by fire? At our campsite on the Chilkoot, everyone settled round the fire, staring into it and chatting. Beside a rushing river, surrounded by a dense forest, and under a gloriously lavender twilight which lasted for hours, we concentrated our attention on the fire located at the focul point of our encircling presence.

The seductively orange embers haunt me. They provide the warmth I sought after joining the polar bear club. Their intense heat warns me off. Paradox: that which would sustain me would also burn me. The fire, while alive, doesn't care about me. I find myself an individual not in society but in natural wilderness.

I wish my shower wouldn't wash away the fire's smoky wildness.

I reach for the washcloth.