Fireweed

The clearest memory of my imaginary family was in the gymnasium at the Catawba Baptist church daycare, our home was under a white fold out table that I named our igloo. I was the pregnant wife to my also pregnant wife. I gave birth when she gave birth, screaming under the plastic flat top igloo in the midst of little boys playing basketball, our imaginary huskies howling beside us. Soon after labor, I made our children soup from shoddily painted wood blocks in a styrofoam bowl. We adorned ourselves with my wife’s plastic clip on jewelry that her mother gave her, and we strutted around the gymnasium announcing that we had just given birth to our shared children. We were the richest women of the after-school class, our igloo was the finest hiding spot guarded by huskies and our childish brute strength, and we would send our children off to private school in the coming days. Our marriage ended when she said she was actually Hannah Montana, put on her new but somehow already tangled blonde wig, and ran from the boys who were to be her new husbands. I raised the children alone for a few days as a single mother. 

The California wildfire season in 2014 started May 14th after record breaking temperatures in Southern California and strong winds from Santa Ana. 

The first time I saw fireweed was on a road trip through Alaska with my family the summer before college. Deep red stalks with red buds and pink blossoms lined the empty roads through every mountain from Eagle Creek to Homer. The soil was erupting solar flares from within the Earth, spouting out only four feet before tapering into the gray sky. My uncle Andy told me that it was the first plant to grow after a forest fire. My dad thanked my aunt and uncle endlessly through the trip, he cried and told Andy that he never thought he would be able to travel outside of the south in his life. This road trip was my first time leaving the Bible Belt in my life, right before I replanted myself above the Mason Dixon line. 

Cal Fire estimated that by May 16th, more than 9,000 acres had burned. 100,000 people had to evacuate.

In the second grade I was invited to my best friend's birthday party. We filled balloons with food coloring and water, then had a fight in the front yard of her suburban house. I never lived in a suburb, I did not think about neighbors watching or our screaming interrupting their Saturday night football. Her mom threw all 6 of us in the shower together, small naked bodies stained with blues and purples, mud caked in our stringy hair. I felt these girls around me and trusted them fully. My best friend’s teenage brother sat outside the bathroom door and watched us dry off, we were too young to understand anything yet. 

“Red outlines indicate hot spots where the sensor detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Winds blew thick plumes of smoke west over the Pacific Ocean.” (NASA)

As the oldest kid in daycare, I populated the group of imaginary friends and lovers around me until I was the head of a colony by fourth grade. I continued to birth children without having any husbands, occasionally I would allow one of my imaginary boyfriends to kiss me the way Daredevil kissed Electra in the rain. Through Bible lessons I learned that husbands were supposed to be the head of the family, the wife being subservient and the eldest son having the position of second hand of the family over the mother. My imaginary colony became populated with men who I birthed children to, all girls, and my husbands would conveniently leave for war and die on the battlefield. 

The Pulgas fire charred 8,000 acres by May 16th.

My grandfather and dad built me and my sister a playhouse on the backside of our yard by the cow pasture. We painted the inside pink because I thought that was the hue of a sunset. I set up a plastic kitchen sink, oven, shelves, cabinets, and two chairs for my sister and I. Amber picked thick bundles of wild onions with me when we planned to make soup. We boiled it by using the water sitting in the hose pipe stretched across the yard, baking in the South Carolina summer sun. Both of our husbands died from mysterious illnesses on the journey through the prairie, leaving us to fight off the wild animals and feed the cows ourselves. We raised land turtles that we had found and caged them in a chicken wire wall under the stilts of the playhouse. Raccoons routinely ate our tortoises, but the box turtles in the plastic pond hidden by tiger lilies survived. I stopped immaculately conceiving then birthing children, and started meeting other prairie women that tended to wander around my dad’s wood pile. They always seemed to be bitten by copperheads or black widows. I dragged them back to the playhouse, laid them in the lambs ear garden, and nursed them back to health with wild onion soup and muscadines. We eventually would fall in love, like the school teacher and repair man in the flashbacks on Disney Channel’s movie Holes. My wives built me boats in the middle of the prairie, and I fed them. Eventually I decided to leave them all, and had to sort through them to make pairs that could marry to keep each other happy because I knew I was not coming back. The plywood lined playhouse with iron structures decayed. The roof fell in, then the floor board. The turtles in the half buried plastic pond escaped after an extremely rainy season made the water levels rise to the lip of the tub. We prayed that they made it to the big pond across the pasture without being eaten. Wasps spit their papery nests into the iron corners, chewed away at the pink walls, and made any playing nearby impossible. The playhouse became their impenetrable fortress. My dad’s friend Keith mowed over the lambs ear garden I had planted from the yard of my great grandmother to my playhouse. The lamb's ear never regrew. Deer ate my sister’s apple tree she planted from a seed one spring. Her tree grew back, then was eaten by deer again, regrew and was eaten. Finally the tree grew to what looked like a hopeful height, and Keith ran that over with his lawnmower as well. My wives stopped eating and birthing babies, then they eventually died off. I mourned them and held a mass funeral for my imaginary colony that became the ghost town of Roanoke. 

The San Marcos fire burned 3,018 acres by May 16th.

In middle school I started going to the weekly Fellowship of Christian Athletes after school program because I was too old for daycare but not trusted to be home alone. This club was part of the Southern Baptist Convention and was marketed towards athletes. I was worthless in sports so we cooked for the teams that practiced during the week and held them hostage with the food for a thirty minute student led sermon and prayer. When I became the leader with two other students, I was a hellfire threatening homophobe dating one of the other leaders who was a gay football player. I was best friends with the third leader, Jordan, who I actually wanted to be dating. She also hated gay people. We kicked one openly gay mormon kid out of a meeting because he was not our standard of straight southern baptist, the criteria which we also failed to meet. I participated in the day of silence for the aborted babies and preached the anger that my pastor told me was the true word of God. Every night I begged God to forgive me, I dreamed of the rapture happening and him leaving me behind to hide from the beast that would roam the Earth torturing and murdering people. Every Sunday and Wednesday night I heard sermons praying for those we hated: the people of different religions, political stances, and sexualities. I listened to my dad rant to the tv, my sister, and me about gay marriage possibilities. We went to Chick-fil-a in support of their statement of anti-gay marriage and I waited in a line wrapped around the building for hours with the other homophobes of my hometown preaching the sanctity of marriage. I wonder how many of those homophobes that preached the sanctity of marriage were divorced? 

The Tomahawk fire burned 6,300 acres and part of the Pendleton U.S. Marines Camp by May 16th.

The pastor’s daughter, Mary, never had a boyfriend and I never had one that did more than hold my hand in the hallway and wish that I was another man. My middle school boyfriend came out to me when we went to high school, after a text breakup while he was on a band field trip. I began having sleepovers with Mary. At church camps Mary, Jordan and I slept in the same beds and showered together depending on which pair of us were together. We shared food, loudly talked about what we thought sex with women would be like and claimed it was just jokes when the youth leaders pulled us aside for stern talks. We held hands and quieted our preaching about the sinfulness of homosexuality. I became the editor of Mary’s secret gay smut she wrote about Amish women falling in love and unmarried Victorian women who found solace in each other romantically after their husbands died in that vague idea of “war”. Jordan read gay fan-fiction to me at sleepovers until I fell asleep. We moved through boyfriends and shallow relationships in high school that felt real but ultimately were used as proof against our gossiping church members. One night, Mary and I kissed in the back of a church van and we saw how far the other would go. Some weeks following that, someone in the church found our semi-anonymous Twitters and printed months worth of tweets to each other about how much we wanted each other. Some of this talk was the language of gay fan accounts towards musicians we thought were hot, some were explicit ideations of sleeping with Liv Tyler or Molly Ringwald, but some messages were directly between Mary and myself about our dreams of dating. Jordan was able to avoid incrimination, her twitter was a one direction fan account that never showed her face and was careful to never reveal her name. The church member that compiled these printed two documents, one for my dad and one for the pastor. I woke up to the tweets taped to my bedroom door one Sunday morning. Unlike Mary, I was able to stand firm in my case of denial to my family regardless of how transparent it was. Mary confessed her sins and decided to never talk to me again, I spoke the devil’s words and his temptation was in me. My dad told me I was never allowed to hug my friends again. I told him good luck enforcing that rule. That Sunday we had a sermon that was more hateful than I had previously experienced, pointed directly at the youth group. Usually Jordan and I held hands and silently cried when the threat of eternal damnation and the disgusting lifestyle of homosexuals was brought up. That day Jordan stood and yelled bullshit before walking from the balcony and leaving through the side door to the foyer. I never got a chance to come out to anyone except my younger sister, because everyone knew and had the written proof. Publicly talking about wanting to finger fuck my future wife behind a not so well disguised twitter account was not a very straight thing of me to do. I lost every babysitting job offer, women in the church blatantly told their children to not go near me while I was beside them in the hallways. The welcoming committee stopped shaking my hand. The usual older people that hugged me weekly at the beginning of church stopped acknowledging me. My dad came to me and begged me to stop being alone with my friends outside of church while on the grounds, his deaconship position was being threatened because he could not keep his family under control. 

The Bernardo fire burned more than 1,500 acres by May 16th.

After the tenth grade I left my hometown for these reasons. I went to a residential art high school two hours away, where I could come out of the closet by my own choice around a group of other teenagers who were also closeted at home. I fell in love with women and had sex in secret, then we would cry over the fears of announcing our relationship to our families in order to be fully dating. We never did. I cut my waist length hair off to a pixie and stopped wearing bras to church until my family stopped making me go at all, about the time I got to college. 

“Drought has plagued the western United States - especially central and southern California - for months, priming vegetation for wildfires. By mid-May, the entire state was classified as being in some level of drought (ranging from severe to exceptional), according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. To break the drought, most of the state would need 9 to 15 inches of precipitation to fall in one month… That would amount to more than a half-year’s worth of precipitation for most of the state.” (NASA)

Once in college I began to date men and women. I lost friends because they claimed I was actually just straight after I had sex with them, because I chose to date men as well. I had a long term partner tell me that I was straight momentarily because if I was dating a man I could not be considered under the category of being gay. After the breakup, one of his exes and I joked about wanting to seduce his mom. 

In my senior year of college I began to grow my hair out from the buzzcut it had been for four years. I am dating the same man I have for over a year. I began to question if I was actually experiencing, or if I had ever experienced, gayness. At times where I question my sexuality because of lacking physical standards that have been considered the iconic “gay” symbols, I remember that none of my imaginary wives in childhood looked the part expected of gay people. None of my wives suffered the social ostracisation of being outed to a church. My prairie wives and I made onion soup with hot hose pipe water and tended to the lamb's ear.