Honest thoughts on the passing of Ashland’s Soo Line Ore Dock...(and advice on what to do when shift happens...)

Danny’s facial features were clipped and pinched toward a point in the center, his thinly-traced countenance suggesting the Scandinavian heritage his last name confirmed. His beady eyes bore the same blankly menacing expression they had fifteen years earlier, on our very first day of kindergarten, when he told me he would beat me up if I tried to sit by him. 

We were fishing off Ashland, Wisconsin’s Soo Line ore dock, hunting the monstrous northerns storied to lurk underneath the massive structure. We’d been there most of a Wednesday morning, hadn't caught anything, when Danny decided to start a fire between two huge concrete pillars by introducing a collection of twigs, branches and whatever detritus he could find to the lighter in his pocket. We were two-thirds out the total length, which placed us approximately 1,200 feet offshore, and I was painfully conscious of the thick smoke his weak, green fire was creating and the attention it might attract. But Danny hadn’t mellowed much since kindergarten; he was brutish, a young man not to be trifled with, and I was not all together comfortable telling him I thought the fire was a bad idea.

Besides, it was providing him his lunch. Impelled by the frustration of not catching anything as much by hunger, he had taken to cooking the fish we were supposed to be using for bait, and did not appear to think what he was doing was unusual, neither the fire, nor the half-thawed smelt he impatiently placed in his mouth after just a few turns over the flame on a makeshift stick skewer.

“You think you should keep the fire going?”

“Yah,” he shrugged, reaching into the Styrofoam bucket for two more fish. “You ain’t hungry?”

I threw a nervous gaze toward shore. “Naw, I’m good.”

It was a cool, gray day in June 1992. Across the canal into which 50,000-ton ore carriers once nestled on a daily basis, my hometown appeared as a dichotomy not likely to get captured in any local artist’s watercolor: a naturally beautiful stretch of Lake Superior thoughtlessly blighted by 'progress', both past and present: a public beach strewn with garbage, driftwood and taconite pellets. Just beyond, a tired mini-golf course on the verge of disappearing forever (having lasted barely two years...). Beside that, the city sewage plant, smelling exactly as you'd imagine one would. More than a mile down shore, past the splendorous hotel constructed within the last four years in the style of a splendorous hotel that had stood nearby 100 years before, the coal plant that provided electricity for a large portion of northern Wisconsin. There was no wind; the water was calm. The only movement, outside of Danny’s conspicuous billows of smoke, was the odd seagull gliding crossways through the gray, lighting on a wooden piling and huddling against the lake-effect chill with a surly flutter of plumage.

More than twenty years later, that ore dock has finally been demolished. A series of inspections in 2007 concluded the deteriorating superstructure (the portion rising some 80 feet above the base) was not only a safety hazard but too structurally unsound to try preserving, dashing the hopes of nearly everyone. The largest of its kind in the world, it was one of several similar structures lending pin stripes to Chequamegon Bay in the early part of the 20th century, over time had become a last-remaining totem to a proud history, and news that its demolition was imminent swung in with the force of a wrecking ball. 

HISTORIC, OR JUST A RELIC? - Ashland, Wisconsin's 1800-foot long Soo Line ore dock, on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay, ceased operation in 1965, and stood until 2013.

My hometown has long reveled in the memory of its glory days shipping iron ore from Michigan’s Gogebic Range to the steel mills of the east, its role as a worthy cog in the mighty tradition of Great Lakes shipping. The end of each shipping season back in the day was heralded in the local paper with a final tally of total tonnage, which ballooned, and dramatically, in war years. The region’s contribution to both the good fight and the building of a nation in the first half of the 20th century became nothing less than its legacy, lauded in story and song.

But legacies can get interrupted, knocked off their feet, by shifting sands before reaching their destination, and that's what happened in Ashland. Like many communities that pin their very livelihood to an extraction industry, the good times didn’t last. Foreign ore and ever-changing mining techniques provided insurmountable competition, and once all the Gogebic mines were tapped, ‘industry’ simply snuck away, leaving its mess behind. The last shipment was loaded off that ore dock in 1965, just a few years before I was born into a post-mortem reality, where all that was left of the good times were the school teams called the Oredockers and the white elephant they were named for, jutting a third of a mile into the bay and already deep into Frost’s 'slow smokeless burn.'

Danny and I grew up together in this reality...or at least in the same town in the same era, not really together. He was a tough kid, and I avoided him when I could, always had to be on the lookout for him and his (bicycle) gang of 12-year-old giants. But we both carried out our youth amidst the skeletal remains of Ashland’s proud history: a bone yard of abandoned railroad tracks, trestles and cars, vacant buildings, lots and storefronts, concrete refuse lining the shoreline and wooden pilings jutting from the otherwise gorgeous waters of Lake Superior.

OMNIPRESENT - The ore dock was visible from just about any vantage point along Ashland, Wisconsin's beautiful but blighted shoreline.

Paramount among this post-industrial playground was the ore dock.  It was left open to the public after ceasing operation (in a far less litigious world), and kids of our generation were given free rein to explore through every stage of our development. At ten, we raced our bikes along the length, fished the ‘diamonds’ (pools located in the interior) for perch; at fourteen we smoked purloined cigarettes and made our first contributions to the graffiti with purloined cans of Krylon; at seventeen and eighteen we crept there at night to drink and do other things grownups told us we weren’t supposed to be doing.  There was never any hiding the fact that we’d been on the ore dock. The orange-colored dust left over from hundreds of millions of tons of ore shipped out over sixty years went home with us, caked into the treads of our shoes and bike tires.

But outside of the tell-tale trail we left swiveling up and down the driveway, or across the kitchen floor, adults never cared that we went there; they went there too. Everyone in town spent at least a little time on the ore dock, fishing or walking. As a young adult, I started doing a lot of both. With an interest in history and a new appreciation for what that dock represented, I would walk through the gargantuan center, stare up to the dizzying heights where seabirds nested, trembling a bit (seriously…) at the dock’s overwhelming physical presence, and listen to a narrative without words - a profound silence broken only by the hollow whisper of wind through those 80-foot pillars, as unnerving as it was intriguing.

And so on that gloomy day in June ‘92, it wasn’t being there fishing that was making me nervous. It was the fire.

“This sucks,” Danny muttered, lighting a cigarette and proceeding to collect more trees and twigs to feed the flames. He said it mostly to himself, and I wasn’t sure what he was referring to – the fishing, the fish, the company, or just the Wednesday - but the look in his eyes brought me back to our first day of kindergarten, the same childish hostility that got me uneasily picking a seat clear on the other side of the room. He was done eating, and I knew him well enough to know he was now keeping the fire going, adding to it, building it up, simply because he wasn’t supposed to.

He may or may not have realized it, but Danny likely would have been working on that dock in a different era, and been doing well for himself. Had he graduated from high school in 1941 or ’51, rather than ’91, he wouldn’t have worried much about his future; he would have concerned himself only with getting through high school…or not…and doing one of two things: joining what was at the time a far less discerning military, or simply going down to the waterfront and getting a job on the boats in an economy that required no specialization finessed by a world view, only physical ability fed by a work ethic.

For that reason it was Danny, more than me, who was screwed over when the dock closed, robbed of a promised (or assumed) livelihood, cheated out of a legacy. I was born and raised in Ashland, and it will always be ‘home’ in some measure, but all else being equal, Class of ’41, ’51 or ’61, I would never have been a candidate for life on the boats or docks. My parents were transplants from New Jersey, found their way to northern Wisconsin to open a bookstore. They helped start the local theater group, gravitated toward the college crowd, my dad thought Benny Hill was the funniest man ever to live (and was right, of course…). I could not have asked for better parents, but the sensibilities they handed down set my brother and me apart from other kids growing up. I was not shy and studious exactly, just culturally alienated. I didn’t know things that Danny knew. I had never hunted, never ridden a snowmobile or a mini-bike, was not nearly as hardscrabble, and at some point, I realized, as my brother had a few years before, that when I came of age, my future would play out somewhere else.

But again, legacies sometimes get interrupted. Sands shift. Shift happens. As it turned out I didn’t go anywhere after high school. I stuck around, took my turn standing in line, waiting - always waiting - and overnight the differences between Danny and me so divisive as boys hardly seemed to register as men. We’d grown up in the same post-industrial town, and in our post-high school lives were getting a taste of the struggle our parents knew: difficulty making a go of just about anything, bouncing between the few dead-end jobs that existed, living with a relative lack of amenities, in a scarred environment, and having plenty of time to fish off that ore dock on a weekday morning. The reasons were different, perhaps; I was there because I hadn’t lived up to my potential, Danny because industry hadn’t lived up to its promises, but we both knew the slow-roiling frustration of disenfranchisement, and to any outside observer, any traveler stopping in town just long enough to fill up on gas, the only thing distinguishing the two of us in June 1992 might have been the fish scales clinging to the tips of his saliva-stained fingers.

JULY 2004 - Nearly forty years after it last loaded a Great Lakes freighter with iron ore from the Gogebic Range of Michigan, Ashland's Soo Line ore dock was in a state of deterioration, and had become a totem not to a proud history, but something else. Note the fence put in place by the dock's owner, CN Railroad, to prevent trespassing. This happened in the early 2000s after it was clear the dock's 80 foot high superstructure had become a crumbling hazard.

Demolition of the Soo Line ore dock started in  2011, really got rolling in 2012, and finished up last summer, with the last of the dock’s superstructure being brought down. The end of an era has been bemoaned six ways from Sunday. As soon as news arrived that the dock's days were numbered, Facebook exploded with campaigns hoping to somehow save it. Those failed of course, and now, everywhere I look when I come to Ashland, the ore dock is being immortalized. Murals have been painted. Commemorative calendars printed. Photographs blown up and framed, hung in public places. 

I understand people's love of it, and desire to commemorate it, but all in all, the loss of the Soo Line ore dock doesn't move me to sentimentality so much as relief. In the last ten years it had become a totem not of a ‘proud history’, which, let's be honest, ended when Lyndon Johnson was president, but the 45-year hangover that followed. It had come to represent the post-mortem reality I knew growing up in a town blighted by brownfield and economically hobbled by its dependency on an industry that pulled off a vanishing act worthy of David Copperfield once it got what it came for.

Happily, much of that brownfield has been removed from the landscape. The ore dock's demolition coincides with other great improvements to the look and feel of my hometown. Cleaner, prettier, more spacious, Ashland, Wisconsin has recently undergone a massive overhaul; it's definitely not the town I grew up in. 

But once again, barely 20 miles to the south, winds of war have been blowing over a proposed open-pit mine in the Penokee Hills. Residents of the even smaller, more isolated (and thus more susceptible to the allure of any opportunity for prosperity, no matter how dubious) Mellen, Wisconsin potentially face the difficult task of trying to find an appropriate balance between that promise of jobs, of livelihood (which are very important, make no mistake...) and responsibility to the environment they and their children, and their children's children, will live in. 

It would seem, for better or worse, the decision there might already have been made, but the story of Ashland's oredock, and that morning in June 1992 when Danny and I were fishing on it, should serve as a cautionary tale to Mellen and other communities and regions like it, to, at the very least, steadfastly observe a few basic tenets:

1) Be wary - always wary - when industry comes sniffing around looking to extract something from the ground; always be listening for the sound of shifting sands

2) Be able and willing to move on quickly when shift happens.

3) Before industry even gets a foot in the door, demand to see an exit strategy.

From my own personal Darwin Diaries: how a school safety campaign actually proved a useful tool in the face of my boundless stupidity

My first obsession, first rebellion, and hell, maybe even a little my first dalliance with an impulse control disorder, came on strong when I was thirteen years old.  My best friend and I were on that precipice between childhood and young adulthood, dangling perilously between our fears and our impulses, our common sense and our restlessness, and for three months in the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years, we became pyromaniacs of the highest order.

It started when Ron found a lighter between the sofa cushions in his living room, either his older sister's - she smoked cigarettes (and looked pretty hot doing so) - or one of her many friends, always milling around when I came over. They were awkward, brace face teenage girls of the Clearasil set, but they were women in my young eyes, older women no less, women of the world, painting their nails, smelling like cigarettes and gum, simultaneously watching MTV and looking like they could be on it, tweaking both my desire and self-consciousness.

The big deal was not so much that Ron had the lighter, but that it was not missed by someone. It became our lighter, a possession as thrillingly illegal as it was permanent, and before long we were wielding it with the same sense of discovery and newly hatched empowerment early Man must have felt the first time he kept a torch going long enough to cook his food and illuminate his night.

"My best friend and I were on that precipice between childhood and adulthood, dangling perilously between our fears and our impulses, our common sense and our restlessness..."

We burned paper - notebook, construction, toilet...paper plates, paper towels, paper napkins...any kind or brand we could get our hands on. We burned leaves. We burned the ends of sticks, the caps of pens until they melted, any cardboard box unlucky enough to be caught sitting around with nothing to do. We burned a baseball cap we found in the alley, a tee shirt that didn't fit Ron anymore. We even torched one of his sister's Barbie dolls with as ceremonious a flair as we could muster. I suggested leaving its charred remains on her pillow as a joke (yeah, I guess I was that kid, a little...), but Ron wasn't comfortable going there, and looking back, that was probably a good thing. He was already pretty nervous about the lighter, certain we'd be discovered at any moment, and quickly regretted what we'd done to the doll, not so much for how torching any kind of human representation might read to others, but for monkeying around in Kate's room. He wound up guiltily stuffing Immolation Style Barbie in a box of books we found in the old barn behind his house, hoping Kate wouldn't notice one of her collection missing. As far as I know, she never did, and the doll and box might still be there.

That lighter became not just a source of unlimited power in our minds, but brainless amusement, wholly befitting two brainless thirteen-year-old boys. In the dark of his bedroom during sleepovers, we would spark it up and hold the flame under our chins in an effort to look as 'freaky' as possible. On a dare, we'd run the flame across the new hairs on our arms, or swipe the tip of our finger straight through it, to see - and prove - what we could take. Inspired by the fantastically hilarious stories that had made the rounds of our classrooms, locker rooms and campfires as far back as we could remember, we tried to light our own farts.

We failed (I guess that too was a good thing...), but Ron had something that was almost as cool. He'd learned from someone how to fill his cupped hand with fumes from the lighter, then ignite it in a fiery display without doing any damage to his hand or fingers. He spent fifteen minutes showing me this parlor trick, another fifteen passed before I summoned up the nerve to try it myself, but once I'd mastered it, it became as reliable a method for whiling away a boring summer afternoon as whittling or bouncing a ball against a wall. I did it so much, I used up all the fluid in that lighter. When Ron informed me that disposable lighters are not refillable, and with no reliable way of refilling it anyway, and having dug my way into their sofa cushions up to my elbows to no avail, I demanded he sneak into his sister's room one more time. There was surely a lighter to be found, probably in plain sight. Quick in, quick out. Come on, Ron, don't be a pussy.

Bold words from someone who would not have dared set foot in his older brother's bedroom, but Ron obliged reluctantly. Not to appease me, but to appease the gods of fire. That summer, we were subservient minions to the gods of fire. It was our first real - as in structured and ongoing - rebellion, our first taste of doing something we knew we weren't supposed to be doing, right on the doorstep of adulthood. He wanted it just as badly as I did.

"That lighter became not just a source of unlimited power in our minds, but brainless amusement..."

In June, we almost burned his fricking barn down, stupidly setting fire to a bin filled with hay and firewood, just to see what would happen, and only barely - barely - managing to put the flames out after they started to lick their way up the wall as if consciously trying to get away from us. No joke, we were seconds from disaster that time. That whole two-story barn, which had probably stood for a hundred years (built when his residential neighborhood was still farm land, his residential street a county road), might have gone up had the garden hose not reached.

On the occasion he and I discuss that incident, some thirty years later, we still cringe at what might have transpired.

It was sobering, but unfortunately not enough to get us to stop playing with fire. By July, in keeping with the quantum universe theory that everything that can possibly happen does (or maybe the Murphy's law version...), we had started seeking out new applications for our pyromania. And that was when the red gas can in that barn, used by Ron's older brother to fill the lawn mower, became of keen interest.

We were duly cautious with the fire water at first, indulging only in small sprinkles on the sidewalk that produced small flames undulating hypnotically off the concrete. But that soon felt inadequate. We evolved, just like early Man, started to write out words.

At first, 'SOS' or 'HELP', for astronauts in orbit we told ourselves (I think I was inspired by an old episode of Gilligan's Island).

Then we got sassy: 'EAT ME', 'BITE ME', or other typically witless 13-year-old expressions were flashed into the twilight heavens.

Then we got artistic (if still witless): smiley faces, a middle finger, a pair of breasts, a penis...hey, we were thirteen years old, and it was great comedy, and dare I say an invaluable experience - never to come again quite the same way - to see a burning penis about four feet in length light the gathering darkness of a July evening in northern Wisconsin at that age, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

But we didn't stop there. In an eventuality that proved Darwin's theory, the words 'Molotov cocktail' floated between us, and by mid-July we were feeling a strong desire for something more epic to appease the gods.

By then we were entirely cocky about our abilities marshaling fire. We'd gone almost the entire summer without being caught, causing a catastrophe or hurting ourselves (oh yes, we were fully aware of the danger of our behavior; that was a big part of the allure...), and felt we had earned a certain lack of discretion. At least, that's what I tell myself to try to explain what happened one late morning in early August, in front of Ron's house, in broad daylight, with traffic going by and someone mowing their lawn across the street.

Unwilling or unable to walk away from the Molotov cocktail idea, seriously believing that bigger fire made for bigger men, Ron and I placed a plastic fast food cup on the ground beside a tree, and filled it three-quarters full of gasoline. He knelt down and carefully lighted a paper wick sticking out of the cup like a straw. He scrambled away hastily, and we both stood there, one of us on each side of the cup, watching, waiting.

I'm not sure what we were waiting for...some kind of fireworks-style explosion to delight and amaze, maybe? It was pretty disappointing, actually. No explosion, no fireball, just flames starting to climb their way up the side of the tree with quickening determination as the cup collapsed in on itself and gas started to leak out.

When the fire started to wrap itself around the trunk of the tree, we gave each other a nervous glance, then Ron, gripped by the same second thoughts as I, stomped down on the cup with his shoe in an effort to snuff the fire out. That's when I got my fireball - a wall of bright orange coming straight at me with a roar.

Suddenly, the entire front of my shirt was on fire.

Suddenly, I was screaming.

Suddenly, I was running.

Suddenly, the gods of fire had become vengeful.

In that moment, I remembered a safety cadence I was taught in second grade, and had barely listened to at the time. Stop, Drop, and Roll. If I ever found myself (in so outrageously unlikely a scenario as to be...) on fire, I should stop, drop to the ground, and roll.

Actually, I can't say I consciously remembered it. It was more of an auto-response, which perhaps is testament to the effectiveness of that particular safety campaign. Though I took off running at first - a fight-or-flight response if ever there were one - I had the presence of mind to stop on a dime, drop, and roll like a barrel through the grass in Ron's front yard...made it a little way into the neighbor's yard, in fact, just enough to put out the flames. It's only in hindsight that I remember being on fire at all. At the time, there seemed to be no time between the moment right before Ron brought his shoe down, and hoisting myself up from the grass fifteen yards away. 

I walked back to the tree and stood before Ronny in what was now a tattered Yankees tee shirt, a hand-me-down from my older brother I would never wear again (which was fine; I'm a Braves fan). I will never forget the surprised look in his eyes. Not horror, but surprise. I'm sure it was the same incongruous expression I had on my face. Neither one of us could really wrap his brain around what the hell had just happened, much less be upset by it. A car went by. The neighbor was still mowing his lawn.

It seemed the world had not heard my screaming.

"Are you okay?" Ron asked finally, and in his voice, if not on his face, there was a supreme disquiet.

"Yeah, I'm...I'm..." I wanted to say I was fine, but that would have been laughable. I reeked of gasoline, there were grass clippings and dirt in my hair, on my face, and though the flames had been extinguished, my chest felt as though it were still on fire. "I'll probably just go home."

"Suddenly the gods of fire were vengeful..."

All I remember of the bike ride home was being afraid to look at my chest and afraid to face my parents, and having a sense that the two things were going to be connected soon enough. I arrived at my house and was greatly relieved to discover nobody home. I made a hasty bee-line for the bathroom, locked the door, removed the Yankees shirt with the stiffness of an 80-year-old man, and gasped at what I saw in the mirror.

There were three burns. Two smaller ones didn't look that bad, but the third was twice the size of the others combined, an ugly charred sore shaped like an arrow head, as though the devil himself had smeared the flames across my chest with his hands. It was about two inches wide, four inches long, untouchably tender and oozing continuously. My heart sank. This was not something I'd be able to take care of myself with first aid cream and a bandage. I was going to need medical attention.

But by then shock had set in, and the fact that nobody was home prompted me to withdraw even further. I went upstairs with the Yankees shirt in my hand. I threw it in the waste basket in my room, laid down on my bed, above the covers, and found sleep blessedly easy to come by.

When I awoke, the sunlight had shifted in my bedroom. My parents were home now, I could hear them rummaging about downstairs, putting away groceries, maybe cobbling together lunch, like a thousand days before and a thousand days after. (They too had not heard my screaming.)  The big burn was the color of grape jelly on my white fish belly, as tender, bubbled and sticky as ever, and now it was announcing its presence with a resonant, blowtorch pain, as though someone were trying to iron me. The two smaller burns seemed worse than they had been before...darker, blotchy, painful to the touch and oozing that awful fluid that stains bandages in amber colored rings. The entire room was saturated with the smell of gasoline.

Taking a nap hadn't made anything better. I still needed medical attention. I still had to tell to my parents.

I shouldered into as light a tee shirt as I could find, hunched my shoulders forward so the fabric would stay off my chest, and went to my dad, rather than my mom. My dad could be strict, but he was the more level-headed of the two, the one I could trust to not freak out (this would prove to be the case time and time again in my teenage years...).

He was upset though, visibly so, no question about it, leaning down for a closer examination of the big burn with a look of horror and revulsion I rarely saw from him. As he drove me to the emergency room, he asked repeatedly what happened, probing for the truth, and sighed with just a little more frustration for every evasive answer I gave.

The doctor in the ER, too, had plenty of questions as he treated my second and third degree burns. I fed him the same bullshit story I did my dad, and though it seemed the doctor's questions reached the level of interrogation at one point (augmented by my dad standing behind him, looking a little like a cop who could go rogue at any moment), I stuck to that story:

Ron had been mowing the lawn, I said, and I was filling the gas tank for him, and as I carefully poured it through the can's long red nozzle, the gasoline had just spontaneously erupted into flames and engulfed me, ignited, I theorized, by the hot metal surface of the engine, or maybe the bright sunlight.

Ridiculous, but intended to safeguard what little of my dignity had not been burned off that morning. This was an accident, my story claimed, as if straight from the cover of a tabloid, it was not the result of vulgar recklessness and stupidity (and a little hubris), for which I had been violently smitten.

Neither my dad nor the doctor believed a word of it; I think the doctor even smirked once or twice (or exchanged a look with my dad...). Like a horse fallen through the ice and unable to clamber out, the more I squirmed and thrashed, the worse it got, but I stuck to my story, too proud to admit anything out loud, especially with my dad standing there. The 'rogue cop' look I saw on his face wasn't really hostility, or even disappointment, it was shame, outright embarrassment, for what a jack ass he knew his son had been that day.

My dad knew. He'd never get the truth, but he knew. And it was mortifying.

The rest of that summer played out as a slow recovery. I remained bandaged, and mostly indoors, through the dog days of August and into September...into the new school year. Each changing of the dressing came with jolts of pain and discomfort. The burns - especially the big one - took forever to heal. Once they started healing, I endured weeks of agonizing itchiness, and whenever I succumbed to the temptation to rake myself, which was frequently, the healing was forced to start all over.

Eventually, I recovered physically. Psychologically was a different matter. The incident could not have happened at a worse time. Like all newly hatched teenagers, I'd been full of all sorts of plans for removing myself from childhood once and for all. Many were embarrassingly calculated poses, but some were accurate glimpses at the adult I would become. I started to really discover girls that summer, or care enough to understand them. I discovered new music, new movies, books...that was the summer I read my second Spenser novel and officially became a fan, watched Monty Python's Flying Circus and 'got it', felt for the first time capable of chiming in on the kind of conversations that went on between my dad and brother, where before I had only listened (or lost interest). It was the summer I renounced cartoons. It was the summer I got a new bike, a ten-speed, put the old banana seater, which I'd been pedaling away on since 4th grade, out to pasture. It was the year I awakened to the notion that I'd lived long enough to have memories to look back on, that 3rd and 4th and 5th grades, and my middle school years, were part of my 'past.'

Looking back, the 'fire gods' bullshit was not actually a new rebellion on my journey toward becoming an adult, it was a last vestige of being just another dumb ass kid, and I paid for it. Everything was put on hold while I recovered, set back to zero. Not permanently, but enough so to feel like a jarring throw down nevertheless.

I know it could have been much worse. I was beyond lucky that the Napalm spray Ron created when he unthinkingly brought his foot down on that Hardee's cup hadn't gone right into my face. And I am convinced that stop, drop and roll is the reason the fire didn't spread.

I could have wound up permanently disfigured.

But those psychological effects are still there. Not in obvious ways. I'm not afraid of fire; it ranks fairly low on my list of scariest ways to die. The smell of gasoline - thick and sickening as it was in my bedroom that afternoon - does not bother me, nor does the sight of a red gas can, or a fast food cup. In other words there are no blatant triggers to remembering that wall of fire or its unpleasant aftermath.

The triggers are far more insidious. An otherwise late summer day can still haunt me, if conditions are just right, if temperature and light and wind and ambient sounds conspire, I can at a moment's notice be given pause, flung back to those last few seconds of my childhood watching as Ron lit that makeshift wick, and left, with fairly abated breath, wishing we'd burnt his barn to the ground.

Looking back on how a love of big beautiful berries has led to a life-long fear of bees

To me, no food evokes a sense of childhood, of my childhood, nothing tastes so much like the 'summer of 1980', as fresh, seasonal berries. Every year I vow to go berry picking, both as a novelty (as I get older, I don't feel 'too cool' for nearly as much as I used to) and to secure those sweet baubles of sunshine in as close to what I know to be their divine state as possible, which, like most fruits and veggies, is the very second they're removed from the plant.

When I was a kid, I lived in the country and berry picking was a big deal for a while. My older brother, his friends and I spent a couple solid summers in the woods near our house foraging and feasting, always on the lookout for a new grow of the raspberries and blackberries strewn randomly amidst the meadows, gullies and woods I was fortunate to call my own then. There were no strawberries or blueberries growing wild where I was, so procuring them involved sneaking into a neighbor's garden and raiding his mounds and highbushes. More than once, while carrying out these covert ops we were sent sprinting off his property by his monstrous German Shepherd, which always seemed to lunge straight out of the setting sun, pulling its chain taut, threatening to yank the eye hook right out of the doghouse, and then me into the doghouse.

But these departures into 'danger' were more than worth it. For it was creeping along the thicket line trying not to get that dog's attention, then finding a quiet spot to indulge my spoils, that I learned the marked difference between 'store bought' and 'homegrown', the difference between the thin, flavor-packed rubies we heisted (the taste of which actually evoked a physical reaction) and the bulbous, overly pithy, largely tasteless frankenfruits my parents bought in the store, usually shipped long distances.

It was crouched behind the neighbor's tool shed devouring the evidence that I learned to expect more, and do so, to this day.

Unfortunately, wild berries are also inextricably linked to a fairly hefty fear that I've carried into adulthood.

One morning, my brother and I were picking our way through waist-high grass between our house and a nearby golf course. It was mid-summer, cloudy but uncomfortably hot and humid; one of those dark days that threatens to storm but doesn't ever do more than sulk. I can't remember what we were doing in the woods, but we'd unexpectedly stumbled across a massive grow of blackberries. We'd gorged ourselves on the succulent fruit, feeling fully entitled to taking our share and vowing not to tell any of the neighbor kids about it, establishing this spot as our private reserve. When we'd eaten our fill, we grabbed as many as we could realistically travel with and started for home.

I was hot and thirsty, and sweat from the exertion of our march and the continuous swatting of mosquitoes and flies was stinging my eyes. It seemed like a long, long walk, felt like we had gone deep into the most primordial depths of the woods and back, but in reality, we probably weren't that far from our house; we never were. Everything seems massive when you're seven, distance most of all. All the go-to places I remember from those days, all the important spots I followed my brother and his friends to, locales that punctuated our existence in the summer months - 'Big Rock', the 'Gully', the 'Sand Pit', the 'Sand Trap', the 'Fort' - seemed like all-day journeys to get to, but were all probably within a quarter mile, half mile tops, of my house.

My brother himself, at thirteen, was a colossus in my eyes, and it was his lead I followed that morning. He always knew the way, not just into the woods and back to our property, but the easiest route through the thicket to get anywhere, trails he and his friends had been charting for a few years, which in kid time is a few decades.

We got within ten feet of the border of our back yard, and I could just see our house in the distance (and already taste the glorious water that would soon be gurgling out of the garden hose, replenishing me head to toe), but before we could step out of the tall grass onto our lawn, a swarm of flying insects started to funnel up from the featureless foliage below us.

"Oh man, I think we hit a bee hive!"

It wasn't my brother's words so much as the unprecedented anxiety with which he spoke that got my attention. It was the first time I remember ever hearing fear in his voice, uncertainty over anything. He dropped his cache of berries and sprinted off in a flash as the swarm intensified. Ten feet away he stopped, turned, and with an anxious bounce on the balls of his feet expressed his frustration that I had not followed.

He called out. I heard him, heard something, but I could not make out the words. I stood completely frozen in the midst of that sudden attack, as though some powerful current were traveling up my leg from the ground, keeping me there and causing me to unwittingly squeeze the berries between my fingers. I was so petrified, I remember feeling as though I were a tiny person trapped on the top floor of a building. I could peak out the window, see the airplanes buzzing me, coming around for another pass, and see my brother in the distance, a mile or two off from this new perspective.

The number of bees (yellow jackets were probably what they were) intensified. They kept coming, funneling up ceaselessly from no specific spot - that is, no visible nest, just the jumble of grass and weeds over which we'd been thoughtlessly tromping not twenty seconds earlier. In my mind they became a single predator circling its prey in ever decreasing circles, and I can remember thinking 'it' wasn't after me so much as the berries. 'It' had caught me taking the berries. 'It' wanted them back. But all that was left of them now was the purple mash between my fingers, and mauve juice oozing down my wrist.

I don't know what would have happened if my brother hadn't dashed back and grabbed me. There were numerous other instances in our youth when, like any older brother, he went out of his way to ditch me at the first opportunity. But not this time. This one and only time, he came to my rescue.

Unfortunately, it was not before one wasp managed to tag me on the fold of skin between the pointer finger and the thumb of my right hand. I shrieked, let go of what was left of the berries with an hysterical shaking of my hands. I grabbed my brother's hand (or maybe he grabbed me by the arm) and we made off for the safety of the house.

The hornets did not pursue us, but as it turned out, my brother had not only dropped his berries when the attack came, but the keys to our house. This turn of events was treated by that 7 and 13 year old like news of a massacre somewhere in another village.

Though he had saved me, I vigorously refused his request to accompany him back to the spot to help him search for the keys. I'll never forget watching from the safety of our patio as he made his way back across the lawn and took his first tentative steps into the tall grass. Nor will I forget my overwhelming relief when I heard him cry out that he'd found the keys, followed a second or two later by a new jolt of fear at the sight of him sprinting out of the thicket at full tilt. Only when he slowed to a leisurely trot across the lawn did I relinquish the notion that the bees were in hot pursuit.

I still have a faint scar on my hand from that sting. It was not the most painful I've endured, but certainly the most memorable for how frightened I was. It is that paralyzed fear, rather than memory of the pain, which makes me uncomfortable around bees and wasps to this day. It's not an irrational fear (like I have of spiders, for instance), but an unavoidable disquiet when they get too close, especially in late summer, when they get bolder, start flying up and checking you out face to face, crawling into your soda can, onto your picnic plate, big as you please. The sight of a paper nest hanging otherwise benignly from the eave of a house, or a tree branch, will almost certainly trigger this unease.

As will, lamentably, the succulent deluge in my mouth at the first taste of a ripe, seasonal berry. Blackberries are the real culprits, but any summer berry will not only unleash as much disquiet as joy, but also a short and powerful impulse toward guilt, as though the berries are still not mine to take.

It was a long time ago; I've strayed further away from youth than I ever thought I would. But it's amazing what I've carried with me, downright astonishing how, in some ways, distance still seems more massive than it actually is.