Recently, I had a delightful and captivating experience observing a group of magnificent entertainers who danced with a myriad of flaming iron torches. Swaying, twirling, swirling, these dancers of flames excavated a forgotten incident from the creaking edge of my memory. 

These swirling Dancers of Flame conjured anamnesis of an event that happened during the yester-years before Global Warming tightened its cruel grip to produce our present Apocalyptic conflagrations. Back then, as happy Hotshot Crew Members, we faithfully suppressed every wildland fire we encountered and often dispatched to burn out logging debris. In those days, Forest Managers naively imagined that timber extraction and burning logging debris nicely replaced natural ecosystem processes. 

During one incident, we marched across multiple acres of steep slope in a chevron pattern on top of six feet of logging debris while dipping our driptorches to ignite the tinder dry needles and branches. To our satisfaction tiny flames immediately grew into vast fire demons devouring the debris. While most of the plot appeared to be burning just fine, at dusk our bosses decided that there remained one area that needed more driptorch action. So we began a driptorch line below the part that had burnt pretty well. This remains a heads-up, danger signaling, Situation that Shouts “Watch Out!” 

After completing half my driptorch line, I heard heart-stopping noises that whispered deadly movements of uphill burning mass. I looked up to see a gigantic stump root-wad rolling down the steep slope, its spidery arms swinging flaming roots (just like those future flame dancers) I horizontally dove out across the debris using my best Olympic swimming racer form, but the gigantic root-wad caught my boots mid-air and swung me 180°. I began rolling horizontally down that very steep hill, across the smoldering debris, rolling faster and faster. During my horizontal pirouettes, my vision captured, in intense crystalline clarity, flickering successive events ahead of me and behind me. Ahead of me, I saw the flaming root-wad stump rapidly rolling down the slope and into the cliff-like road cut. Behind me, I saw my driptorch cartwheeling (looking like the iron torches used by those future Dancers of Flame) and coming for me. Rolling over and over, I spewed a plume of sparkling, swirling embers over and behind me as if I had run across the stars. My horizontal pirouettes showed ahead of me quick flickering frames of the flaming stump emerging from the road-cut cliff and rolling across the road, then leaping into the forest below. I also saw in successive jerky frames, a nearby Hotshot sitting on the road looking into the valley below, eating his lunch. When the roaring rolling flaming stump whizzed by him, he stood up and turned around and saw my spinning fire ballet performance. Behind me, my flaming driptorch aimed to gain on me. I rolled into the cliffy road-cut and down. My flaming driptorch stomped across me and then stopped in the middle of the road, igniting a pool of fuel. Dizzy and pretty banged up, I slowly sat up. Then my hardhat came rolling down the road cut and nearly plopped back onto my head.

The Hotshot looked at me from across the road, but he said nothing. Then he turned and went after the flaming root-wad stump. Still dizzy, I looked behind me into the crowding darkness and at all the swirling embers and shimmering spats of flame. And how they swirled and gyrated and pranced, like dancers of flame. I got up, went to the road edge, looked down to my fellow firefighter putting out that root-wad stump. Then I ate his lunch.