Giants towered all around. One of their fallen brethren lay stretched from the trail to a spacious campsite far below. A few steps past the camp, the trail passed under a spring in the form of a little sheet waterfall several inches wide, framed by supple ferns and clover.
Though ample daylight remained, little of it filtered down through the high forest canopy in this Manhattan of Red Giants. Gathering water from the spring, the boys claimed the campsite at the end of the fallen Giant and resurrected the purification fire. Though it seemed impossible that such a pure fountain could harbor any creature so foul as giardia, they proceeded to purify the water for drinking. The air was warm, though they were more than a vertical mile above the Sink.
The campfire waved and swayed before the boys as they gazed, wide-eyed, through the veils of her dance of swaying light, heat, and smoke. Something about her dance took them out of time to a primeval place, such as a familiar scent might do, but this seemed to go deeper. They held their palms open to the fire, though they had no need of her heat, nor protection, light, nor yet even a cooked meal. Perhaps they sought something else from her. Perhaps they could not help themselves. Perhaps it was instinct. She had been man’s first companion, comrade, cook, and protector; so close to man she’s part of him, from that first cooked meal, that first game drive before the grassfire; from that first captured flame to today’s internal combustion civilization.
Life as we know it is itself driven by an internal combustion engine—a mitochondrial nano-engine; but unique to man since before civilization, before the horse, before agriculture and the dog, is the domestication of fire, or rather the domestication of an ape—a domestication by fire. Man is famously capable of speech and abstract thought, but even with respect to these powers, the line between man and beast is ambiguous, yet man remains the one igneous species among the denizens of our world. The boys’ fire-reverie surprises no one.
As darkness crept into the grove of Red Giants, the campfire shot cool flames of light up their massive trunks, but the dark silhouettes of the Giants reached far beyond, and the canopies seemed utterly unreachable to the meek firelight. Only the stars that floated between the Giants—and slipped in and out of their gigantic heads and monstrous arms—could appreciate such heights. At last, Sam put the fire to sleep, and the boys unrolled their bedding at the Giants’ red feet.
In the morning, Armen got a scare when he realized he didn’t have the key to the bike lock they’d used to secure the bikes at the ranger station. He looked all over the campsite to no avail. Later, as the sun’s rays broke through the trees, he went to the spring for water, and found the key shining under a fern. Years later, I lost my wedding band at that very spring while washing my hands with concentrated soap. The ring took flight as if by will.
That morning put the heat behind Armen and Sam. The morning gave them new vigor, and they gained Hockett Plateau before noon, Armen singing and whistling Happy Trails here and there along the way. They enjoyed a refreshing ford across the river, and proceeded east across the sandy plateau, passing green meadows along the way to golden trout country.
They ascended a sandy hump up to the Western Divide, which branches off from the Great Western Divide just north of there and continues south down to Bakersfield. The boys then descended into the canyon of the Little Kern, forded the river, and turned downstream, following the old trail.