Prescribed Fire
By: Lafayette Cruise
The first thing Jasper Mason notices is the drums and the singing. He sees the bright warm glow of what must be a fire. As the drums and chanting grow louder, he descends upon the edge of a backfire–a band of burned prairie meant to starve an oncoming blaze of necessary fuel. Instead of the normal crew in fire management gear he sees folks dancing in the middle of the flames.
More specifically, he sees Martin Birch. Tall and sturdy, he’s not just a skilled land manager but a surprisingly skilled dancer. Jasper is hypnotized by Martin’s thick black braids twirling with their beads and feathers, his skin glowing like a bronze gilt over a molten core ablaze in the revelry. Adorned in his regalia, stomping and leaping and spinning, Birch is the most beautiful person Jasper has ever met, slowly becoming the very flame that is crawling towards the back fire. Fully-a-flame, Martin beckons him to come dance. Jasper feels a pull in his chest — a caged flame yearning for freedom and communion.
“Control yourself,” he hisses.
In an instant, he’s in the middle of Sauk Meskwaki on the edge of open grassland and oak savannah.
He can see a wall of fire and smoke voraciously devouring the savannah–hungrily clawing along, rushing toward him.
Martin grabs him to keep tending to the backfire. Jasper keeps trying to move his legs but they’re like lead.
“Do something! You are in control of this!” Jasper sees himself frozen in that field, Martin continuing to yell at him for help with the backfire, but he won’t move. He’s caught between the flames. Martin is furiously working on the back fire and the monstrous wildfire sweeping across the oak savannah behind him.
“Will I let the fire consume me?” He can tell Martin is disappointed in him but he can’t trust that more fire will save him.
Jasper takes in the destruction he senses he caused, even though he doesn’t know how. He berates himself: “You’ve lost control — such a fuck up.” He’s petrified. Martin keeps yelling. Jasper hears the roar of the flames rushing to engulf him.
He jumps awake from the dream with a scream, his heart pounding in his chest.
Trying to ignore whatever that dream meant, he gets up and heads into the kitchen. When he enters, Spinel is sitting at the kitchen table, still awake, drinking coffee and listening to radio chatter, their face illuminated by the screens mapping the fire management efforts in real time.Jasper takes in his mom Ruby’s youngest sibling, diligently at work. Ruby was thirteen and Spinel four when Hurricane Leonidas hit the Gulf. While Louisiana tried to recover, the Derechos of 2025 were leveling and flooding much of the Midwest, and when they were done all that water just sped down the Mississippi and did what the Army Corps tried to prevent nature from doing: spilling through the Mississippi, punching through into the Atchafalaya and washing everything away.
Despite being climate-displaced people, they’ve both accomplished so much, and yet the two are so different. Spinel is tall, strong, and sturdy, the side of their head shaved in a clean bald fade leading to a thick mohawk of dreadlocks, with a beautiful broad nose with a gold nose ring in their right nostril. Those kind and mysterious brown eyes that draw Jasper in, surrounded by thick long lashes — those Mason family genes were strong. Even in the midst of the stressful burn season, the break in the prescribed radius that Jasper created, and the subsequent spread of the prescribed fire yesterday, Spinel seems cool and unbothered while they diligently perform their role managing the Sauk Meskwaki National Conversation Land and Reservation 2078 burn season.
Jasper pours himself coffee. The smoke hovering over the Sauk Meskwaki is still visible. The Conservation Land and Reservation sits at the intersection of the Driftless Area, the oak savannas and tall grass prairies cutting through parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. Jasper stares out the western window in the kitchen, dreading the moment the rising sun will signal a new day of controlled burns.
Without looking up, Spinel quips, “Looks like someone had a fire nightmare. Want to talk about it?”
Maybe it was the being woken up from an already fitful sleep, Spinel’s jovial mood despite the context — 4:00 in the morning managing a routine fire that, thanks to Jasper’s negligence, almost became a wildfire — or the unsettling ease with which they knew his mind, but Jasper’s chest tightens and his cheeks warm. Some part of him retreats, hiding from the shame.
“Not funny–I’m the fuckup that lost control, and now millions of acres of land are going to burn because of me.”
“Hey don’t leave — come back. Talk to me!” says Spinel. “First, the spread the fire is not ’cause you’re a fuckup’. You made a mistake that we signed off on. But more critically, we didn’t predict that sudden warm front.Nothing burns that wasn’t meant to — it would have jumped whether your team was there or not.”
Here they go again, Jasper thinks. It’s the story Spinel always told when they visited Ruby’s family in Chicago, usually when Jasper and his siblings were helping them in the community garden. Removal of indigenous people, extractive monoculture, “Get big or get out,” and soil degradation. Then, years of floods destroying homes, farms, communities, and sense of control.
“… That’s why when we were brought in by the Sauk Meskwaki tribal coalition, we reintroduced controlled burns to restore the health of the soil and our relationship to the land,” Spinel continued. “So, second: Do you understand how amazing this is! We haven’t had a fire of this size in nearly a century. We’re trying to heal — we could have chosen early on to try something new to reorient ourselves and when that didn’t work the planet shook us to the core.”
Jasper just wants to get out of this conversation and away from the feeling in his chest “Cool the earth is healing–but this isn’t how we wanted it to go. I’m still the fuck-up who messed up his very straightforward role in a run-of-the-mill prescribed burn. Like everything that I try to do just goes disastrously. No amount of your new age ecological wisdom is going to fix that.”
Spinel winces — they can feel Jasper’s pain.
“I’m just trying to help you articulate and contextualize what you’re experiencing and feeling. Like this ecosystem,” Spinel lovingly offers.
“How am I feeling?I’m feeling like everything I touch, I fuck up. I’m supposed to be so smart and yet I’m on academic probation.I’m close to graduating and I can’t even do the fucking work. Because my grades are shit and I can’t graduate, I can’t get a job. I had a fucking panic attack and my parents don’t want to deal with me so they ship off to the middle of nowhere. And then when I get out here I’m given straightforward training and instructions and somehow out of hundreds of thousands of hectares of burn I somehow don’t do a good enough job with a back burn and almost start a wildfire! So how do you think I’m feeling!? I’m a fuck-up!”
Spinel grabs their nephew’s shoulders firmly but with care. “Jasper, dear. I don’t know when that lie took root in your head, but you are not a fuck-up. In the past day I’ve seen you have to come face to face with a deadly mistake–with something beyond your control. You’ve fallen short of your expectations, but you are not a fuck-up. You are trying too hard to be in control of everything, but it seems the universe is trying to tell you to let go. You don’t need to prove or be anything beyond yourself. You are so wonderfully human, so utterly worthy of love and care.”
Spinel’s words pull Jasper out from his secret cave, from the deluge of pain, fear, longing, disappointment. The two of them stand there, Jasper weeping against Spinel’s soft flannel. “I am trying my best to make this world a better place. I’m supposed to be an example to for folks to look up to: a successful, Black, queer, climate-displaced person. I have to be better than everyone and yet I can’t! And then yesterday I was so scared. Scared that the fire would burn out of control that it would engulf me. I was so scared.”
Spinel hugs him closer. After a while Jasper transitions into the puffy-eyed, runny nose, sniffling stage.
“Come sit on the porch with me,” says Spinel. They grab their mugs and a quilt and go to the porch to look at the sky. The smoke and the orange glow obscures the stars, so, they just sit on the porch beholding the horizon in the cool fall predawn.
“Take a slow, deep breath. Feel that fire in your chest — those overwhelming emotions. Let them burn, don’t suppress them. We’re going to take time to feel the past and process the moment and look forward into the unknown.”
The air is cool. The scent of the burning prairie and oak savannah wafts through the valley. The musk of the distant fires mixed with the cooling fall air is invigorating. Even with Jasper’s lapse yesterday, the burns seem to be going smoothly. It will be a nice fall fire season.
“To be honest, I look at you and see a swirl of traumas our family is still healing from. We all experienced it differently. Your mom, Ruby, knew a time before the floods and the storms and destruction. My childhood was spent in the instability of being displaced in our own crumbling country.”
Jasper sits with that. He considers how bizarre it is that he’s never considered his parents’ past, and how those past lives affect them in the present. He’s definitely never considered how his mom’s experience as a climate-displaced person affects him. But then he considers Spinel, and how they’re almost the complete opposite of his mom: Relaxed, unperturbed, emotive and fun.
“If you both went through the Floods together, how is it that you turned out fine, Spinel?”
“Turned out fine!?” Spinel laughs. “I don’t know if I’m any better than your mom. We spent most of my formative years traveling through a country reeling from a stalled government, racial tension, a near-constant of natural disasters, and multiple pandemics.”
“I mean yes, despite that I was a free-spirited, contrary child discovering their non-binary identity while my parents and Ruby tried to keep us self-controlled and safe in unfamiliar places–places where being climate-displaced was bad enough, but to add poor and Black was a recipe for violence or exploitation. It took a lot of work and hurt to get me here, and it’s taken a painfully long time for me and Rubs to get our relationship to where it is today.”
The sun jumped over the hills. The smell of Avery’s Bakery down the road began to mix with the scent of fire.
“Jasper–you need to stop playing the perfect son and embrace just being you,” Spinel says. “Practice sitting with and feeling your emotions. You are carrying our family’s trauma and the pressures that brings with it and honey, you need to begin letting it go. You need to feel the flames of sadness, anger, hurt, fear, hope, joy, love…you need to do some internal prescribed burns so that natural flow of emotions can return.
“This burn season we’re going to get you back in tune with your emotional and spiritual self. We’ll bring back ‘Jazzy-Feet’ Jasper and you are going to dance. Cause trust me, you’re not getting a date with Martin Birch without starting that healing process.”
Jasper feels heat rise to his face “H-h-h-how did? I don’t–.”–
“Oh please. You two have been making eyes at each other since he and I picked you up from the Amtrak station in Dubuque. Why do you think I keep having you shadow him? I mean, he is great at his job and there is a lot you can learn from him, but geez… see, this is what happens when you try to suppress everything.You can’t see the good things right in front of you.”
As the sun continues to rise above the green Driftless hills, Jasper and Spinel sit listening to the birds chittering in the trees and the tall grass, eager to start their day with the rising sun.
This story is past of a series of reflections on ritual and decolonization. Check out the others below:
- Ben Cruz — Altar-ing Pathways
- Miguel Rivera — A few thoughts on understanding and uncoupling from the legacy of colonization, October 2022
- Amelia Winger-Bearskin — Antecedent Technology
