There is a pyro in all of us.

I am from Sacramento, CA and I attend a very small university in a very small town in the middle-of-nowhere (On 4Square you can literally check in to “Middle-of-Nowhere, Indiana” on I-69 north of Indy), Indiana.The other day I had the privilege of attending, for the very first time, a prairie burn. For those of you who have never had the opportunity to observe such a marvel, a prairie burn, is an event in which the owner of a field lights it on fire. Cool right?

We don’t do things like that in Sacramento, or at least not very often. On the contrary, setting a field on fire could result in anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple hundred thousand acres going up in flames and probably a felony for the culprit. I’ll never forget the summer of 2008 when some 200,000 plus acres were on fire somewhere in the middle-of-nowhere (I’m not sure if you can check in there on 4Square) and eventually not-so-nowhere, California. The smoke traveled north to Sacramento and hung so heavy in the air that the sun appeared red for a couple of days. It made for some very rough football practices with what felt like no oxygen in the air. All that to say… this was something new for me and I was pumped!

To put it bluntly, the fire was quite a let down. It was not the uncontrolled roaring blaze ravaging the landscape like a small part of me had hoped. It was merely two men calmly walking around circumference of a field lighting a tame line of fire that slowly moved inward until the whole field was charred to a crisp. Not exactly what I had imagined, yet I would estimate that nearly 200 people showed up. Why? Well, it was fire.

There is something about the nature of fire that draws people around it. Whether its to keep warm, to cook or to watch, fire has this incredible ability to bring people together.I’m a fan of alliteration so perhaps we might call this phenomenon, “Fire Fellowship.” That is the real reason we all came to the prairie burn. To watch the fire and fellowship with one another.

I don’t fully understand the mysterious allure of fire, but I do know that whatever differences there may be between mid westerners and Californians (there are plenty), or any other area of the world, I would reckon there is a bit of a pyro in all of us.