The Great Thumb Fire

The Great Thumb Fire

Inside the blistering barks of sugar maples, red and silver maples, birch, black walnut and basswood trees sap bubbled and boiled, and hissed ear-cracking warnings.

Zizz zik Zizz zik Zizz zik

Below, field ants skreiched. Scarab beetles squealed. Their cries, pitched at a frequency so extreme only a mammal like a bear could register it, ripped through the burning forest.

Crashing through a clearing on Klug Road a black bear squinted her eyes and rotated her ears.

Two bawling cubs trailed her.

Their mother chose the thickest white pine and raised herself on her back feet. She barked up the tree, urging her cubs to flee into the air. The mother growled as the cubs balked. She seized the cinnamon-hued male with her spikey-sharp teeth and flung him at the pine.

He scrabbled up the purple-colored scales. His claws furiously pricked the bark of the veteran pine. He wailed as he went. With each clenching and releasing of his fore and back limbs, he inched up the pine. He risked falling as scales ripped from the tree’s surface and left no mooring for his toes. He looked below but couldn’t see his mother or his sister in the mass of embers and shrieking birds. The cub climbed further and then stopped. His baby body quaked from tiredness and terror. He cried the lament of a lost child.

“Mamaaaaaa…..”

If the fire were sated with the shorter, younger, and more combustible pines, the cub would have a chance of survival. Surely there was enough fuel from the mounds of felled needles and the parched honeysuckle vines desiccated from months of dry heat.

A resplendent bald eagle soared to a tree taller than the one chosen by the bear. Her nest was wedged below the crown of an equally resplendent pine.

This tree was overlooked by the greedy lumbermen who pillaged the peninsula for white pine to feed the thirsty ship builders, carpenters, and coopers. If this pine had been fashioned as a mast on a clipper, the eagle’s nest would have been named for a bird lower than she.

A sailor would have to use hands and feet, clenching and releasing muscles, to reach the crow’s nest. Once inside, he would use the vantage point, high above the water, to measure the distance to land. He would look to safety, to home, to family and friends.

The eagle looked down with her majestic beak at the mewling cub. She recognized the incongruity of their situations. He was not a threat. She moved on, intent on reaching her lofty nest over a hundred feet above the ground. The fire whipped higher, with greater frenzy and hunger.

The fire consumed the pine chosen by the frantic mother bear and spared the one protecting the eagle, whose ancestors had buttressed her veneration in waves of amber grain and the majesty of purple mountains.

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In the rocky shoals of Lake Huron, lascivious sooks broadcast erotic pleas to their species' males. The urgency to procreate was palpable all through the crevices and junctures of sand and lake water. At Sand Beach, rocks protruded from the shoreline for a hefty distance before the lake dropped deep enough for a man to stand with water running over his ankles. The space made for a safe lover's lane, the slippery, jagged edges of lake rock a deterrent to anything other than aquatic gills and pincers.

Jimmies hearkened to the call and paired with a female, her biological clock beating in tandem with the Lake's tide's ebb and flow. They rocked, tummy to tummy, and Jimmy protected his lady love through her most vulnerable hours. Had they depended on the sun for determining their course, they would have been stumped. But the call of procreation was more potent than the fickle amount of sun that trickled from millions of miles away. What looked like night was really day. What looked like bolts of the sun were really droplets of fire. What sounded as thunder was really the thundering herds of mammals seeking water, the element fire could not vanquish. The jimmies and the sooks tangled together were dashed apart as the beasts of land invaded their watery habitat, splashing, tumbling, kicking, shoving, and dismantling the love nests and terminating future offspring of thousands of Lake Huron crayfish.

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The tufted titmouse retreated to her nest in an oak tree that had withstood the great fire of 1871 and marked the south edge of the Pawlowski property. She was happy here, raising her handsome babies with their white faces and sharp black eyes, in the home she claimed following the departure of a woodpecker family. The mother titmouse had redecorated, lining her nest with the finest nature had to offer in Parisville, Michigan. Her most favored fibers had been boldly plucked from the back of a Chesapeake Bay Ducking Dog, the only dog of its kind in this little town occupied by a sturdy band of Polish Catholics. She brandished her wings against the soft strands and cocked her head, as faint crackling noises registered in her brain. Hoping to correspond with her band of birds, she sidestepped from the center of the tree.

“Peter-peter-peter,” she whistled. She cocked her head and frilled her grey pointy crest. She heard no response. She flew higher on the tree and inched her way to the outside circumference.

"Peter-peter-peter," she called again and scanned the skies. "Peter-peter-peter," she whispered as the wind lifted and slammed her beak into the Pawlowski barn as if it were a nail plunging into a pinewood coffin.

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Nokee Wilkowski and her sons were visiting her brother Thomas at his cabin bordering the Cass River. The boys listened eagerly to their uncle’s stories while helping Thomas patch the roof of his cabin. Thomas walked with a limp, and Nokee could tell his discomfort grew.

It was Lerk who sounded the alarm, “Fire!”

The older boys lifted their uncle on their shoulders and their mother in their arms. Thomas's dog ran in front of them as they bolted to the riverbank . Swirling ash and shooting flames reached higher than the tallest trees.

The family stumbled into the river.

“Gichi-manidoo.” Nokee heard Thomas pray as they looked about and saw the creatures of the creator’s making join them in the river. A mother bear and her cub stood side by side with her sons. A fox family, a beaver family, squirrels, deer, otter, muskrats, and all creatures presided over by Gichi-manidoo hid in the river, where the raging fire could not reach them.