Man, Nature, God and the Inbetween

Rebuilding a dock is an animal experience.

It's wet, cold, involves a whole lot of ingenuity and, when all else fails, the brute force of a bull moose.

Tearing apart the old sections involves a lot of time in the water pulling apart the cribbing sections with a pry bar and moving rock piles with your hands.

Building the new sections takes much of the same. You build as much as you can outside the water but there's still things that need to happen that have you wet and wishing you had gills.

You need to find tall, straight spruce trees for the extensions. Cut them down, skin the bark, drag them to the shore, tow them with a boat to the project site, cut them again to size, and hammer them together. Then you trim and shim and do all manner of chainsaw acrobatics to get your new supports as level as possible. You drive spikes through the logs and pin down your planks with nails, all the while keeping things straight, square and sturdy.

If you do it right the foundation will last twenty years, granted the ice doesn't wreck havoc in spring.

The old pieces get pulled up on shore. Some gets cut up for firewood, others, either because they're too rotten or too full of nails, get hauled to a burn pile.

This is where I ended up tonight, burning the old dock.

Piled high like a log house, the flames shot up twenty feet into the air. A fire like this is one that should be shared but instead I was selfish and sat there on my own. The heat burned through my work pants and a storm cell created its own light show across the lake.

Embers shot upwards, like souls leaving Earth and trying to reach Heaven. Many exploded into the night sky and disappeared into the air. Others arced back into the ground, heavy from the baggage that life thrust upon them.

Some souls make it, some don't.

The lightning circus moved closer and before long the storm was right above me, as if the fire I lit had called in. But even as the rain came down the fire was too hot to be extinguished.

There's something about a controlled fire. It's a sign of humanity, of safety, of man conquering the elements, a light in the darkness.

And as I sat there swatting mosquitoes and watching the destiny of a million burning souls, I felt like there was nowhere I'd rather be.

Indeed, if God came back tonight and said it was time to go I'd stare Him straight in the face and say,

"Sorry, man, I'm not done here yet."