Adopt a roving point of view.
Home. For most people, there are many places like home. Find a suburban block, and you will likely find two houses built from the same blueprint. But for some definitions of home, there truly is no place like it.
Home begins with a hand-painted sign by a driveway off a New England forest road. Nearby, Smokey declares an extreme danger of wildfire. Headlights occasionally pierce the evening haze, otherwise lit by breadcrumbs of glowing dice. The gray thickens at each turn, until the labyrinth opens to a wide field. Coleman has taken over two corners – tents on one side, and far too many gallons of camping gas on the other. A longhouse occupies the far corner, where all of the food is cooked, but none of the fuel goes there. After all, the longhouse is not home.
A shirtless, barefoot man searches a clipboard of names with a flashlight that looks like an identity crisis. Men, women, and undecided pass through, donning their dogtags as they go to the many fire pits that enclose the field, hopeful for a familiar face. They’ll say their greetings before they trek to the dark wooden racks illuminated by tradition, where they each unpack and hang up their square red cloths and charred staves. Tonight, they will carry their cloths because there is a new member of the family.
A single figure weaves her way to the fuel. She baptizes her staff under her companions’ supervision, and, with a nervous tunneling gaze, follows her matador and photographer to a lonely torch. Flames wick onto her staff and peel back the winter cold amidst shouts from all three hundred onlookers: “Virgin burn!” As the flames fly, held aloft more by adrenaline than by her own hands, the family grows by one more person.
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