Bread and Fire
and the hungry monster around us
I got up and made eggs this morning. I don’t know how we’re making food these days, but I do know bread: water, yeast, flour, salt, in that order, just that. I wrote a poem once about it, on a whiteboard halfway down the stairs to the basement where we churned out hundreds of sticky buns for hungry summer tourists.
The poem is gone, now, pretty sure, along with the dogs we shared, and the cats, and the love that went sour because...I guess I was a disappointment.
But the bread stayed. “You’re a hell of a baker,” she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. How could I be a hell of a baker? I don’t know except that I know that the bread is alive and I treat it like that, except that I know the air and the rain and the sea mattered; except that they still matter, way over here, nothing is the same and it takes a month or so of tending life to know how to tend this life, specifically, here, particularly.
It finally mostly worked yesterday (I’m picky, the other loaves were fine)--I changed measuring cups and gave it more time to think things over in a barely warm oven, less flour to the water, more time, it all works out. Hydration ratios are more vibes anyway, anything that’s alive is vibes, that’s why croissant and baguette are art but banana bread is a good recipe and an accurate oven. No yeast in the bread. The rain still matters but not as much. Better living through chemistry is, well, precise but the only life being lived is yours. It’s lonely.
You’re together with the bread though, together and breathing, rising and falling with gas and digestion and air pressure and rhythms and come and go, in and out, up and down, catch it at the right moment...
and then there’s death, too, to catch and hold the moment you have to kill the yeast right before it runs out of food. That’s true whether it’s wild or tame, biddable or its own little ecosystem-in-a-jar on your kitchen counter.
And then you eat it, we all have to kill to eat, no way around it. Life derives from life. Even yeast is life, and mushrooms, and ferns whose vasculature is older than dinosaurs, probably. We rise and we fall and again and again and again, even sequoias fall, and start over, a journey so long we can barely countenance it. We try though, we stretch our fingers so long and only get a tiny fraction of the way around, so many humans for one old tree, we can and do fell it, sometimes.
And sometimes it burns, the hair off the top of an ancient life beneath our feet. Too much gone and it never recovers. Just the right amount and it resets. Are we in relationship or do we think we are hungrier than we are, eating incessantly to feel better in some undefinable way?
I fear my midnight hunger driven by changing body chemistry and questions has nothing on the incessant cravings of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, something between cancer and megafire, creating its own weather which drives the storm higher and higher, winds whipping the flames into the skies, consuming everything.
Consuming everything.
I cannot bake enough bread for that. It is not a thirst that can be slaked. It is not a hole that can be filled. It must instead be stopped with firebreaks, cut off from what feeds it from the outside and within. Burn a line wide enough that it can’t jump; tend the forests, clear some underbrush, keep things watered and interconnected and whole.
There is still some forest. There is still time. The bread I bake cannot go to feed the hungry maw but it can go to feed the hungry neighbors, literally or metaphorically. I can water and clear underbrush. I can plant gardens of herbs. Maybe I can have a bit of my own earth. I can plant and tend relationships and people and knowledge and wisdom. I can build roads that are also firebreaks that are also ligatures between people and community and the things that feed us.
And I can decide who I will feed, and what I will not.
Sometimes, that is enough.