This story is dedicated to Icarus… One of the dumbest most impulsive stupidest characters in all of mythology. Icarus… may your terrible life decisions guide many others.
My uncle is a firefighter. It’s pretty cool… most of the time.
When is it not cool? When he and all of his children come into my home and criticize the way I choose to live as being “unsafe” and not “fireproof.”
How is my life unsafe according to the fire cousins? I guess I don’t keep all doors shut at all times and in all places, I don’t keep a baseball bat in my closet, and most of the things I own are 100% flammable.
Now I’m no pyromaniac… but I find fire interesting. When I look at fire, I immediately go into some kind of trance where I can’t hear or see people around me. I start thinking of the good old days and laughing like I’m 80 years old reflecting on my life before the war.
According to my uncle, everyone and their dog should have a fire plan. My understanding of a fire plan is a list of possessions in order of value so that you know what to save first if a fire comes your way.
I wrote up a fire plan when I was 15 and it’s one of best I’ve ever seen.
Listed on the plan is a simple list of 568 possessions in order of value and importance.
Step 1 is obviously to break the window, followed by shoving my mattress outside so that I can throw all my books down onto the mattress without destroying them. Each of my books gets a rating on how important it is to me so that if a fire ever were to happen I know exactly which books need to be saved first.
That’s basically the whole fire plan… if I have extra time I’ve included my calligraphy set, Hardanger fiddle, and favorite mug that reads “The World Needs More Canada.”
So all of this is to say that I think Fire and I have a pretty decent relationship. If it ever comes I’m ready for it because I have the security of my fire plan. I’ve also read and seen Fireproof by Eric Wilson, the inspirational Christian story of a failing marriage that gets rebuilt through the grace of Christ Jesus.
Did I read that book when I was too young?
Yes, most likely I did… I blame my Aunt Lois for having it on her bookshelf when I was 10. If you’re a struggling married couple you might want to be careful when you’re around me because I do consider myself something of a marriage therapist after my brief sojourn into that world.
Well, the winter of 2022 was brutal on my old body. It literally almost caused psychological damage. I was permanently cold from September 13, 2021-June 4, 2022. The cold can mess with your sanity… just look at Russian history as an example.
One frigid, blood, death, freezing, ice-cold, walk-in-freezer-like day I walked through the door of my house. I could sense that I had simply experienced too much cold that day. I felt that if I even looked at just one ice cube something bad would happen. It was the beginning of what I would eventually realize was a form of insanity.
I felt a small presence of warmth and noticed that my mother was cooking dinner on our gas stove over a large flame. As I had done for years I went to stand in front of it to collect some semblance of warmth.
I stood in front of the stove, holding out my hands, trying to thaw,
This was not enough.
I decided to turn around with my back against the stove to collect warmth in a more thorough and efficient way. As I stood there I felt very much like Icarus…. He’s the guy that wore his father’s wings and didn’t listen to his dad when he said “Don’t fly too close to the sun” and he totally flew way close to the sun and melted and drowned because he was stupid. I’ve always thought that Icarus was one of the dumbest people of all time. During Greek mythology as a child that was a clear thought in my head. Well, there I was, a mature young adult with an authorized fire plan, standing in front of the stove and having my own personal Icarus moment.
I stood there feeling the warmth on my back… but it was not enough… I leaned further and further into the stove until finally feeling like maybe things would be ok.
Then there was a moment… a moment when it felt like the warmth changed… like it got more warm than it was before…. like an unusual kind of warm feeling.
I thought to myself in a very calm and collected manner, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I was on fire right now.”
Now there are a few things I know about myself.
1. If I saw a snake’s mouth attached to my body I would pass out and never wake up
2. I am physically incapable of burning any kind of book (even my old horrendous math textbook that ruined my childhood)
3. I could not survive seeing myself on fire.
Because of #3, I knew I could not look to see if my thought was correct… so I carefully turned around so my sister could see my back.
She immediately said, “Mom, Ari is on fire.”
My. Mom. Laughed.
She thought we were pulling some kind of sick joke.. because I guess my sister and I joke around constantly about one of us being on fire. -_-
Then she saw 3-foot flames all over my back, slammed me into the wall, and beat the crap out of me with an oven mitt.
The whole thing was over in about 7 seconds.
Perhaps Icarus’s moment of stupidity was only 7 seconds as well.
In those brief 7 seconds, I lost most of my clothing, 1 1/2 inches of hair, and some skin that was kind of important to me. I also lost a bit more of the little sanity I had left… this manifested itself in the crazy laughter that I used to try to diffuse the situation which was very tense because I had just been on fire.
My senile grandmother stared daggers at me from the living room probably thinking of the time when she was growing up when they didn’t waste fire on young people. In her eyes I saw that the experience was not a majestic “girl on fire” moment like Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games… it looked like a psychologically disturbed young person who can’t handle a little cold.
I made the decision to be a tougher person like my grandmother must have been in the 1940s during the brief moments when I felt nothing but adrenaline after having just survived being burned alive.
Five seconds later the pain started and didn’t stop for the next 10 days.
In case you’re wondering if you can wear pants with a burned backside… you can’t
So I wore fat man overalls for 3 weeks until it healed… and by healed I mean it looked more purple than red.
The whole experience taught me many things
-Maybe Icarus wasn’t that dumb…. HAHA that’s impossible
-Maybe Ari is as dumb as Icarus sometimes… also impossible
-Maybe the cold weather causes psychological damage to the point that people aren’t responsible for their actions…
In the end, the fire plan didn’t save me one bit.
Neither did sleeping with my door shut or having a bat in my closet
I feel firefighters everywhere have betrayed me.
Ari Icarus Johnson