Wood doesn’t burn, my
Pop explained.
It’s mostly water.
Water boils.
What you call smoke
is mostly steam.
It hisses, I said, and screams trying to rush away from the heat.
It’s not a person,
Pop explained.
Chemicals react.
The gas expands,
bursting the cells, steam lighter than air just floats
away.
Then the wood gets dry, and then it
burns?
(Bright little
eight-year-old.)
No. Burning’s an
illusion, really. At best, an imprecise term.
What happens next,
organic compounds break down in the heat, some of the hydrogen and oxygen form
more water which also boils away leaving extra hydrogen atoms to oxidize and
that’s the flame.
I don’t remember
exactly how he explained it.
Something about the
surface to volume ratio in the twigs, dry limbs, and thin split kindling.
From match to
cardboard to sticks to logs and when the fire was blazing hot he said you could
even throw a wet log in, boil it like a furious teapot without sucking the life
out of that fire.
I’m no scientist but
I know wood does not burn,
it boils and melts
and breaks down into elements that oxidize in air, leaving only carbon.
And when he died last
summer, quietly,
his hand cool in mine,
his heart popping
erratically on the monitor above our heads,
slower and weaker,
then flat—
his breath crackling
and hissing, then ceasing, a pale ember of a man,
I forgot that night
in the woods when he taught me chemistry.
Only now, winter in
-- Ken Kaye, The