The Six Years I Didn't Touch Fire

My brother and I learned fire together. Fifty dollars a show, driving up and down the Utah valley as teenagers, two kids with a poi set and no real idea what we were building. That's where twenty-eight years of fire performance actually started, in a car with my brother arguing about whose turn it was to drive.

He died about ten years ago. I don't tell that story often, and when I do I keep it short, which is its own kind of tell. I was living in California at the time, out of the Marine Corps, staying at his place for our sister's wedding reception. Two or three in the morning, a knock at the door, a police officer standing there. I've never needed more detail than that to know exactly where I was standing.

I didn't process any of it for seven or eight years. What I did instead was get busy. I had a marketing company by then, fifteen employees, an office in Ogden. I built that into something that could swallow every waking hour I had, and it did, and I let it. A sixty-hour week doesn't leave much room to sit still with a dead brother.

Fire went with it. Fire was ours, his and mine, and I didn't pick up a prop again for six years. It wasn't a decision I made on purpose. I just never got around to it, the way you never get around to a thing you can't afford to feel your way through.

I got back into it by accident. A three-day business summit in Park City, an icebreaker question on the first morning about the most unique thing about you. I said I was a Samoan fire knife dancer, mostly as a throwaway answer, and the room made a sound I wasn't expecting out of seventy-five executives. The organizer found me at the first break and talked me into performing after the dinner banquet two nights later.

I hadn't spun fire in six years. I'd touched it once, three or four weeks earlier, more or less by coincidence. My wife at the time drove the hour home to grab my gear while I traded a three piece suit for a sarong and leis, and I did a Polynesian set in a courtyard while it sprinkled rain, off a tiny bluetooth speaker. I still have the video. It's slow, my hesitation visible in every frame. I look at it now and it's a little embarrassing, and I keep it anyway.

After that night people started calling me the fire CEO. I liked it enough to buy the domain. I told myself that was the whole story, a good nickname from a fun coincidence at a conference. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to notice what had actually happened. The thing I'd been avoiding for six years had walked back into my life through a room full of strangers, at an event that had nothing to do with fire.

The actual grief work came later, mostly by stumbling into it. A personal development workshop where it came out sideways, in the middle of something else entirely. A handful of therapists over the years, working through different pieces, my brother eventually one of them. I'm not finished with it. I don't think that kind of thing finishes. But I can talk about it now without it taking me apart, which is further than I was willing to bet on for a long time.

I still think about the version of me who drove up and down that valley for fifty dollars a show, arguing with his brother about the radio, both of us too young to know we were building the first draft of a career. I don't know what he'd make of Hana now, or of me now. I know the six years I spent not touching fire were never really about fire. They were the only way I knew how to carry something I hadn't figured out how to put down.