September 24, 2026
What Twenty-Eight Years Actually Looked Like
Twenty-eight years of fire work looks like glamour from the outside. Most of it was actually a truck, a phone, and years of paperwork that never made it into a single photo.
Most of a fire show happens before anyone sees fire. A truck loaded with propane tanks, a drive that usually takes longer than the show itself, a phone full of half finished text threads with a venue about parking and load-in time.
People meet me and picture the highlight reel. Fire in the air, a crowd going quiet, a photo that ends up on a website somewhere. That part is real, and it's still the reason I do this. But it's the smallest slice of the actual job, and it always has been.
Building Hana from a fire performer with a truck into a company with performers in eleven states meant most of my hours went somewhere nobody sees. Contracts. Invoices. Coordinating a crew in a state I'm not standing in. Answering the same three questions from a planner who's never booked a fire act before, and needing to sound calm about it like it's the first time I've heard the question instead of the tenth one that week.
None of that photographs. Nobody asks about the afternoon spent getting a venue's insurance paperwork sorted, or the nights a drive home ran past midnight with gear rattling around in the truck bed and every light on the freeway starting to blur together. That's not a story anyone tells at a dinner party. It's most of the actual career.
For a long time I treated that gap like something to hide. Admitting the job is mostly phone calls and paperwork felt like it made the whole thing smaller, less like a craft and more like any other small business grinding through its Tuesday. It took years to stop being embarrassed about the boring parts and start being honest that they're the parts that actually built something. Fire got people's attention. The driving and the calls and the invoicing are what turned that attention into a company still standing after twenty-eight years.
I'm not looking for sympathy about the hours. I chose this, and I'd choose it again tomorrow. What I want is for the choosing to stay honest. If somebody's watching from outside and reading it as glamour, I'd rather they know what actually fills the years, so if they go build something of their own they're not blindsided when the real work turns out to be unglamorous too.
I still love the twenty minutes on stage more than almost anything else I do. I don't love it because it's rare. I love it because I know what it cost to get there, and most of that cost never shows up in a photo. Twenty-eight years of that, and I'd still call the fire the smallest part of the job. Just also the part I'd never trade.