In August 2020 the CZU Lightening Complex Fire burned more than 97% of Big Basin State Park in Northern California.
The path is unfamiliar now.
Seven summers ago, we built campfires at night, slipped gooey marshmallows between
chocolate and cracker.
The trees green, shrubs sang as bees haloed their flowers.
The sky canopied by an arc of branches.
Dirt’s damp smell, dew-dropped from the morning’s fog.
Droplets beaded on our packs, swiveled down our necks, caught itself in the tips of pine needles.
Our boots imprinted themselves into soft soil.
This year when we return, the trunks are singed and stoic.
Heat pummels our heads as dust swirls behind us in small tornados.
Stopping to lunch on a fallen log, we watch ants move in and out of our thumb’s shadow.
Now, plastic signage is torqued into abstract art.
Charred grills without campsites pushed to the backs of trees.
“Have you been here before?” the park ranger asks as we pull up to the makeshift kiosk.
“Not since…” our pause mid-sentence enough for her to grasp.
She nods, scribbles her initials on our parking pass.
“You’ll see. The trees are surviving.”
—
Laurel Maxwell is a poet from Santa Cruz, CA whose work is inspired by life’s mundane and the natural world. Her work has appeared at baseballballard.com, coffecontrails, phren-z, Verse-Virtual, Tulip Tree Review, and Yellow Arrow Vignette. Her creative fiction was a finalist for Women on Writing Flash Fiction Contest. Her piece A Still Life was nominated for Best of the Net by Yellow Arrow Publishing. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. When not writing Laurel enjoys putting her feet in the sand, reading, traveling, and trying not to make too much of a mess baking in a too small kitchen. She works in education.
