Burning Off-Cuts
My first night back in the van I stop in the White Mountains above Conway. Back to the forest. No cell signal, no humans for miles. Nothing to do but watch the sun set and burn the off-cuts.
I stack them up in the fire pit, on a bed of dry leaves. All of the bits of plywood and two-by-four that will never be anything else, the scraps left over after the usable pieces have been cut out of the board. Some of it is blemished or warped or otherwise unusable, but most of it would have been perfectly good if a pencil line had gone just a few inches to the left. But instead here it is, stacked up in a circle of stones.
I light the paper at the base and the flames rise quickly through the dry wood. I can see the parts that were cut away, the negative space in their shapes that became the cabinets and seats and bed in my van, but I can also see the loss. A perfect rectangle of plywood, 32 square feet of pure, raw potential, was reduced to real furniture. Infinite possibilities collapsed beneath the blade of a saw into mere actualizations. And now what’s left over is going up in the blaze.
There are so many cuts to be made on the way to finishing, and in many ways the end result is as much a question of what is left behind as what is kept. Every road taken is a thousand thrown on to the licking flames. For now I lean in, letting the fire push away the cold autumn air for as long as the off-cuts can burn.
