I used to think I understood fire.
I grew up in Montana, where summers meant campfires and winters meant woodstoves crackling in the corner of the living room. Fire was warmth, safety, the smell of pine logs catching flame. Fire was home.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2016 that I learned fire could also be a monster.
I was working seasonal construction out in Nevada, repairing a stretch of highway near an old mining town. The desert sun beat down mercilessly, and every task felt heavier in that heat. On the third week, our foreman told us to help clear brush near a storage shed that had been abandoned for years.
“Just move fast,” he said. “Storm’s rolling in tonight, and I don’t want lightning striking dry weeds this close to the site.”
I remember laughing about it with my buddy Kyle.
“Lightning? Out here? Place hasn’t seen rain in months.”
But orders were orders. We hauled junk, piled up old boards, broken pallets, scraps of tar paper. Someone struck a match to burn it all down. The flames roared up instantly, hotter and faster than anyone expected.
At first, it was fun—watching the blaze dance, hearing it crackle like a living thing. But then the wind shifted. Sparks sprayed, embers leapt, and suddenly the shed itself was on fire.
“Get the hell back!” our foreman shouted.
I was too close. Too slow. The old structure went up like a torch. The roof caved, a beam split, and in one sickening moment, fire swallowed me whole.
I don’t remember much of the next thirty seconds. Just heat. A roar louder than anything I’d ever heard. The smell of burning wood—and then, sickeningly, the smell of burning flesh. My flesh.
I felt my arm catch first. A searing agony shot through me, white-hot, as if someone had poured molten metal onto my skin. I stumbled back, screaming, but another beam collapsed, spraying sparks across my chest. My shirt went up like paper.
I remember clawing at it, ripping the fabric away, the fire biting into me even as I fought to escape.
Then Kyle was there, tackling me into the dirt.
“Roll! Roll, dammit!” he shouted.
He forced me down, grinding me into the sand, smothering the flames with his own jacket. My lungs burned, each breath tasting like smoke and ash.
When the fire on me finally died, I was shaking uncontrollably. My left arm was blistered and raw, patches of skin already sloughing off. My chest felt like it had been branded, charred in ugly patterns.
Kyle’s face hovered above mine, pale with shock.
“Oh Jesus, man. Jesus Christ. Stay with me.”
Someone else shouted, “Get water!” Another voice, panicked: “Don’t pour it on—just cool him, cool him slow!”
Hands lifted me, dragged me away from the blaze. Someone pressed a damp cloth against my arm. The contact made me scream all over again.
Burn pain isn’t like anything else. It doesn’t fade like a cut or dull like a bruise. It climbs into your nerves and screams endlessly, turning minutes into eternities.
I begged for it to stop.
But it didn’t. Not for a long, long time.
They got me to a hospital two hours later. Those two hours were the longest of my life.
I drifted in and out of awareness, catching fragments of voices. Kyle telling me to breathe. The foreman yelling into a radio for help. The sound of tires skidding as someone’s pickup barreled down the highway toward civilization.
The ER smelled like antiseptic and something sharp I couldn’t name. Nurses swarmed me, cutting away the remnants of my clothes. One of them said, “Second and third-degree burns, large surface area. Get fluids going. Morphine, now.”
Morphine. The word was like a prayer. When it hit my veins, the edges of the pain dulled, though it never truly disappeared.
The doctors explained later: about 30% of my body had been burned. My arm, chest, part of my neck. The worst part wasn’t even the pain—it was the risk of infection. Burned skin can’t protect you anymore. It’s open territory for bacteria.
They debrided the wounds, which is a fancy word for scraping away the dead tissue. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Imagine your body already screaming, and then someone has to peel and cut at it like you’re not even human.
I spent weeks in that burn unit. Skin grafts. Bandage changes that felt like torture sessions. Nights where I woke up drenched in sweat, convinced I was still on fire.
Through it all, Kyle visited. He’d sit by my bed, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, just making sure I wasn’t alone.
“You scared the hell out of me, man,” he told me once, voice thick. “When I saw your arm burning, I thought… I thought you weren’t gonna make it.”
I looked at him, my voice raspy.
“I didn’t think I was, either.”
Recovery wasn’t a straight line. It never is.
Some days, I felt strong, determined. I’d force myself through physical therapy, learning to stretch and move skin that felt tight and foreign. Other days, I stared at the scars in the mirror and hated myself.
The skin grafts left patchwork patterns across my chest, pale islands surrounded by ridges of scar tissue. My left arm would never look the same. It hurt to lift things. People stared. Children sometimes whispered.
But the hardest part was the memories. Fire haunted me. I couldn’t stand the smell of barbecue grills or the crackle of campfires. Even the hiss of a stove burner made me flinch.
One night, months later, Kyle dragged me out to a support group. Survivors of burns, car accidents, industrial mishaps. People with faces half-rebuilt, hands missing fingers, stories etched into their bodies.
A woman in her fifties, her arms scarred worse than mine, looked me in the eye and said,
“You lived through something that should have killed you. Don’t waste the second chance.”
Her words stuck.
I began talking. First to her, then to others, then eventually to myself. Saying out loud that I was afraid. That I hated what happened. That I hated how I looked. And slowly, very slowly, the fear loosened its grip.
It’s been years now since that day in Nevada.
My scars are still here. They always will be. My left arm aches when the weather changes. My chest is a roadmap of fire’s cruelty. But I’m alive.
I tell my story at schools sometimes, to teenagers who think they’re invincible. I show them the scars, the grafts, the burns. I tell them what it feels like to smell your own skin burning. It’s not to scare them—it’s to remind them that life is fragile, and fire doesn’t forgive mistakes.
Kyle and I are still friends. Every year on the anniversary, we meet up, drink a beer, and sit in silence for a while. We don’t have to say much. We both know what happened, and what could have happened.
I used to think fire was just warmth. Just light in the dark.
Now I know better.
Fire takes. It scars. It changes you.
But if you’re lucky—if you’re very, very lucky—it doesn’t take everything.
I am proof of that.