It's Bonfire Night...

No, not the British version. Not Guy Fawkes' Night. This is Woodberry's, and in a little less than two hours, the Bonfire will be burning in celebration of tomorrow's game against our archrivals. That's the excuse, anyway. Kelly disagrees. At our first Bonfire, Kelly looked around at the howling, half-naked boys brandishing torches like something from a roadshow production of Lord of the Flies and said to me, "This isn't about a football game. This is about the death of the Corn God!"

I like bonfires, but they can certainly be a bit frightening. When I went to Manchester University, I didn't know about Guy Fawkes' Night. I mean, I knew about it, but I didn't know when it was. One Saturday in November I went on a field trip, along with all the other American exchange students, to various places in Yorkshire, including Halifax and the Bronte Museum in Haworth. It had been a lovely day, but as the sun set and our bus began wending its way home to Man. U., I noticed that visibility was getting bad. Fog? Well, it wasEngland, after all... Still, it was a bit unsettling. It was even more unsettling when I realized it wasn't fog at all; I don't have much of a sense of smell, but even I could catch the scent of smoke after a while. Then I started catching glimpses of orange light on the hillsides, and sometimes down in the valleys. They were fires, I realized, and they were everywhere. It wasn't one big fire, but dozens, even hundreds of smaller ones. What the hell was going on?

I had recently seen a production of Raymond Briggs' post-nuclear tragicomedy When the Wind Blows, and it may have influenced my thinking, but I became worried that civilization had fallen. I thought about Isaac Asimov's story "Nightfall," in which a planet accustomed to eternal light from its six suns finally has them all in shadow--and has to set fire to its structures to provide itself with the light it needs. Our own world was being run by Reagan and Thatcher at the time, and who knew what they might have done while we were wandering through the museum, looking at photos of actors who'd played Heathcliff and copies of Kate Bush singles? Somehow it seemed entirely plausible, traveling through the mysterious darkness of the Pennine Mountains, that the bombs had dropped.

Eventually I realized that the fires were too cheerful, too controlled, for anything so apocalyptic, though I might have thought differently if I'd been able to see any of the effigies of Guy Fawkes blazing amidst the flames. I finally remembered the British tradition of setting fires to commemorate Fawkes' attempt to blow up Parliament, and I took note of the date. And since that time, I've tried to remember the fifth of November.

It's what one is supposed to do, after all. In his last Sandman story, Neil Gaiman perhaps half-jokingly had Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare collaborate on a bit of doggerel that achieved immortality:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot.
I know no reason the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em, everyone.
5:37 PM

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