A Burning Yurt

My good friend Corbett, unable to secure an off-campus living arrangement, and refusing to enter a dormitory ever again, had petitioned the college administration for an alternative housing scenario.

The faculty had gotten wind of his time in Africa, and despite their consternation at his unwillingness to report on his East African initiation experience — Corbett had steadfastly refused to “study his friends” — they had agreed to his request for an anthropological experiment in “alternative living.”

During the previous year, Corbett and his free-spirited pals had taken to hosting Native American style sweat lodges in the woods above campus. They bent several saplings over to form a crude dome and covered the structure with a tightly wrapped medley of tarps, fastened with ropes and twine. Stones were heated over a campfire and centered inside the lodge where the participants added cold water and sat in a circle soaking up the steam.

I’m fairly confident the Native Americans were unexposed to alcohol for the majority of their sweat-lodge history, but Corbett’s crew passed around wine and whiskey, replenishing their freshly sweat poisons with new batches.

Later, when it came time to sort out living arrangements for junior year, Corbett decided he would take the Native American spirit one step further. Soliciting our friend Michael for a roommate, he petitioned for and was granted permission to construct a Mongolian-style teepee in the woods above campus.

“It’s a yurt,” Corbett explained to our friends as he and Mike finished packing loose hay about the foundation. (They had both worked for my father on the island and were confident in their newfound construction skills.)

“Perfectly satisfactory abode,” Corbett beamed. “No reason to live like sardines in a concrete prison with a bunch of Mass-holes!”

“Got a woodstove and everything in there.” Mike chimed in — equal parts pleased and nervous to be intimately involved in Corbett’s latest adventure.

Michael was an interesting character who had grown up in Washington, D.C. He was short and wiry with intense brown eyes and small nubby dreadlocks. He was into hip hop before it was called hip hop and constantly introduced white-bread kids at Colby to cutting edge music and literature.

After college he worked for my parents with me on the apartments and out at the lake. Mike was the last person I knew with the gift of genuine letter writing, and over the years sent several beautifully written missives meticulously scrawled in all caps. Corbett was fortunate to have found an ideal yurt-mate.

The two settled into their new digs on the hill above the field behind the president’s house. They worked hard to create a comfortable space and before long were settled in Colby’s inaugural off-campus yurt.

The interior of the teepee was pleasant, featuring a braided rug, two mattresses and trunks doubling as dressers and bookcases. As the temperature dropped in late autumn, Corbett fired up the woodstove and he and Michael enjoyed warm evenings, followed by crisp nights and chilly mornings before breakfast and class.

As you might imagine, curious students and friends made their way over to marvel at this unique collegiate living arrangement. When feeling idle and unchallenged, Corbett had the woods and plenty of space to fire off salvos of arrows and spears. Mike spent much of his time listening to music on a boom box, writing, and reading voraciously.

One evening, while plodding his way through a dense novel as Corbett slept, Michael was pleasantly surprised by an unusually brighter light to read by. He read each night using the light of a battery powered lamp, and conveniently (and naively) assumed the unusually strong luminance had come from the newly installed dry-cell marine battery.

Then the glow across the pages of his novel flickered.

Again assuming an innocent scenario, Michael checked the light bulb to see if it needed a twist to better the connection. It was at precisely this moment that a flake of light gray ash floated gently in front of his face.

Mike attempted to pluck the drifting ash but was distracted by his book. The pages in hand were now brightly lit and it did not take long for his visual senses to align with his olfactory. Smelling the smoke, Mike looked to the ceiling. The flue pipe from the woodstove had lit the canvas of the yurt and the canopy was blazing.

“Fire!” Mike screamed, flinging the paperback across the room.

“Fire!” he repeated, but Corbett was already on his feet and hurling his belongings through the door flap.

Mike, perhaps betraying a lack of training in emergency procedures, yet fiercely dedicated to the pursuit of adventure, experienced an irrational and indignant moment, and paused with inaction.

“How the hell could this happen?” he thought to himself, simultaneously recognizing that Corbett had already given up on the future of their precious yurt and was busy heaving his trunk (which contained the bulk of his belongings, as if he suspected this kind of thing might happen) out the doorway.

However, one group, the Colby College campus security detail, had not given up on the saving of the school’s inaugural yurt.

Having spotted the smoke some minutes before, they drove their blue-and-white Ford Taurus, outfitted with studded snow tires, straight up Runnals Field, skirting the president’s front lawn, up to the top of the hill and the edge of the woods, arriving early on the scene with fire extinguishers in tow.

Mike, who had given up on the rescue of his precious belongings in the face of what was now a conical shaped inferno (and increasingly indignant that Corbett seemed to have removed the entirety of his things in no time at all), found renewed hope in an unlikely source.

The campus security force was notoriously incompetent and both Corbett and Michael had had more than one infuriating run in with the college’s safety detail. This checkered history seemed behind them, though, as the two guards leapt from their vehicle and bravely ran toward the blaze with their portable foam hydrants at the ready.

Sadly, both fire extinguishers were empty.

Bone dry, in fact.

The guards exchanged looks with Corbett and with Mike, who promptly dropped his head in confirmation that ninety percent of his worldly possessions were destined to be cinders.

Alas, Michael had little time to grieve as sirens sounded and they turned to watch the Waterville Fire Department trucks careening off-road and up the hill.

As fire trumps almost every conceivable mitigating circumstance, the drivers of the pump and ladder trucks saw no reason to avoid the president’s pristine lawns and destroyed them wholesale as they bounced and dug in, tires spinning through the mud on the way to their duty.

By the time they arrived, however, the fire had run its course and the yurt, along with Mike’s letters, books, clothes, and collection of South American bamboo flutes had been reduced to an acrid and smoldering pile of debris.

The off-campus Native American living experiment was over, and Corbett and Mike were homeless.