Twitter Campfire Stories
6 Nov
When we were kids, my brothers and I spent our summers at my grandparent’s cabin in the hills of New York’s southern tier.
By day, we’d raise heck like boys do, flinging apples with whittled sticks, searching for salamanders in the gully, or trekking up to the North 40. By night, we’d settle around the campfire to tell stories we’d told countless time before.
Now, half a lifetime later, I’m sitting by the campfire again, telling tales with a cadre of storytellers I barely know. Only this campfire is different.
By the dim glow of Twitter’s artificial firelight, I can make out only the shadowy silhouettes of their faces. I know them only by their voices, so to speak…by the timbre of their Tweets. We are strangers, and yet, we are friends.
We tell a story in which we are all characters. Our Tweets are a sort of folk lore, a shared history we write together. Tweet by tweet, we add to the story — to our story — deepening it, giving it texture. With each keystroke, we allow ourselves to be drawn more deeply into the story.
On those summer nights of my childhood, when the night was lit only by the campfire’s flame, my eyesight would surrender to my other senses. The shrill whistle of an apple log, I learned, is a dialect altogether different from the crackle of old hickory. I discovered the taste of fog, and the mossy scent of a White Pine on a humid night.
I learned, too, that there’s more to a man than he reveals by daylight. I came to know my father best, and grew closest to him, when we stared into the embers of the same dying fire.
Staring into the fire. Following a stream of Tweets hardly seems to compare. And yet, amid the @replies and DMs, there is camaraderie. Around this modern day campfire, in this darkness, I find kinship with these strangers.
As I scroll through the avatars of everyone gathered around the Twitter campfire with me, I’m reminded of an old camp song I heard long ago, adapted from a John Denver tune:
There’s an old man on a mountain, a mile or more away
Heading down an old, familiar trail
His body’s feeling weary, his feet are getting sore
But he smiles for now he knows that he is home.Â
Hey it’s good to be back home again
Sometimes this old place feels like a long-lost friend
And hey it’s good to be back home again
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