My father provides ideas for stories from time to time, or the core of the tale itself, upon occasion. Beyond the similarity of our speaking voices, our storytelling and argumentation resonate harmoniously, making for easy writing. The nub of this tale starts with an email from the senior Colonel, in which he offered two images of heat: a blacksmith and an angel standing on the sun. This prompted reflections on people working with heat to create things.

My father grew up in the countryside, outside of Philadelphia. Sure enough, in the 1940s there was still a blacksmith in the community. The blacksmith has lived on in my father’s childhood memories, like the inquisitive postmistress, and his favorite childhood toy. Blacksmiths create things both practical and aesthetically pleasing through the application of so much heat that iron or steel becomes malleable. For some great pictures and description of the process, you should read Scott Wilmot’s “Homesteading: 3 Days of Blacksmithing.” Blacksmiths work in close proximity to extreme heat and can only create with metal heated to such a temperature as could inflict devastating injuries in case of accidental contact. 

Other artisans work in softer metals, melting their work materials in a sort of pot, skimming off impurities and then pouring off some of the molten metal into a mold, from which the cooled solid forms may be further manipulated into a final design, for ornament or practical use. I have an early memory of my father practicing one such art.

If you wish to shoot with some regularity, you must either have the budget for newly manufactured ammunition or the time to assemble components together into rounds ready for firing. Of the component parts, there is one that the average hobbyist might produce: the bullet. You can make your own cast lead bullets. 

Get a small stock of the right sort of lead. Get very sturdy long leather gloves, an iron pot for melting the lead, a long handled stirrer and ladle, and the right size mold, which will lock shut. The mold opens, and the newly cast bullets drop free, with a tap on the mold from a small brass mallet. You will not need more than a gas fired camp stove, and yes, you should be doing this outdoors on a pleasant day so you need not worry about any lead fumes.

As I recall, my father used a mold that allowed you to pour two bullets at a time. He most certainly did not let us young children do the melting or pouring ourselves. Look but do not touch. Such orders from my parents were like force fields. As my middle sister commented many years later, observing a spoiled brat carrying on in public, “I don’t recall that we had the option.” No, we did not.

What we learned from looking was a bit about turning solid chunks of metal into liquid and then converting some of that molten metal into useful shapes when it solidified. From this observation, we were better prepared to understand accounts of Paul Revere, and then of matter changing states with changes in temperature. 

Consider an industrial scale application of heat. No, I am not referring to steel or aluminum smelters. Consider a lesser, but very controlled, use of heat in creating something useful. “How Do You Make That Hose?” tells the story of my maternal grandfather’s patented process for vulcanizing rubber hose while it is in motion on an assembly line. Without vulcanization, natural or synthetic rubber turns gooey or disintegrates into brittle bits. Apply the right amount of heat for the right duration, and you get everything from your garden hose to the fan belts in cars.

In reading the story of my grandfather, Douglas Pratt was reminded of his own grandfather’s invention of a process for efficiently producing applesauce on a commercial scale. It turns out that the application of both pressure and heat to apples, by hot steam jets, created applesauce far more efficiently than boiling them in a pot.

Both the rubber hose and the applesauce making looks like a factory process. Yet, if you look closer, or step back far enough, you may discern a creative mind behind an elegant design for the creative application of heat. The creative mind is far more evident in other fields.

Walking through the Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden with my father and mother one fine spring day, the strange and beautiful products of heat and imagination were scattered throughout the fields and beds. My folks started coming down to the Phoenix area to spend a week watching the Mariners at spring training. After the Mariners jacked up the prices, but failed to sustain excellence on the field after their one magical World Series season, my folks shifted their itinerary to visiting a series of gardens from Washington state down through California and over to the Desert Botanical Garden.

So, there we were, to see the wide variety of plants that can flourish in the Sonoran Desert. Yes, the Valley of the Sun is in the northern reaches of the desert named for the Mexican state of Sonora to the south. The most impressive native plant, the grandest, is the saguaro, but there are many others. Yet, on this particular visit, the most impressive sights, the wildest shapes and richest colors, were the creations of a blown glass artist: Chihuly.

While working at lower temperatures than the blacksmith or other metal smiths, glassblowers is constantly working, at a careful distance, with molten glass. There seems to be constant movement to their work, as their material so quickly cools. Applying blown air while spinning the glass allows a glassblower, working alone or with assistants, to manipulate a molten blob into all manner of beautiful and strange glass forms.

The artist’s creative acts are evident to all of us in the riotous swirling yellow and orange sculpture. Not pause a bit longer. Scan left. Is this thing of nature not also a product of heat, albeit much more gradually forming and still changing? What great creative mind conceived this work of nature?

“Awesome” has been worn out in overuse, but this is awesome:

¹⁷ And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God;

¹⁸ That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great. [Revelation 19:17-18, KJV]

Searching on “angel standing in the sun” yields frescos and iconography that depict an angel standing in the Sun, not under the sun or in sunlight, but rather in the Sun. In the midst of the events being described, a being standing unscathed on Sol is not a great leap. After all it is a being that only sometimes manifests in the dimensions we perceive. It is a servant, outside of the universe as we ordinarily experience it, of an entity that created the universe we experience. That being, at this point in the story, is about to remake the entirely of creation, and the means? Fire.

For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, 6 and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. 7 But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. [2 Peter 3:5-7, ESV]

It seems, then, that people who have learned to work creatively with fire reflect an aspect of the Creator. Vulcanism, no not in the Star Trek sense, points back to the Roman god of fire, whose activity extended to volcanos. Consider the creative power of a volcano when it produces massive lava flows. Then think of the crops harvested from lava-rich soil. Then think bigger than a puny god of volcanos and blacksmithing, to a Creator of the rules by which all of this is brought into existence and sustained, through all the better and worse lesser creative efforts by humanity. That is a hot idea.