We Didn't Start the Fire

Behind our house is a stand of pine trees. They were planted about forty years ago on a five-acre patch between the back yard and a large field, and they represent the first sign of surrender by my wife’s farming family, when dismal crop prices in the early eighties made clear that it was time to plant something besides corn and soybeans, and to start looking for another way to make a living. Like hundreds of other small farmers across Louisiana and Mississippi, my wife’s family signed up for the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) Longleaf Pine Initiative, which paid struggling farmers to take their land out of row crop production and plant pine trees instead. Tall and graceful now, these pines stand east of our house, so the morning sun sends shafts of light flooding between the trunks. Or it would, if the patch hadn’t been overtaken by an impenetrable thicket of Chinese privet, which swallows the pine trunks in a dark tangle of undergrowth to a height of twenty feet or more, and serves as a secure hiding place for the deer that invade the backyard, having their way with my wife’s rose bushes each night. 

For years we’ve looked out at this wall of drab foliage and imagined doing something about it. Then for some reason last winter I went down to the edge of the thicket with a chainsaw and spent a satisfying afternoon clearing privet from around the nearest pine tree. The next weekend I cleared around another tree, then another. A year later the pine patch is about two-thirds cleared—the privet replaced by a dozen massive burn piles—and the tantalizing sight of the morning sun stealing through stands of newly-liberated trunks is enough inspiration to keep me at it until all the privet is gone. If Billy Joel doesn’t kill me first.

Because here’s the thing: all the time I’m doing the heavy but strangely satisfying work of clearing privet, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” will be stuck in my head. Remember that song? It’s the one where Billy repeats a chorus of “We didn’t start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire / No we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it …” over and over until your brain surrenders and starts chanting along. It’s this chorus that goes round and round in my head while I’m plodding back and forth, arranging privet limbs into burn piles. If my brain was capable of reproducing the rest of the song, in which Billy reels off scores of headline-making events that happened over the course of his lifetime (“Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again. Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock …”) it would be more interesting. But that’s not how earworms work, is it?

This is weird—worse than the blisters, scratches, and poison ivy rashes that are also side-effects of a Saturday in the pine patch. Why this particular song? And why does my brain feel the need to spoil a perfectly good flow activity by regurgitating it over and over again? When and where did I even hear this song recently enough for it to have become so deeply embedded in my brain stem? In a gas station somewhere? In the local supermarket (always a reliable source of bombproof eighties radio hits)? Or has it been lurking there since 1989, like a benign tumor, waiting for the right combination of environmental cues to cause it to flare up? Because it’s not like “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is stuck on repeat in my head while I’m driving to work or cooking dinner or mowing the lawn. There’s something about the specific pace and tempo of cutting, dragging, and stacking privet branches that brings it on. And lastly, why is it that the songs that end up stuck in your head are never ones that you like? I don’t have anything against Billy Joel particularly; it’s just that I never expected to be chased around a pine forest by him. 

So what’s the solution? Drowning Billy out with the lyrics to different songs (Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack” springs to mind) doesn’t work. Nor does chanting nursery rhymes or turning on a radio. So maybe Billy’s trying to tell me something. Perhaps the best strategy is to stop trying to drown him out and do what he suggests: start the fire. Maybe, when the last of the privet is cut and all those huge burn piles are set alight—in my own redneck version of Burning Man (complete with effigy)—I will finally have succeeded in consigning Billy’s specter to the flames. Then my work here will be done.