Flaming Fields

In Minecraft you can build a compass. When I first started playing and was still afraid to go into the caves and thus dependent on any iron I found hanging around at the surface level, making a compass was the pinnacle of my desires. I thought it would fix everything. “Goodbye, being lost!” I thought. Ha. Finally I managed to get enough iron and redstone dust (by boringly digging; I hate digging but it’s safer than caves) to make one. I was quickly disabused of my notion that the compass was going to save me because the compass, frankly, makes little sense. This may be my fault: I’m still not entirely sure if the general annoyance factor of the compass is so high because I’m not one of those people who can be dropped off in the wilderness with a compass and find my way to Albuquerque in a week or whether it’s a Minecraft thing. I lean towards it being a Minecraft thing, because, you see, the compass points toward spawn, not north and all points heading away from spawn are south. It took me a while to figure this out – I even blithely wrote “Head South!” on a sign at a spawning hut, only to find, of course, that South can take you anywhere at all. This confuses me – I think it would confuse anyone who doesn’t live at the North Pole - and leads to my making long and strange circuitous roads that could have easily been combined with other roads if the compass made more sense. In all honesty, though, here on Earth the command to head South can lead to all kinds of different places as well. It is a quandary.

That’s how I discovered the flaming fields. They’re right around the corner and up the coast a bit from Sandstone House but I found them the bass ackwards way with a compass heading “north.” I’ve seen huge forest fires before but this one has to be the biggest ever. Whoa, I thought, and then I thought, wait. I’ve been here before and there was no fire. I started looking around, feeling that déjà vu feeling, and sure enough, up in the sky was the little floating island I had sheltered on before I built Sandstone House. So the fire was brand new.

“Did I do this?” I thought, “Oh no.” Torches don’t catch things on fire, luckily, and I thought that flaming monsters in the daylight didn’t either. I didn’t remember using my flint and steel anywhere but here were acres of burning trees. It must have been my fault, right? It’s been my fault before – using fire to clear a tree or two can easily lead to the kind of experience that makes Smoky the Bear cry a lot. We won’t dwell on that experience. But I honestly couldn’t remember doing anything that would lead to fire this time. I’ve been more careful, Smoky, honestly. Was it my house fire? But none of the trees anywhere near my house were burning; in fact, the tree cover, which went on for quite a while, had kept me from seeing the flames.

I kept exploring and finally I found a pool of still lava that seemed to mark the starting point of this fire. I don’t think it was there a week ago. What the hell? Did it just erupt? Why was it suddenly out there? What strange Minecraft geological forces were at work? If a creeper explodes in the forest when I’m not around does it make a sound? See, Minecraft is good for your brain, philosophically – the deep questions are all here, right up to and including the Oh Shit I’m Going to Die, Freeze or Flee? question that is so central to our experience as paltry mortal beings.

My best guess is that the lava suddenly appeared – why? I don’t know. – and a hapless farm animal or maybe an evil monster fell into it and then started lurching around, flaming, and caught a tree. The domino effect took over and lo, Flaming Fields was born. I thought about trying to clear it but a half days work with an axe made me realize the futility of that notion. Flaming Fields is here to stay.

The realization that there’s not a damn thing I can do about Flaming Fields has disheartened me. Just like various ecological disasters on Earth, there’s little one person can actually do. I mean, sure, yes, I could conceivably devote the rest of my life to cleaning up a river or part of the Gulf or Flaming Fields, but in actual fact I’m too lame. Or too tired, whichever. Thus, as is so often the case, I give up. I don’t give up right away, because I do go through a cave or two, finding a lot of lapis, whoo hoo, and discovering that I can actually dye sheep on the hoof. That’s pretty cool and I dye a couple of sheep an attractive and vivid blue but then they wander into Flaming Fields and die, which is depressing. Fuck this. I leave World 2 for a while and move on to another world: World 3.