In June 1996, the Hochderffer Hills Fire started and over the course of ten days would become the largest fire in the history of the Coconino National Forest. In the summer of 2017, as I was collecting materials to make sculptures with, I noticed the big bellied gray ponderosa pines decomposing into the earth. But their branch attachments were solid, hard and full of pitch. My memory automatically took me back to a graduate art history class I took on Indian painting, where we studied various paintings that illustrated Indian monarchs laid on funeral pyres, their penis's erect, the last throes of creation, reproduction and ejaculation as the fire flared below.