As my son Colin and I packed the car full of camping gear and headed toward Coronado National Forest, south of Tucson, the familiar discussion had already begun — basically about him being the best damn whatever. This topic always seemed reasonable, essential even. But then the conversation gets wanders into the searing heat of the desert. One of the problems was my well-meaningness: I was a dad stuck in the son-launching mode. Why couldn’t I just let him write his own script? Actually, even then I trusted his judgement and the tools he was choosing, but I had these orders from my genes to share lessons my lessons learned. (Over the years I’d morphed into a lessons-vending machine.) I probably thought I was going the paternal extra-mile, still dispensing soap and water for all those times when things would really suck.

“You have to love the work you do,” I said, for probably the hundredth time. “If you find good work you’ve just given yourself five days a week.” (He’d surely auto-memorized this one.) Then the stark- reality voice in me spoke up. “it’s also true that you may have to bump around a little to assemble the career pieces,” I counseled.

Twenty-one years-old and six-foot-four, he spelled it out: “I don’t want any part of a desk job. Period. And I don’t want anybody looking over my shoulder to see how fast I’m working.”

“I get it.”

“I want to be like the Apache chief, Geronimo, standing up for what I believe,” Colin said as we drove through a desert landscape of saguaros and creosote bush. His ambitions were pure components of an evolving personal ethic. He had recently led a group of fellow Prescott students through this same Arizona terrain, a place where thirty-eight Apache Indians had held off five thousand U.S. troops for over a year, for love of the land they knew. A large part of me was in synch with Colin and his Apache mentor. But in today’s world, everybody wants your job. Everybody wants your money. How do you find your signal in all the noise? The bottom line was this, and he made it clear: “Don’t worry, I got this.” Face to face, he told me he was happy. So I deliberately, strategically backed off, better late than never.

We set up camp in the desert, accidentally discovering how close it was to the border: a patrol blimp hovered silently above the desert canopy. On a walk to stretch our legs, scrambling over sandstone and cactus, he said, “I want to show you something. “I think you’ll like this.” Standing beside a ten-foot-tall flower stalk (stool, in the agave family) he cut a walking-stick section of the stalk, about the diameter of a standard flashlight lens. I could tell he was excited about sharing his fire-making skills. He carved a small section into a platform, then added a notch in one edge of it. Then he gathered clumps of sun-baked grass and set the tinder ball aside.

“Will you help with the drilling?” he requested. “It takes a lot of energy, but there’s a sweet payoff when you get fire!” I stepped into the heart of this ancient, treasured craft. Colin’s intensity and focus were so familiar! He would waggle down the shaft of the stalk and I’d quickly take over at the top. The friction we made bored a tiny hole in the platform. I announced from my hands and knees that we were getting a wisp of smoke, and he responded in a grunt, “But no coals yet, right?” I wanted this effort to be successful for many reasons. I wanted to celebrate the skill he’d acquired at Prescott College and in a wider sense, I could imagine so many ancestors, hungry or cold, desperate for fire. Our efforts made me feel like a son of many fathers.

Eight or nine minutes went by, no coals. Finally, after my arms were exhausted, he rubbed sweat from his forehead and tried one last time. At last, a tiny coal fell down the carved notch and into the warm hill of sawdust. “This is the moment I like the best. I can take a little break now, the glowing coal will spread into the sawdust. If we’re lucky.” After a few catch-up breaths, he grabbed the tinder ball and placed it over the tiny coal, softly breathing fire into the bed, and into himself.