to build a fire

On Thursday evening we built a fire in our backyard, our first fire of the season. We have piles of wood from pruning our trees this spring, and we'd just been waiting for the right day to have our first fire.  We haven’t yet dug a new fire pit since planting a cherry tree in the first fire pit, so we set a metal bucket atop a large concrete bird bath bowl (to keep from singeing the grass) and built a little fire in that. The bucket had a centimeter of water in the bottom, but we tossed in small sticks and newspaper anyway, figuring the water would steam off.

Though I'm a pyromaniac at heart (aren't we all?), I’ve never been the best fire builder. I can get them started, eventually, but I rarely take the time to set them up properly. If I have a book or box of matches, or a lighter, I know that I don’t have to get the sticks to catch on the first try. When I do take the time to create a nest of soft material and a small teepee of sticks, and getting the fire to catch takes only two or three matches, I feel a deep contentment. But that doesn’t happen very often.

Last Thursday, I crumpled up some newspaper to put in the bottom of the bucket, and layered small twigs on top of it. The newspaper burned quickly, of course, but the sticks refused to catch. And refused to catch. One match became two, and two became seven.  It didn’t help that the wood we were using wasn’t cured, that it is early spring and right now even small twigs still have moisture in them. After twenty minutes the fire still wasn’t going and Greg, Britta, and I were getting frustrated. Finally Greg tore up strips of newspaper and brown paper bag and just kept tossing them in, and the small sticks finally caught, and then larger sticks caught, and then our oak logs burned, too, and we sat around the flickering orange and yellow warmth, eating our soup and drinking beer, breathing in the comforting smell of wood smoke in the evening air.

The very next day, Friday, I spent at the Native Plant Garden at Fort Missoula participating in a full-day workshop for some of the MNHC staff and long-term volunteers. Brett Holmquist from Ravenwood Outdoor Learning Center was the facilitator, and we spent the day learning new ways to be teachers and mentors for children in the natural world.

After sharing each of our backgrounds, telling each other about where we came from and why we were participating in the workshop, we walked outside along the rock-lined path to the middle of a small field of native plants. A miniscule teepee of sticks and twigs was set up in a circle of bare ground, with a ball of bark and plant fibers resting in front of it. Brett knelt on the ground while we circled around and watched. He took a long, peeled stick, tapered at one end, and fit the tapered end into a small flat piece of wood with several holes drilled into it. Placing his hands near the top of the stick, he rolled it rapidly back and forth between his palms while moving his hands downward. He did this a second time, and a third. After the third time, a thin wisp of smoke rose up from the piece of wood and wafted away in the chill April breeze. Smoke rose up again the fourth time, and the fifth time, and the sixth time. I thought of Tom Hanks in Castaway, crying out triumphantly, “I have created FIRE!”

Brett then set the stick down, and lifted up the flat piece of wood. A tiny cone of ash lay on the rock below. Brett picked up the rock, and carefully tipped the ash into the ball of bark, then cupped the bark in his hands, brought it up to his mouth, and blew gently. A thin curl of smoke rose from the bark, then more. “Let us all add our breath to the fire,” Brett said, and walked around the circle, holding the bark bundle, while we each took a turn blowing our breath into the infant fire.

Sparks glowed, and a yellow tongue of flame flickered briefly. At last Brett set the bundle beneath the twig teepee, knelt down, and blew the sparks into flame, which eagerly consumed the bark, then ignited the twigs. The morning breeze rushed through in gusts, blowing the smoke in whirls and sending the flames to the top of the teepee. Heat radiated out, and we leaned in to feel the warmth on our hands and faces. All this had taken, perhaps, five minutes.

When most of the sticks had been consumed, Brett had us fan out to create our own fire nests—bundles of bark and twigs—so we could transfer the fire to the big fire pit. My friend Ann and I formed a handful of stringy bark into a ball, and she used a stick and a rock to transfer some hot coals into the bark while I held it. We both blew into it carefully, and watched the sparks glow and smoke. As I carried the bark to the fire pit, I felt the heat of the tiny fire warm my hands. I thought, “I am carrying fire.” The smoke rose into my face and disappeared into the air as I added my fire to the other fires in the pit, and they all burned together.

Two days, two fires, two stories. Thursday night, I made sure to put a box of matches in my bag so that we’d be able to have a fire during the workshop the next day. Wouldn’t it be awful, I said to Greg and Britta, if I forgot the matches, and we had no way to start a fire? But they never made it out of my bag on Friday.  They were completely unnecessary.

How many things, I wonder, do we see as necessary because we have forgotten (or, perhaps, never learned) that there is a simpler way of doing things? How much does some of our modern technology, whether matches or hot water heaters or cell phones, keep us from being thoughtful and responsible with our resources? I lost track of how many matches we used trying to start our fire on Thursday evening. What if we’d only had one match? We would have dumped the water out of the bottom of the bucket. We would have made a nest of shredded paper, bark, and leaves for our fire. We would have found the smallest, driest twigs. We would have searched out dry wood chips and slivers of wood. We would have set up our fire bed completely differently if we had had but the one match.

I can’t even put words to all of the thoughts that come to mind when I ponder these two fire experiences of the past week. It’s not only about not needing technology to survive. When we can go to the grocery story and have five thousand food choices, what does it matter if an orange gets moldy or our children pull up their noses at some dish we prepare for them? We can just throw the food out and get more. What does it matter that we know that our oil and natural gas and coal resources are finite when we can still go to the gas station and fill up our cars, still turn up the thermostat and have instant heat? We have so much available at our fingertips—so much excess—that we have forgotten, if we even ever knew, what it is like to have no choices, what it is like to be in want, how little we actually need to survive.

How long will it be, I wonder, until we start feeling the tightness of resources that many people around the world already feel? How long until food and gas prices become prohibitive? How long until clean water is something we no longer have the luxury of taking for granted? How long until a 2,000-square-foot home for a family of four is seen as an unnecessary extravagance?

I want not only to learn to start a fire without matches or a lighter, but to stop buying garlic and potatoes and onions because Greg and I can grow all we need ourselves. I want to stop taking gasoline for granted, and clean water, and exotic foods like bananas and off-season tomatoes and avocados (whimper). I want to be content in our 1,180-square-foot home and know that we can raise a child or two, and various plants and kitties, in this space: it is ample. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “There are two ways to get enough. One is to accumulate more. The other is to need less.” I want to learn to need less.

Needing less doesn’t mean we have to throw out the matches. We simply need to learn the proper way to build a fire.