fire in your hand: FIYH

Fire in Your Hand

Dave's Little Guide
to Ultralight
Backpacking
Stoves

Fire!

How you can hike lighter, hike better, hike
simpler, make your own stoves and have lots
of fun in the woods, either alone or with
friends (if you have any).

Featuring tips, stories and ravings from the
author and his imaginary friends and relatives.

Like...

Uncle Reinhold Pudzer, Citron Ella Schmelling,
Joe “Dirty Maggot” Periwinkle the thru-hiker,
and possibly some others too frightening to
mention, like Aunt Lydia Pudzer, who provides
frequent scoldings.

By Dave Sailer

— Contents —

Covers of the print version when it was available.

Fire in Your Hand front cover

Fire in Your Hand back cover

— Disclaimers —

Dangers

This book is for adults. It describes some things adults might or might not do with fuel, flames, tools, and sharp pieces of metal. Anyone working with fuel, flames, tools, and sharp pieces of metal assumes full responsibility for their own actions. Anyone attempting any activities or projects mentioned in this book is assumed to be intelligent, creative, responsible, and prudent. If you are not an adult, and are not also intelligent, creative, responsible and prudent, then do not act on anything you read in this book. The author is not responsible for anything you might do. You are.

Characters

Any resemblance that characters appearing in this book bear to persons living or dead is entirely intentional. The most transparent characters are based on an uncle and aunt.

Both of them are now completely dead, and generally were not that interesting when alive. The two sisters, Lydia and Esther, were both dreadnaughts of the old fleet: large, heavy, slow, barely maneuverable, but mounting massive armament and deadly in a close fight. They knew what was right, what was wrong, and what your place was. No discussion needed or allowed. They are both gone now but their footprints remain in the linoleum of many kitchens and the smells of fear and righteousness still linger near their abandoned dens.

I have come to respect, admire, and love Citron Ella, who is probably the woman I've always wanted to meet. But she’s never shown up so I had to invent her, and she is good. Too good for me, for sure. Anyhow, she’s married, which makes it safe all around. The best ones usually are.

As for the other characters, they are all facets of my multiple personalities, if any, and are totally fictional, or if not, then you will never, ever find out who they are really based on, nor will they. I am actually that clever, so just give up now. No character is based on you anyway, not even one, not even remotely.

No One Is Harmed

Some children in one story border on tears, but briefly, and all turns out well enough. They are not hurt. No one is hurt. Put down those ax handles and knives already. I've kept a promise made at age five to be grown up and not to cry anymore, but have been drifting toward occasional weepiness in my dotage. Not over skinned knees or life’s disappointments but on witnessing acts of kind selflessness and love. There happens to be a bit of that depicted here but not nearly enough, and for that I apologize. I assure you that I am still trying to grow up.

So, the author thanks you. (That's me, Dave, then? I guess so.)

— Forward —

Forward: “An introduction by someone other than the author, usually a famous person...”

No famous people would admit they know me. Please! If any famous people know me, now is the time to get in touch. We really need to talk. No need to call long distance, just shoot me an email, it’s practically free.

I have this little book that really needs a forward, and you can help. It won’t take much time at all, I promise, and it will help to make you a little more famous than you are already, maybe even a little tiny bit notorious. Maybe one or the other. Possibly both. That can’t be bad, can it? I’m not proud, so you can write it off as charity.

For now I’ve got someone to stand in. I’m not even sure that this is his real name, and maybe it’s just as well, because I’ve never seen him and if he told me his real name and I met him in person I might be even more disappointed than I am just reading the forward he sent me, but since it’s all I’ve got, it’ll have to do for now.

Note to famous people: The following space could be yours. Just write me. Please! Do this BEFORE it’s too late! – Dave Sailer

The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country. – George W. Bush

With these words we open a new century free of past mendacities, and tenaciousness to the tides of history. Our clinging fingers loosen and slip off the window sill of earlier misapprehensions, sliding down the walls of our closed interior worlds in the stale rebreathed air that we’ve breathed all too many times before, while our fingernails screech on the semi-gloss paint of our all too small world view, and now it’s the dawn of a new day. The world has gotten bigger while it continues to shrink.

We now have nothing to fear but our own limitations. And maybe outsourcing, for those who haven’t yet retrained their replacements from Borneo or Uruguay (though labor costs are still too high in Uruguay, at sixty-five cents an hour, for them to be competitive, but maybe next year after the expensive ones die off).

But not to fear! If all you have is a tin can and maybe a pocket knife that you haven’t had to sell for food yet, or even if you still have a job, or you never had one because you’ve devoted your whole life to hiking, and even living in your car would be a real luxury if you had a car and a place to park it, you can still go backpacking because it’s mostly free, except for food, and you can make almost everything you need, including stoves, which this book is about, so read on.

Gentle reader, I am with you when I’m not hiking. Or I could be, if you’ll forward your address in case you have a little shack in the back of your yard or maybe an empty garage where I can stay for the winter when I’m not hiking. Or better yet a room in your basement, which would be really cool, where I could use the shower, because I need to. I really do and I won’t take very long.

You don’t need imports and I don’t need imports. Just keep this book close by and it’s pretty much all you will need, and we can ignore all that stuff coming in from all those foreign factories, especially the ones outside the country.

And if this book is too hard for you I’ll read it to you. I would love to. I would be glad to. I can read you to sleep and make some lightweight stoves for you because I know how and we can be buddies and buddies help each other, so there is a future here. Be my friend, please, and send me that address because I need a place to stay. Also please send a few bucks for a bus ticket.

— Your friend, Bill “Pharting Bob” Johnston

— Preface —

Preface: The preface is a brief introduction to your book. It describes the scope and importance of the book and its intended audience. A preface does not discuss the subject matter in detail or provide background. That belongs in an introduction, which should be part of the book itself. Unless the reader questions who wrote the preface, the reader understands that you wrote it, so the preface should not need to have your name on it.

This book is about ultralight backpacking stoves. I say this for those who didn’t read the title, and in their excitement decided to jump right to the preface, to get the real scoop. Or if you read the title but didn’t really believe it, you can start now. Believe! Believe!

This book is about ultralight backpacking stoves.

Since this is the preface, I can’t risk my new author’s license by telling you too much more at this point, but keep reading, because it gets a lot better in just a little while.

This book is divided into several chapters, each of which is composed of words, often of many words, with occasional simple illustrations (or not) designed to amuse and awe the illiterate (or not).

Of course I am sure that this book will be the very most important book you have ever read, and as such it is with the greatest difficulty that I, the author (whose name appears on the cover but should not, from modesty if for no other reason, appear at the end of the preface), refrain from calling this “The Book”, “The Good Book”, or “The Greatest Book Ever Written”.

I have also heard rumors that those descriptions above, the ones in quotes, have already been used by previous authors of unrelated works, and I’m certainly not a copycat, and don’t want to confuse any readers, so we’ll just leave the title where it is, and scrape off all the adjectives, and keep saying just “this book”. We all know what we’re talking about. This book, the one about ultralight backpacking stoves.

Please check in at the lexicon if any of this is starting to get difficult. The lexicon has lots and lots of one-syllable words that explain most everything, and it’s pretty good reading all by itself, and should clear your mind of all doubt, freshen your breath, curl and/or straighten your hair as needed, and sweeten your disposition.

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it. – Groucho Marx

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate. – Douglas Adams

— Definition —

For this book we’ll start by making an arbitrary definition. An ultralight backpacking stove weighs no more than one half ounce (14 g), unless it is a wood-burning stove. If it is a wood-burning stove, it will weigh no more than five ounces (142 g).

Exercises

Define the word “definition”.
Do something arbitrary, but not mean.
Learn how to weigh things.
Extra credit: Call your mother this weekend and talk to her about backpacking. If she isn’t available, then call someone else’s mother. She’ll be glad to hear from you. Mothers always are.

— Introduction —

God stuck out her finger and said, “Yo, stuff, burn already.” And lo, there was lots of flame. – The Grand Secret Little Book of Ultralight Backpacking and Esoteric Mumbo Jumbo (Long since out of print.)

Since we’re still toward the front of the book, this is a good time to write an introduction. Uncle Pudzer is asleep in his chair, across the room, and won’t be reading over my shoulder. This is a good thing. He gets upset at times, and starts swinging his cane, one of those old-fashioned solid hickory ones with the rubber tip on the end, and I don’t want any of that. The cane is lying flat on the floor next to his chair, and he’s snoring. As long as he keeps that up, I know I’m safe.

Not that I’m going to say anything terrible here. Just the truth as I see it. Which is what Uncle sometimes objects to. Not the truth so much as how other people distort it. The truth is what he says it is, and that’s that. Disagree and duck.

He doesn’t need the cane for help in walking. For him it’s a tool. A tool to swing with. He thinks of it as a portable exclamation point that he can carry along, just in case he ever needs to add emphasis.

But usually he’s a pretty reasonable guy. Had a hard life. A lot of adventures. Learned a lot. And now he’s older. He’s helping me get this book out, and gets a small cut if we make anything, so I can’t complain too much. The few cents he might get goes to supplement his Social Security, which is about all he has. Lost the rest somewhere along the way. Not a big pile, but it would have helped. Now he’s scraping by, and thought he could pull in a few bucks if we work together on this and pass along what he knows about getting by in the backcountry.

He learned it all the hard way, starting as a boy living on the plains of North Dakota. Born as Reinhold Willhelm Pudzer, he was nothing special in a place where no one else is either, even to this day. He comes from German-Russian stock, Germans-from-Russia, or GRs as some of them call themselves.

This was a group of Germans invited to come and live in Russia when Catherine the Great was running the show there. The imported Germans were supposed to set an example for the lowly, ignorant and indolent Russian peasants, but all they got was resentment. Back in Germany they were the bottom of society, the lowly, ignorant and indolent German peasants, so maybe they didn’t have a whole lot to teach, but hey, they got an offer of free land in Russia, so they took it.

After a while Catherine had her own problems, namely death. One legend reports this as having to do with indecent activities attempted near and/or under a horse. This isn’t really important to our story, so we’ll just move on.

She died, and then...

Following Catherine’s death, the GRs got their pink slips, those little notes nailed to foreheads and front doors that said something to the effect of “OK, the Czarina is dead. You really, REALLY aren’t welcome here any more, and if you don’t leave now, we’re going to get nasty or kill you all, or vice versa, whichever we feel like getting to first.”

So they left. Some went back to Germany where they resumed their lives as lowly, ignorant and indolent German peasants. Some went other places, and the residue blew into North Dakota one day on the back end of a dust storm, and homesteaded there.

Some say that these were the bright ones. Some say the strong ones, or maybe the stupid ones. Or maybe the strong ones, the bright ones and the stupid ones just got all mixed up together in a big ball, became used to seeing each other around, and sort of scattered randomly all over the northern plains like birdshot fired toward the top of the map.

These are my relatives. Mostly good people if you don’t rile them or confuse them, which often has the same result. Hardworking. Generally honest. Kind of isolated, and maybe not the prettiest marbles in the bag, but they mean well.

Most of them worked with their hands, and a lot still do. A few worked with their heads, but they were in the minority. There’s something about hefting a well-made, finely-crafted 12-ounce carpenter’s hammer, tapping a nail head gently to set it, then slamming it home with a few expert whacks. Now try doing the same with your forehead and you’ll see the difference. Why most of them kept on working with their hands, that is.

Uncle Pudzer came from these people. I do too, but from a generation once removed.

He grew up on a farm near Milroy, in central North Dakota, a town of 178 people and 12 dogs. Some say that the name came from the first two farmers to settle there, one of them a misplaced Englishman fond of John Milton’s poetry, and the other a stubborn German-from-Russia obsessed with Roy Rogers movies. Legend has it that the two of them finally decided to fight it out in the street for the chance to name the town after their personal heroes, but after swinging at each other for a while they decided to break the tradition of fighting to the death, and compromise. Instead of “John Milton, North Dakota”, or “Roy Rogers, North Dakota”, the town became “Milroy, North Dakota”, the order of the syllables determined by the flip of a dollar coin. But this was before the time of Roy Rogers so it can’t be true. No one may ever know, even those who care. Let us move on then.

As a youngster, Uncle Pudzer had a hard life. The usual hard life of plains farmers.

I never was a fan of Lawrence Welk’s music. He hailed from a farm near Strasburg, North Dakota, but I kind of admired the man. In a way. For his toughness. And his determination. His never-say-die attitude.

Some say that a never-say-die attitude in the face of impossible odds is ignorance driven by stupidity. But you can’t kill a rock by beating it with a stick, and if you’re as tough as a box of rocks then there isn’t much that can do you in. As a kid, Lawrence Welk and his siblings had a yearly allowance of ten cents. This is recorded fact. Imagine it and wonder. It was not my world, and it surely was not your world, but it was a world that others had to live in.

The first thing young Lawrence did with his annual allowance was to convert it. Into 10 pennies, which he spent deliberately, one at a time. Because he had no other choice. As a young man he discovered music, and decided to buy an accordion. There are those who don’t connect the word accordion to the word music, and some of them are even bagpipers. You know who you are. But Lawrence wanted that accordion.

Welk’s father eventually agreed to buy him an accordion, but with conditions. Without any money of his own, there was only one way: work it out. So Lawrence Welk sold himself to father. The deal: buy me an accordion and I’ll work for you for seven years without pay. And he did. Imagine that, if you can.

Later on, much later, there was Lawrence Welk’s Fruit Gum Orchestra and Lawrence Welk and His Hotsy Totsy Boys and many other bands. And then the Lawrence Welk Show. And the peak of Germans-from-Russian glory, Lawrence Welk on PBS, (the other PBS – keep reading) every Saturday night on KCTS in Seattle, and possibly other cities.

I for one don’t want to know. Few Germans-from-Russia have ever heard of PBS, or Seattle, and might regard either with deep suspicion, as many of them did with their first TV sets, sitting on full alert, sticks in hand, guarding against surprise and unfamiliar, foreign ideas. Nevertheless these shows are a long way from humping the old squeeze box in the barn.

So that’s the kind of world Uncle Pudzer came from. Just so you know.

Early on, when not doing chores around the farm, he was a member of NPR, the Northern Plains Rovers, a local variant of what in other parts of the country was known as the Boy Scouts, but with a slightly more distinct farm orientation.

This appealed to him. He had never been a fan of PBS (the Prairie Boy Scouts, a wussy organization, as we would say now), and so he joined up with the hard core boys of the NPR.

The NPR had formed during the Spanish-American War, over fears that an Anglo-Spanish alliance would somehow form, take over Canada, and then invade the United States from the north when no one was looking.

While everyone else in the country was hopping up and down over the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, and signing up to go fight in Cuba, the isolated farmers of the northern plains had to watch their crops. They were scared of losing their acres of dirt, tumbleweeds, rattlesnakes and grasshoppers to bands of Spaniards and Canadians intent on taking afternoon naps and ending sentences with “eh?” while forcing the decent homesteaders to do their bidding by scraping around in the dry, barren fields.

The fear of foreigners ran deep in isolated parts of the world, and news was slow to filter in, so even many years later during the days of Uncle Pudzer’s youth, long after the war ended, the NPR continued to watch the borders. Uncle Pudzer like many joined at 14 and learned how to cook ground squirrels over fires fueled by animal droppings, squeeze drinking water from thistles, sleep under the stars wrapped in cowhide, and generally get along on bugs and seeds and be happy with it while maintaining a vigilant watch in every direction.

It was only much, much later that these well-meaning folk learned the British had always hated the Spanish as much as they hated everyone else, that there was no threat of invasion, and that Canadians were pretty much OK too. By then, though, Uncle Pudzer’s course was set. He had been toughened, and liked to be out there under the stars.

He could survive on very little food or water, knew how to handle blizzards, tornadoes, and years of boredom. He gained more experience and flexibility during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. He didn’t participate, as such, but by this time he had learned how to read, and picked up surplus army survival manuals for cheap.

Eventually he moved to the West and finally had a place to practice real backpacking. In the West he saw some of his first trees. And things called mountains. And water that didn’t have to be sucked up by a windmill from a deep, deep mysterious hole bored into the ground.

Even though my people are slow learners some of us can learn, and Uncle Pudzer is one of those. He blossomed. He got over his annoyance over the mountains getting in the way of the view. At age 46 he got a high school diploma, a first in his family. He expanded his knowledge of the outdoors, absorbing everything he came across, and even invented some techniques and gear of his own.

He became my mentor, and is now a consultant for a series of books on lightweight backpacking (this one!). He learned late but he learned well and now he wants to pass along his vast knowledge and finally make some money.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I hope to.

– Dave Sailer, your author today

Exercises

Research the true history of German-Russians and write a screenplay about them. This will be our own private little Borat event.
Adopt someone of German-Russian descent.
Avoid the whole topic.
Extra credit: Learn how to talk like Lawrence Welk.

FIYH

Fire in Your Hand

Dave's Little Guide to Ultralight Backpacking Stoves

— Contents —

— Disclaimers —

Dangers

Characters

No One Is Harmed

— Forward —

— Preface —

— Definition —

Exercises

— Introduction —

Exercises

Archive

Dave's Little Guide
to Ultralight
Backpacking
Stoves