Story: Modern Stoves

Story Break

Modern Stoves

Citron Ella Schmelling

Things were different when I first started backpacking. Outdoor shops sold only the basics: boots, packs, tents, stoves. In a big store you had a choice of several stoves and some aluminum pots. Maybe they sold a frying pan or two, and an enameled steel coffee pot for those who really thought they needed one.

You could pick a white-gas stove, a kerosene stove, or maybe take a chance on one of those new canister stoves, if you were really adventurous. You had choices but not enough to hurt your head. Enough was really enough. Things just worked. You could understand them.

Such as fire. Start with wood and a match. Put the two together and you had fire, or not. It either worked or it didn’t, and it was up to you. The human race evolved with fire over thousands of years. We knew about it and it knew about us. The early one-unit backpacking stoves weren’t much different. You put in fuel, primed the stove and lit it. You put it out when you were done, and moved on.

Years later things are different. Now we live in the age of marketeers and trend setters. We want to see somebody famous using a thing on television before we decide that it might be the one and only indispensable real deal. We want what they want. Or what they get paid to tell us they want.

And new materials and clever engineering have improved life on the trail, they really have. But a lot of change is just glitter, just glitter on a pig. Fascinating the first time you see it. But then you start handling it, and you get the glitter in your eyes and up your nose, and then all over the floor. And eventually you have to admit that all you really have is a dirty pig.

Try deciding on a stove today. Hmmm. Maybe the designer colors first catch your eye, or the rhinestones, or the built-in wireless internet access, or the testimonial by Paris Hilton hanging on a little tag, but you still have to deal with a stove on the trail. All by yourself, out among the trees and the rocks, in the dark. Take a look at the owner’s manual and see if you’re qualified to handle it.

I still don’t know when cleaning kits and stove tools first appeared. I wasn’t watching. I was just out hiking. My stuff worked and, silly me, that was good enough. Maintenance kits? Tune-ups? Owner’s manuals? Puleeese!

To buy an up-to-the-minute stove today I’d have to sign up for classes and get certified, then take the exam to qualify for a learner’s permit. With luck I might be able to solo a few weeks after the classroom study and supervised lab sessions ended, like, oh, sometime in September, and wait until next season to actually use my stove.

Look at what’s happened in the rest of the outdoor world. There’s a pattern. Boots (and maybe mountaineering boots for the adventurous) have morphed into leather boots, synthetic-fabric boots, composite-materials boots, waterproof-breathable boots, hiking shoes, camp shoes, trail running shoes, wading shoes, boating shoes, and hiking sandals. No sleeping shoes yet, but wait another year or two and you’ll see them too.

Instead of just well-crafted down bags we now have down bags AND several kinds of synthetic bags, hybrid bags, half bags, quilts, bag liners, overbags, rain-repellent bags, fleece bags, and down-filled blankets.

External-frame packs, internal-frame packs, removable-frame packs, frameless packs, fanny packs, water-bottle carriers, iPod packs, hydration packs, adventure-racer packs, day packs, overnight packs, weekenders, intermediate-trip packs, long-trip packs, expedition packs, strap-on pockets and pack extenders.

First double-walled tents (the tried and true standard). And now free-standing tents, dome tents, half-dome tents, family tents, solo tents, tents with carbon fiber poles, tents with fiberglass poles, bug tents, mountaineering tents, three-season tents, four-season tents, tarptents, singe-wall tents, catenary-cut tarps, backpacking hammocks, and bivy sacks electron-beamed together from deep space out of new age materials.

What the heck happened? I used to be pretty smart, sort of. This used to make sense. It seemed to. Now I’m not sure. I don’t own any titanium pots, or even a titanium spork. I don’t have a graduate degree in stove maintenance. I don’t even have a stove that sounds like a jet plane. I don’t eat food manufactured by people in biohazard suits. I’ve never used a trailside espresso maker or prepared homemade ice cream in a meadow by kicking a Lexan ball around.

I just have some simple things that I can understand, that work, and I still manage to take care of myself, and even have fun.

What’s wrong with me?

Why We Need Stoves

Why We Need Stoves

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take the ship. – Herman Melville, from ‘Moby Dick’ (A man who never knew the joys of a backpacking stove.)

Why do you need a stove? Good question. You pay your taxes, you’re respectful of your parents and nice to children and small animals.

You don’t shoplift, even occasionally, and come to a full stop at every sign that instructs you to. You’ll drive all the way to the store and back at one mile an hour under the speed limit, just to be sure you’re obeying the law, and politely ignore each and every one of those behind you (backed up for two or three miles) who are all honking and waving at you, reminding you with that single pumping digit that you ought to at least speed up one mile an hour.

Now why, when you finally cut loose from town, drive out where no one knows you, where you’re out of sight of your boss, away from telephones and keyboards and bills, can’t you just sit down and build a fire and cook something on a stick the way your ancestors did in the old country?

True, in some places this just isn’t allowed. But in some places you can do it, though there are reasons why you might not.

If you’re in a national park, ya gotta watch it. They get kind of touchy about some things, and they carry guns. Take Zion National Park: “Fires are not allowed in the backcountry. Carry a backpacking stove, or plan simple no-cook meals.” That’s what they say, and since they went to the trouble of publishing it, I’m sure they mean it.

Or Death Valley National Park: “Campfires are prohibited, except in fire pits in developed campgrounds. Gathering wood is unlawful and burning of wood is not allowed in the backcountry. Use of a low impact backpacking stove is encouraged.”

Or North Cascades National Park: “Use dead and down wood only... On the coast, build your fire below the high tide line. Consider using a large wok, gold pan or other metal container to avoid making scars on the ground... A gasoline stove is essential. You may not cut down live trees.”

They mean well, they really do. The tone is pretty clear, but either someone there is confused, or they have some fairly strange regulations. There is no coastline in this park. The nearest ocean of any repute at all is 50 miles to the west. They expect you to carry either a wok or a pan made of gold. They can’t mean a pan to pan gold with, since national parks won’t let you make off with things you find lying around, especially nuggets of gold. (Try it and see what happens.)

They allow that you might be making fires, and encourage you to use only dead wood, and protect the soil, and then say that a gasoline stove is essential, which is pretty darn confusing, don’t you think? Are they saying that you should use a stove instead of open fires or are they just dumb, and haven’t they heard of backpacking stoves that use fuels other than gasoline?

Who, government employees?

Hmmm. Let’s push a little deeper then.

Generally, the rule in national parks and national forests seems to be that “Fires are prohibited above 3,500 feet elevation.” But no governmental agency wants to let an opportunity pass without enacting regulations, so states have some rules too, as this notice in New York attests: “At all times, only emergency fires are permitted above 4000 feet in the Adirondacks and 3500 feet in the Catskills.”

The bureaucrats at Olympic National Park in Washington State manage to sound a little more like actual humans than some others by explaining why they might have certain rules: “You are encouraged to use a stove in the wilderness. This minimizes the impact on soils and vegetation, and reduces the risk of an escaped campfire. At higher elevations, and in heavily-used camp areas at lower elevations, firewood is scarce... Wood that naturally decomposes is no longer present to contribute organic matter to the soil... Gather only dead and down firewood and be aware of your impact on living vegetation and soils. Choose smaller pieces of wood.”

OK, we’ve already agreed that we’re law-abiding and generally reluctant to be handcuffed and dragged around by ornery, rulebook-wielding rangers. (Except for that really nice blond one in Olympic National Park that I ran into two summers in a row – pleasant, pretty, efficient, neat as a pin, and right on top of her game without being confrontational. Damn. Should she wish to drag me around anytime, by any body part of her choosing, I will consider it great good luck and shall not resist in the least.)

As important as following the rules can be, there are even better reasons for using a backpacking stove instead of an open fire. One of them is convenience. Stoves are pretty much self-contained, and unless you make your own (which we’ll get to later on), they come completely assembled. Backpacking stoves are portable.

Duh. (We’ve used this word before. You know what it means.)

Point two: Backpacking stoves are darn quick to use compared to open fires. Just set up a stove, fuel it, light it, and let it rip. Afterwards, fold it up and get back to hiking. No hunting for wood that isn’t wet. No hunting for wood and bringing back damp stuff. No throwing that away and then hunting for wood that not only isn’t wet but isn’t damp through and through. No throwing that away (again) and hunting for wood that not only is bone dry, and weaker than you are, but isn’t rotted out and useless. No smoke blowing in your face. The joy of simply sitting down at the end of a long morning or a long afternoon and firing up the stove without fighting with it, without really having to think about it should never, ever be underrated.

Point three: Stoves are dependable. You know way up front what kind of fuel they need, how it’s going to burn, and that it comes in remarkably well-labeled containers. You know that when you light the stove it will just work, and work exactly the same way it did last time. You can turn the heat up, turn it down, or turn it off. Period. No huffing. No puffing. No trying over and over again to get it lit, or pouring water and dirt on it to put it out.

Point four: Stoves are safer. By using a stove you can avoid an open fire that might make a break for it and leave you standing there saying “Oh, poop. I did a really, really bad thing just now.” Which you might say as your favorite national park burns down around you. Fire is just itching to run free. This will not happen with a stove, mostly.

Point five: Stoves don’t pop and spark and shoot sticks out all over the place. Stove fuel is either tightly contained in a can (for gases), or in a bottle (for liquids) or you can carry it in a bag of your choosing (for solids).

Unless you really screw up, stove fuel is about as safe as beer, though less refreshing. Remember that point. Beer isn’t totally safe by any means but then again you don’t need a hazmat suit, six years of training and a framed certificate in order to use it. You just have to be old enough to know right from wrong and how to open the can. Stove fuel is about the same. If you’re an adult you should have no problems. (If you’re an adult and can act like one.)

Point six: Stoves are easier to light than open fires, and this makes them safer. Here’s how to do it: (1) turn on stove, (2) light it. Done.

And some stoves, like the ones you can make yourself don’t even have moving parts. Since stoves are easier to use than open fires, they’re also quicker, which just adds to safety. Tired? Hungry? Eyes crossed with fatigue? Getting kind of clumsy? Daylight fading?

Here’s Choice A: Determine your elevation. If below 3500 feet, then get up, crawl around in the bushes hunting for something to burn so you can eat and go to bed and by god you’re tired, cold and hungry. Then asphyxiate yourself over a smoky fire and spend half an hour making sure the fire is out when you’re done. If above 3500 feet, skip supper, or...

Choice B: Light the stove, cook and eat.

Which one you gonna pick?

Point seven: And something you might not think of at first: stoves are hotter than open fires, because they burn higher energy fuel, and their flames are more focused. This means that a stove will heat quicker and the flames will stay in one small place where you can keep an eye on them. Just act grown up and remember to keep your fingers, eyebrows and pants away from the stove and you will be totally all right. I guarantee it. (Note: If your name is Darlene – or Bob – then this might not apply to you.)

You’ve reached the point now where you’ve considered the law, convenience, and safety in your deliberations about whether or not to use a backpacking stove. If you aren’t convinced yet, then there is still another card in the deck. Slap it down, turn it over and read this: conserving resources.

Check back on what the folks at Olympic National Park said. “Wood that naturally decomposes is no longer present to contribute organic matter to the soil.”

OK, even they get confused when trying to put things in writing. They mean well, they really do, but that one just didn’t come out right. What they really meant is the opposite of what they said here, which is “Wood that is burned as fuel is no longer present to contribute organic matter to the soil.” Because it went up in smoke.

Whether you have a cozy little fire that sneaks off and gets intimately acquainted with the old growth forest you’re camped in, or you just manage to safely and completely burn a small quantity of wood to cook your evening grits, you’re taking something away from the forest.

In the case of a massive forest fire you’re taking away all of it at once, and leaving nothing, though if you survive you may become a temporary celebrity. If you’re taking away a few slowly-decomposing bits and pieces, a twig here and there, a couple of pine cones, things which would have been homes for a few ants, termites, beetles and fungi (or at best might have been mouse toys), it ain’t a whole lot, but it adds up over time. Think of hundreds of backpackers a year building thousands of fires a year, year after year. Think of those bored mice, and all because of you.

Take a few minutes sometime, and if you’re near a clean, clear stream, go looking for caddis fly larvae. Caddis flies are harmless little critters that live most of their lives underwater, in little mobile homes that they make for themselves out of bits and pieces of whatever plant material comes to hand down there (and sometimes sand grains, too). Tiny freshwater trailer trash, but tidy in their own way.

Look at the bottom of the stream, and watch for things that look a little like slim cigarette butts. The ones that have legs and move around are caddis fly larvae. The ones that don’t move are probably cigarette butts. Or maybe turtle poops. You can leave those alone.

The live ones (the caddis fly larvae) need all those little bits of stuff to make those tiny mobile homes that they live in. Those small houses are cramped but they work. They keep these little guys from being eaten. “Just trailer trash,” you might think to yourself but they’re pretty clean, don’t stay up late, don’t ride loud motorcycles, and hardly ever play rock music past midnight, get into drunken brawls or urinate on the hood of your car.

If you insist on tearing up the landscape for your own needs (like cooking lunch) when you could be carrying a perfectly good small backpacking stove that you made yourself for free out of recycled materials, then you should just be ashamed. Very ashamed.

To deprive these innocent little bugs of happiness is churlish and rude. No dictator, no matter how evil, would stoop so low, and there you are, Mr./Ms. Eco Friendly, ripping up the landscape just so you can heat food and shove it into your face. If my mother was still alive I’d send her right over to your place so she could whack you with a stick. She isn’t around anymore, so you’ll have to ask your own mother to do it for her.

Oh, the humanity!

On the other hand, though, most backpacking stoves use fossil fuels, which some people object to. I’ve always thought this argument was at least a little dumb. Say you drive (or take a plane, train, bus, cab or scooter) out to the trailhead, and use up anywhere from three to 200 gallons of fuel doing it, then hike for two or three weeks and use half a pint of white gas. Now, if you can, tell me where the problem is. On which end of this story does it occur? And really, how many fossils use fuel anyway?

If you are one of those people who sees a problem, then there are stoves that avoid this. But no matter how you slice it, backpacking stoves are very efficient, and there are ways to increase the efficiency of stoves so much that they use hardly any fuel at all, no matter what they burn.

Don’t forget the last lesson from the last chapter. Any stunted runt can use an open fire, burn lots of wood, and eventually manage to cook something. It takes a modern human with a completely up-to-date brain and a highly developed social consciousness to use a backpacking stove. What you are free to tell any runts you meet is that backpacking stoves can actually be a whole lot easier to use, especially for us modern types with high school diplomas, or even college degrees.

Usually a bachelor’s degree indicates a person who can use a screwdriver without fear of losing fingers, if working cautiously. A master’s degree very often guarantees that we can almost always figure out which end of the fork to stick into the food, and holders of Ph.D.s quite often retain the ability to bathe and dress themselves.

Nearly 100% of those in ALL these groups can learn to use backpacking stoves, especially the simpler, more foolproof ones that have no moving parts. If necessary, you can have a little sticker on the stove’s bottom that says “Other end up.” And one on top that says “Fuel goes here.” Some might need a brief instruction manual that shows how to light a match or flick a cigarette lighter.

And where to stick it. And so on. No, really. Just six or seven easy lessons, maybe a few days in the hospital burn unit for the slow learners, and we’re set. Even for those with Ph.D.s.

Then you get to go out and use some CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY, prove unequivocally that you are superior to each and every knuckle-dragger who insists on using those old-fashioned, gross open fires that ACTUALLY SIT RIGHT DOWN THERE IN THE DIRT. That’s reason enough right there.

Rise above the dirt, my friend. Rise above it. Because you can.

Exercises

1. Translate Moby Dick into Esperanto and recite it from memory while roasting weenies over an open fire.
2. No, seriously.
3. Cook and eat a lizard on a stick.
4. Extra credit: Get a job with the National Park Service and write better copy for them.

Story: Setting A National Park On Fire

Story Break

Setting A National Park On Fire

Joe “Dirty Maggot” Periwinkle

Growing up is a process like evolution. Evolution works on groups not individuals. The individuals either live or die. The ones that live get to mate AND THEN die, but they don’t change. Their offspring might be better, but they won’t be.

In other words, it’s a crap shoot — you’re either born with it or without it. If you’re born with it you get to grow up and raise a family before you croak. You still have to croak, but you get some fun along the way, and when you do kick off at least you can do it surrounded by your kids, or your spawn, or whatever your species has.

In a way, growing up is a little like this, without the same kind of fun. Well, not for me anyway. I was too shy. Or maybe ugly. Who knows? Anyhow, a person has a lot of phases they go through, and a lot of moods and all, so it’s kind of like each one of us is a whole herd in a way. As we grow up we learn which of our personalities works and which doesn’t, and most of us live past our dumb days and what’s left is a smarter version of what we started out as, because the dumb parts die off and what we’re left with is just the smarter parts.

I’d like to pass along some info so maybe you don’t have to start out quite as dumb as I did. You can still be as dumb as you want, but if you are really, really dumb, then someone like me isn’t going to convince you of anything anyway. So fair warning.

One thing I learned is how not to set national parks on fire. I learned this by setting one on fire. See, the power of stupidity is pretty intense. As Elbert Hubbard said, “Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.” Now he was smart. You have to wonder how he learned that one. He never told.

He was a pretty darn famous 19th and early-20th century writer, responsible for many famous quotes, such as “Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive,” and “Life is just one damned thing after another.” Fitting for someone who went down on BOTH the Titanic and the Lusitania. But I digress. Back to stupidity. Something I know. In my league.

You can do a lot by being stupid. You stumble into things. You have adventures. You never know what life is going to hand you next, because you’re too dumb.

Being ignorant isn’t quite the same. It’s a little different, but it can pass pretty well for stupidity most of the time. The truth is that if you’re just ignorant you have a lot better chance. You can get over it. Being stupid is a deeper hole to climb out of.

The rule of thumb is that everybody is ignorant about everything. Think about it. How much do you know about anything? Take your tired old classic example: quantum physics. The average person has heard about quantum physics but has even forgotten that they’ve ever heard the phrase before. And what does it mean anyway? Really. Nobody knows.

I’ve heard it. I have a B.S. in physics, but unless you’re already adept at BSing, getting a degree doesn’t help that much. So I’ve heard about quantum physics, and I used to know some of the math, but that’s all gone now, so I’m ignorant again. Even someone with a Ph.D. in quantum physics doesn’t know everything about it. The universe is a big place. It’s mostly dark, and full of big empty spots, and really, really old. How much can someone know about all of it? Not much. Not enough to matter.

It’s taken us several thousand years to figure out that there are two fundamental things, matter and energy, and that they are equivalent. You can change one into the other and back again, but beyond that nobody has the slightest clue about what they really are.

So all of our brightest minds, those belonging to our best people, are still basically clueless. And not just about quantum physics, but about everything. If one person could know everything about anything at all, without having his head blow up, then the rest of us would be out of work. Look how many economists it takes to run things, or plumbers. Get the drift? It would take only one person in each field, period. The rest of us would only have to follow orders.

So here we are – we’re all ignorant. That’s the first idea. Part two is that you can be dumb, but real stupidity is being proud of your ignorance.

Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of. We just agreed that we’re all ignorant. About everything. And can’t help ourselves. That’s just one of our basic dimensions. We can’t help it. But we can learn. It’s not as if we couldn’t do anything at all. Each of us can learn a little something about a little bit of something. Not doing anything at all is just stupid.

So I don’t set national parks on fire anymore. I learned. A little. I decided this right after I set my first national park on fire. Does this quick thinking make me really smart? It don’t necessarily follow, but I’ll take credit for that if you really insist. Pretend that I looked down at my shoes and shuffled a little, and said “Aw, shucks.” If you want.

What I did was closer to evolving. It was like the ignorant me set the park on fire while another me stood by and watched. After putting out the fire they got together and talked it over and decided to learn from it. So as not to perish. Screaming. In a flaming forest. Or in a federal prison, doing 900 years to life.

That’s probably about as good as it gets for most of us. Stand around looking at something dumb we did, say “Whoa there, maybe I shouldn’t do that again,” and live to do something else dumb later on, but not exactly that same thing again.

So here’s how to set a national park on fire.

When it’s time to stop and eat, go off the trail. Find a comfortable, quiet spot out of sight, for privacy. With luck, you’ll be near a small stream so you don’t have to carry all your water with you. The forest will be quiet, the air nearly calm, and the mosquitoes far away. You’ll set up your stove on a level spot on the forest floor, fill your pot, fuel the stove and light it. You’ll put the wind screen over it, and munch some snacks while you wait for supper to cook.

A few minutes later, after the stove has come up to operating temperature and is giving off a faint bubbling sound from boiling alcohol, you think to yourself how great it is to be out where the smell of smoke can stimulate your appetite, and how especially great it is because not only were you hungry already, and not only is the smoke making you even hungrier, but in just a few minutes you’ll have a pretty good meal, so being hungry is just part of the fun.

And then you’ll remember that you aren’t cooking over a wood fire. You’re cooking on an alcohol stove, and smoke has no place here, and why is there smoke rising above your stove anyway?

That’s about when you’ll pull the wind screen off and see that the heat from your stove reflected around inside the wind screen and bounced back to the ground over and over and over again and created a burning ring in the dry old forest duff where you set up your stove.

That’s about when you start swearing and show your true character by either (a) swearing some more, jumping up and reaching for your water bottle, knocking over your pot, but not, luckily, the stove as well, and managing to put out both the fire and the stove with the water, then dismantling everything and pouring more and more water on the ground and stirring it and kicking it and stomping on the ground until all the water you’ve poured on it comes squishing back out of the ground, and then peeing on this spot several times through the night, and checking on it one last time before you leave the next morning, or (b) following the old adage “When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

Following the first course will give you a fighting chance to recover, slink away, and learn a little something. The second will likely get you toasted. Or imprisoned. Or maybe both.

How not to set a national park on fire.

Don’t do as I did, do as I say. Set up your stove on rock or on clean mineral soil without anything burnable in it. Scrape away the top layer of duff if you can, getting down to bare soil. Do your best to find the most level place you can. If your stove does topple over (or you knock it over or whatever) you’ll probably lose any water you’ve heated, but more important, if you should spill burning alcohol on the landscape, it won’t set rock on fire. And a stove on a level perch won’t likely topple over.

Now you’ll be outdoors where conditions are usually far from perfect, and you can’t always set up your stove on 100% certified fireproof surfaces, so check this out: make a reflective plate to go under your stove. Get a cheap aluminum foil cookie sheet or oven liner and cut four squares from it, each one small enough so that it will fit inside your cooking pot for carrying.

When you set up, take those four pieces out and arrange them on the ground so you have a nice big reflector to set your stove on.

When it’s going strong and putting out lots of heat, that heat will be bouncing around inside your wind screen. It will shoot down toward the ground, hit the reflector, and shoot back up to your cooking pot where it will do some good. You won’t set the ground on fire. More heat will go into your pot as well. The one stone, two birds thing. Remember this.

This is why you still have Mt. Rainier National Park to visit, and not Mt. Rainier National Cinderland Charred Area. That’s right. It was me. I set it on fire once, and fixed it. And I promise not to do it again.

What Fire Is Good For

What Fire Is Good For

But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: 'Home is home, be it never so homely.’ – Henry David Thoreau (Sitting at Emerson’s table after one of those big Sunday dinners that secretly kept him going.)

Let’s review just what fire is good for. Hmmm. How about for cooking food? The obvious choice, in case you prefer not to gnaw on cold things while on the trail. Some options are better than others, depending on what kind of fire you plan to be dealing with. Basically you can bake, boil, broil, fry, roast, steam, and if you’re kind of wimpy, just warm things up.

But heating things up can do a lot of good. If you carry a bowl or cup to eat out of, or just to drink from, fire can sterilize it and kill any little trail cooties that might have hitched a ride there with the intention of getting to know you better, from the inside out as it were.

Whether or not you get into trail cooking, it’s always nice to have a hot cup of coffee, tea, or cocoa whenever you need one. If you have a stove you can do this without much fuss, and it makes you feel nice all over. Also, there is a little extra boost of heat in warm food and drinks. When your healthy, fit, trail-hardened body digests food you get a shot of energy from the food. Hey, that’s why food was invented. But warm food has another little trick. It’s warm. Duh.

Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

In other words, for those who haven’t gotten it yet, your body doesn’t have to waste any effort warming up the stuff you eat or drink, so your body is a lot happier, especially when it’s been one of those days. You know, up all night shivering, hiking all day in the rain, discovering you’re out of toilet paper, getting chased by the occasional grizzly bear, then abducted by aliens, then dropped off again by aliens after hours of unpleasant body-orifice probing. And so on. One of those days, you know.

Then you think: wouldn’t it be pleasant just to sit down and have a nice, hot cup of cocoa? You bet. Which is one reason people carry backpacking stoves. Another Duh.

So it’s not all about cooking food. Hot food and drinks are GOOD. Stopping along the trail in the middle of a long day creates a break.

A cookfire or a meal simmering over a stove creates a center for both solo and group hikes. It lets you stop and refocus. And if nothing else matters to you, being able to set up a stove and cook a meal without incinerating (a) the food, or (b) yourself, or (c) the rest of the world, well, it just gives you some warm fuzzy moments, moments when you’ve managed to reaffirm your control of the situation through the use of simple technology.

In answer to the basic question of what fire is good for, then even if you don’t eat at all, not even a little bit every once in a while, you can still say that it yet again proves that you’re one of the lords of creation and all those critters out there just better darn well watch out.

Exercises

1. Review all the reasons why Henry David Thoreau was a dork.
2. Calculate the number of trail cooties that could live inside the volume contained by your skin, if they consumed all your internal organs first. Hint: “If there are enough bacteria in a liquid culture to make the culture BARELY CLOUDY, counting the cells commonly reveals nearly one hundred million bacteria per milliliter (1 x 108 cells/mL).” -- Harold Eddleman, Ph.D., President, Indiana Biolab (Emphasis added, and with good reason. Yikes.)
3. Put on your slippers and a nice, thick, fuzzy sweater. Kindle a friendly blaze in the fireplace. Brew up one cup each of coffee, tea, and cocoa. Drink them slowly in turn while sitting in a comfy chair before the fire. Write a nice letter listing the best features of each drink and mail it to Santa.
4. Extra credit: Burn your pornography collection today. Or if you can’t bear to, then send it to me and I’ll see that it is disposed of properly.

Story Break: Doing Without Fire Or Stove

Story Break

Doing Without Fire Or Stove

Citron Ella Schmelling

I’ve gone without a fire or stove, but it hasn’t always been easy. Maybe it was the thought of it. The thought of my abandoned stove following me around like a puppy I was trying to ignore. I couldn’t help it. It was like I’d left something that needed me. Doing without a stove wasn’t so bad in itself, but it was like I was somehow shirking my responsibility to myself.

Whenever I sat down to eat, I missed my stove. There was some kind of hole in the day. I stopped to eat, but then again, all I did was stop and eat. There was no little pause to get organized, to pull out the stove and assemble all the pieces and twiddle with them. I didn’t get to pour in the fuel and fill the pot and set it up and know that the familiar hot little fingers of flame were bringing me a meal. I just sat down and ate, and then pushed on again. No ceremony at all. No break, really.

Breakfast was especially bleak. Chilly breakfasts would come and go without ceremony. Mornings are always cold. Sometimes morning is the coldest, most difficult part of the day.

When the sun goes down at night the sky dims like a giant eye closing, and the warmth that has lain comfortably in the earth’s body throughout the day begins to lift up and rise toward the stars. Finally the whole world goes dark, and like a corpse the earth ceases to be alive, and little by little grows colder as it passes farther and farther into the lands of night.

When I got up the morning was there, but no happy little friend, no stove, no glow, no hot coffee, nothing to warm me, nothing to get me started. Other than willpower, of course. There was no reason to sit and wait, no small bright nugget of heat to wrap myself around while breakfast cooked. There was just me and the chilly, still silent morning air. It was like my puppy had died. Mornings can be lonely and sad.

I would walk all day, and stop once or twice to eat. I had good food. I brought things I’d prepared at home. One favorite was a batch of brownies with lots of chocolate and peanut butter in them, for energy. A few bites could keep you moving for hours, but it still wasn’t enough somehow. It was good, it was great in itself, but it was only food, you know?

I wanted my friend. I wanted to sit alongside the trail in the cool shade of a tree, looking out over a long warm valley bathed in noonday sun, and eat something spicy and hot that I had just cooked. I wanted to but I couldn’t. No chance of it. There was no bubbling little pot serenading me, promising me a rich, hot lunch. I wanted it but it wasn’t there. I missed it.

When evening came then just one more day was just over one more time. You know how it goes. You’ve put in a good day and you’re proud of it, and tired. You’re dusty. You’ve been walking all day. You want to relax a little, but the hour is getting late. If you don’t keep on top of things the night will be coming down on you, and you don’t want to be stuck bathing in cold water, and then setting up camp in the dark.

But there isn’t much joy in finishing off a bag of dry crunchy things at dusk, then washing it down with cold water. You can get the calories you need and be well fed. Nutrition isn’t the issue. You can eat enough to make it through the night without any problem. That’s all right. But without a stove there’s still something missing.

It’s a little too wild out there, a little too rocky, a little too lonely. You’ve put the day behind you and you’re about to change phase. You’re going to go into hibernation for a few hours. Become a chrysalis. Transform yourself into tomorrow’s person.

You need a wedge to create a little space for you between the day and the night, a small private space put down right there where you can sit with your guard down for a few minutes, safe with your own thoughts and at peace. And eat something warm in complete comfort.

Without a stove and some hot food and hot drinks you feel a little too far from home. You’re totally on the outside of everything.

You’re way out there, and maybe you feel like you don’t quite have enough to hang on to. You’re traveling lighter and leaner, that’s true, and that’s good, as far as it goes. You spend less time fussing and organizing things, all right. (There are no dishes to wash for one thing.) But still you can feel like you’re both a little too close to and a little too far from the landscape somehow, like you’re not really there at all.

Something like being in a new car showroom surrounded by perfectly-polished sheet metal that has never been touched by human hands, sitting expectantly on top of those squeaky clean tires on a linoleum floor, waiting.

That new car smell all around, and you don’t need a new car, you don’t want a new car, you don’t care. What you want is to feel real, like being somewhere with someone you belong with, being welcome, and you can just never get that feeling in a showroom. A showroom never feels like home.

Maybe I’m just not as adventurous as I’d like to be. Maybe I need that puppy to come home to. Is any of this making sense? Am I all alone?

Maybe not. I go lighter than 99% of everyone out there, and I don’t build big scary wood fires. A small wood fire can be nice when you need smoke to confuse mosquitoes. But I don’t like to build fires. Most people think being outdoors means burning things. I’m off in the fringe, I’ll admit, but perhaps not too different from everybody else.

I don’t go outdoors so I can just sit and burn things. But I still like a hot cup of something, and the idea that I’m in control of my world. And the feeling that I’ve done well and can relax every now and then and have a decent meal. In peace. And feel at home on the trail.

That’s what a stove is good for, and why I almost always carry one.

Doing Without Fire Or Stove

Doing Without Fire Or Stove

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness. – Henry David Thoreau (during his weekly walk into town for supper with Emerson)

The first thing to consider is whether you really need to cook anything. Doing without something is always the lightest way to travel. Granted, the weight of fire itself is inconsiderable, nothing, but the stuff you need to make safe, controllable fires does weigh something, and sometimes it can weigh lots.

Remember our lesson about what fire is? (Hint: oxygen, fuel and heat. Pants.)

That’s right!

Oxygen: The atmosphere is full of oxygen, so you don’t have to carry it unless you really like to show off. Backpacking is a peaceful sport for sane people, so let’s just move on right now.

Fuel: Generally, ya either gotta carry it, or spend time gathering it. Either way involves fuss and effort. You can burn lots of things, but we’ll assume for now that you’re looking at carrying a gaseous fuel in a can, or flammable liquid in some kind of container. This means weight and some level of complexity.

Heat: A heat source can be matches, a cigarette lighter, or something similar, maybe even just a spark. Pretty small and light overall, but still one more thing to keep track of, especially if you try carrying a spark around. Lose something important on the trail and you’re hosed. (Lightweight rule number one: If you don’t take it, it weighs nothing. Lightweight rule number two: If you don’t have it you can’t lose it.)

Pants: What you’ll normally be wearing when you start a fire, or use fire, unless your job is starting fires, and you get to work at home, and you start fires indoors, and your house is fireproof, and you already burned your pants. In any case, we’ve already figured out your story.

So you leave the stove and fuel and matches at home, and then what? Well, here’s a hint – a good next step is to leave your cooking pots at home too. And anything you need to clean them.

So right away, you save weight and make things simpler. And at no cost.

You can’t accidentally set yourself on fire, or set any forests on fire, or any of your friends. Your friends will be grateful, even if they don’t tell you outright. Learn to watch for the small, subtle signs, like breathing. It means that they still like you because you didn’t roast them.

Having no fuel, you don’t have to worry about spilling the precious stuff, or leaving a valve open and having the fuel all sneak out into the air, or worry about having the stove blow up in your face. In fact, if you don’t use fire at all you can’t have even a single accident with it, except for the case that someone else’s accident gets loose and runs you down. But we won’t count that one. We won’t hold it against you. You’re home free.

Think about the people you might be stuck with, by choice or by chance. They make mistakes. Their mistakes might be bigger, more dramatic and more unfortunate than the ones you make, and probably are.

Let’s remember who we’re talking about here. These are “other people”. Not up to our level. Our mistakes are clever and amusing, and less painful because of it. Someone who’s just dumb and clumsy is likely to do anything, and will definitely be an annoying person. Shunning a stove and avoiding any chance of a fireball can be a good move.

Which reminds me of someone I backpacked with once. Let’s call her “Darlene”. She just happened to be a woman. If this bothers you, then assume that she was really a man. A man named, for example, “Ingemar”, or “Sigfuss”, or just plain “Bob” for short. “Bob of the Flames”.

Anyway, this person had an old white-gas-burning Svea 123R, a type of stove I also used for many years. And this Darlene who shall remain nameless had fitted it with the optional pump. The pump pressurized the stove, which made it run much better. And this person (Darlene) would pump up the stove to about 800 atmospheres, and then drench the stove with white gas (as a primer), open the valve, and throw a match in the general direction of the stove.

Eager to demonstrate its willingness, this stove would shoot a column of flame thick as a tree trunk about four feet straight into the air. Darlene (or Bob, or whoever it was) would wait for the priming fuel to go out, and then run the stove at full bore while cooking trail glop.

Now one little-known but interesting feature of the old Sveas was that they could overheat if run at full throttle for extended periods. When overheated they could explode and produce large and entertaining displays of flaming white gas. They were built with a safety plug in the cap of the gas tank, but this didn’t always work, and Darlene’s cap had been replaced, if you remember, with a pump. Who knows how that was put together? I for one doubt that it had a safety plug in it. And “safety” is a word with surprisingly many shades of meaning.

Darlene (or Bob, for example) swore that she (or he) had owned this stove for many years and had never had a problem. Meanwhile, the rest of us, all having seen old movies of nuclear tests in Nevada, dropped our suppers and shrank back into the far corners of the geography until Darlene had finished cooking and then shut off the stove. Even when the stove was cold we were always aware which way it was pointing

This reminds me of the Old Landlady Philosophy, which I encountered while living in a really delightful apartment that my elderly landlady had built above a two-car garage in her earlier days. “Built” as in “with her own hands”. She was a gem. Out rebuilding porches and crushing cement at 80. Former North Dakota lass, she was. Strong as a stump.

The faucet in my kitchen sink fell apart one day. After looking at it my landlady said “I don’t know why it should break now, it’s worked fine for 35 years.” This is the essence of the Old Landlady Philosophy. Throwing gas onto a stove and then running it flat out exemplifies the same approach, but contains a larger helping of raw fear. If it’s never reached the thermonuclear ignition point in all these years, then why would it kill us all today? And so on.

Aside from some of us getting minor wet spots inside our underwear, nothing else exciting happened that trip, but you probably get the drift here, doncha?

There actually are people who make a deliberate, rational choice to do without fires or cooking. One I’ve heard of is Alan Dixon, who says “when I solo, I don’t take a stove or cooking equipment. I eat cold food. I take caffeine pills for my morning buzz. I can deal with this.” He also snarfs down a big meal before and after a trip. “I figure I can make it at least 3 days without any food,” he says. And he has, too: “I’ve had to do this before and feel comfortable with my choice.”

And let’s include Emma “Grandma” Gatewood, a mother of 11, grandmother of 23, who took up backpacking at age 67. She wore Keds sneakers, carried her gear in a homemade cotton bag atop one shoulder, slept under a plastic shower curtain, and did not carry a stove. She knew about boots, packs, tents and stoves. But in the mid-1950s these things were even heavier, uglier, less comfortable, and more expensive than they are now. She made her own choices based on her own needs, becoming the first woman to solo thru-hike the whole Appalachian Trail, and the first person ever to hike it three times. “Most people are pantywaists,” she once said, “Exercise is good for you.”

It’s an option.

Exercises

1. Write a 6000 word essay on why Henry David Thoreau was a dork.
2. Use your essay as a fire starter.
3. Buy a nice pair of flammable pants and give them to your next door neighbor for his birthday.
4. Commit random acts of senseless befuddlement.
5. Extra credit: Spin around and around until you get really dizzy. Then confess everything to the police, even if you didn’t do it. They will appreciate your thoughtfulness.

What Is Fire?

What Is Fire?

Water? No. Air? No. Earth? No. It’s fire. Fire is the only element that is any good at all when you want to cook yourself a hot dog. — George “Flamethrower” Nilrac

Fire making is a complex process, as you know if you’ve ever tried to start one. My mother used to smoke in bed when getting out of bed to smoke became too much trouble. Since she was always smoking, she never would have gotten any sleep otherwise. Lots easier for her just to snooze and puff at the same time.

This proves two things. One is her level of talent in not ever once falling asleep and roasting herself, anyone else, or even any of the cats. The other is how hard it can be to start a fire. If she ever really did fall asleep this way, nothing ever actually caught fire. We lived. Thanks, Mom.

Harry Houdini said “That fire could be produced through friction finally came into the knowledge of man, but the early methods entailed much labor.” Try rubbing any two random things together and you’ll see. Keep trying for several hundred thousand years until you just happen to get two nice, dry sticks that are just the right size and shape, on a day when you feel good and strong after a decent meal and have finally decided that no matter what happens, you are just, dammit, going to invent fire and get on with things.

When fire finally does happen (after the aforementioned several hundred thousand years) it’s because you got the atoms of one thing excited enough to go and fight with atoms of the other thing, and they got all mixed up together, gave each other lots of black eyes, and ended up producing lots of heat and light. And that’s what fire is.

You can start a fire by going at the old rubbing procedure nearly forever. Or, on the other hand, sometimes you just happen to walk into the room when the atoms from column A and the atoms from column B have all had a really bad day, and have all really had it with each other already, and they’re just waiting for someone like you to come along and do even one little tiny thing, just one thing, and then by golly they’ll just go at it like wildcats.

Like those days when someone has turned on the gas stove after the pilot light has blown out, and absently walked away. It’s days like this that you wish you’d stayed in bed yourself. Inside your mother maybe, in the earliest stages of pregnancy, before you were more than a few casually acquainted molecules, when it wasn’t too late to get reabsorbed and forget about all this individuality business, and being born and having responsibilities and all.

You probably will think this to yourself while running around in circles and trying to put yourself out. And if you live through it all you have to lie around in bed for a good long while, strapped up in bandages, and hurting a whole lot more than you want to. That’s the alternate way of not how to do it.

Whether you can control the resulting fire or not, you always need three things for fire to happen: oxygen, fuel and heat. Luckily for us the atmosphere is 21% oxygen, and it’s always close by and pumped up. But if you, for example, set your pants on fire, this also means that they will keep burning. You can’t get away from that crazy old oxygen. You can use your pants as fuel, of course, if you really want to, but if you’re a backpacker you generally try to avoid that, since pants are so handy for wiping your hands on. And this is why experience is such a good teacher. Do it once (or twice at the most) and you’ll learn not to do it again.

OK, that accounts for oxygen and fuel. The heat part of the equation can come from a match, a cigarette lighter, or sometimes just a simple spark, depending on the fuel.

What you want, if you’re going to make a good, hot cup of coffee, is a controlled but self-sustaining fire. You need enough heat, mixed with just enough oxygen and fuel, to start the fuel and oxygen combining in a romantic but efficient sort of way. And when they do that they produce their own heat. This gets you to what is called “ignition continuity”. That’s the feedback loop where heat from the fire cycles back into the fuel and oxygen and keeps them hot enough to continue dancing (a.k.a. fighting). It’s also called an “uninhibited chain reaction”, but a full description of that is available only in the adult version of this book.

This feedback of heat into the fire breaks down the fuel, makes it start hopping around like crazy, and sends it out looking for some oxygen to tangle with.

But a paradox! We have a paradox here! Hello! Danger! Paradox Alert!

Solid fuel doesn’t burn. Neither does liquid fuel. Only gaseous stuff does. So you need to get the solid or liquid stuff hot enough to break down and get really gassed off. Then you can have a fire, and only then. The process is called “pyrolysis”, The fuel gets pyrolized. Whee! Waking up some nice morning and finding out that you’ve been pyrolized would get you pretty hot too, and you might just burst into flame, too, pants or no pants. But it wouldn’t be that pleasant from the front row.

So let’s review here. You need oxygen which you’ve got plenty of, then fuel, and some kind of energy to kickstart things. Then the burning will begin, and it will throw off enough heat to keep itself going. And it will keep going until it runs out of (all together now) fuel, or oxygen, or heat. You need all three.

That’s why you can put out a fire by throwing water or sand on it (cuts off oxygen and cools it) or by pulling sticks out of the fire or scraping the ground bare (removes the fuel). Or by taking your pants off.

A typical flame has some structure to it as well. If you’ve ever gone to the hobby shop and bought a “Visible Flame”™ model kit to assemble at home you know after close inspection that a flame has three basic parts.

Lacking a properly assembled “Visible Flame”™ kit, you can also carefully look at a candle flame. (Be careful about the eyebrows, though – yours.) There’s an inner part of the flame just next to the wick where the wax and the wick are starting to get all hot and vaporized. That’s where they mix with air. This part of the flame doesn’t look like much, which may be why you fell asleep trying this in high school chemistry class.

OK, it gets better though. The next layer is hotter. This layer is above the first one and kind of surrounds it, and in this layer there’s some actual burning going on. Way more exciting for us science buffs. WooHoo! The flame here is usually bluish, grading to yellow toward the outside. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen combine here to produce carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water and a few noxious substances with terribly complicated names and generally bad reputations. And heat, too. Don’t forget our friend, Mr. Heat.

The outermost layer, at the top of the flame, is yellowish or whitish. That means it’s hot. Really hot. Amazingly hot. Which is why you shouldn’t stick your finger into it, let alone your eyebrows. And watch the tip of your nose, too. The burning finishes in this region of the flame. It’s where the last bits of carbon hang out, getting incandescent and making the flame bright with their glow, just before they enter into a permanent relationship with oxygen.

Stick something relatively cold like a cooking pot into this top part of the flame (remember now, no fingers!) and you’ll cool down the flame. Carbon will condense out of the flame and collect on the pot instead of burning, and you’ll get a bunch of soot. (Science fact: soot is raw, unburned carbon!) This also proves that chemistry is real, and that it can hurt a lot if you didn’t listen and stuck your finger in there anyway.

And I believe we’ve proved our point about the three essentials needed for fire. When you stick a cold cooking pot into the flame you suck up heat, and by doing that you deprive the carbon of its chance to glow and burn. Instead it gets all limp and wussy and falls out of the flame and sticks to the bottom of your pot.

Right here is about the point I dropped out of the Boy Scouts. Nothing much had any interest for me after I got permission to start fires, burn things, and make soot. The rest of it seemed so impractical, so lame, so organized. Basically I’ve hung onto an immature fascination with fires and cooking things outdoors and left it at that, which is where my interest in backpacking really came from.

If after all this you still don’t think that fire can be fascinating, then look up George Goble, a Purdue University engineer who received the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for starting a barbecue fire in three seconds.

Mr. Goble used 60 pounds of charcoal briquettes, 10 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX), and a match. And destroyed the grill. But got nice, hot coals. “Warning” he says, “If charcoal is PRESOAKED in LOX first, an explosion will result. One briquette presoaked in LOX is approx equiv to 1 stick of dynamite.”

In the words of Terry Pratchett, “Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”

See? Fire really IS fun!

Exercises

1. Locate two sticks and bond with them.
2. Get a tattoo in the shape of a large flame, with this text:

   When I’m burning,
   When I shout, and
   Scream out loud –
   Please put me out.

3. Befriend an oxygen molecule.
4. Look up the story of George Goble and reassure yourself that it’s true.
5. Extra credit: If you look up the story of George Goble and feel reassured, then please stay away from me.

Story Break: Uncle Pudzer Builds A Fire

Story Break

Uncle Pudzer Builds A Fire

Citron Ella Schmelling

Q:  Hi. Thanks for helping us out with this book. Before we start, do you have anything you’d like to use as an intro?

A:  Well, uh, first, most people wonder about my name.

Q:  Right.

A:  When my parents were on their honeymoon they went camping because they didn’t have much money, and they heard someone talking about citronella. They thought it was a girl’s name, and two words, not just one. They had never heard of it and didn’t know that it was a plant oil used as an insect repellent.

I like it though. While I was growing up I would have a few odd moments at the start of every school year – in grade school, mostly – when my teacher first saw my name, but they got over it. I was embarrassed. A lot. Who wouldn’t be? I hated my name then, really hated it, but as I got older I started to feel special. By then I had a nickname, Sally, but now mostly I go by Citron Ella or just Citron.

In grade school and junior high, and high school I was always Sally. When I got to college I started to become my own person. Nobody knew me, so I changed to Citron. Nobody else has my name. I like that a lot. Now I’m Citron Ella and proud of it. I read somewhere that Ella means “beautiful fairy woman”,” and citron is a wonderful small and delicately-scented fruit, so even if I ever feel a bit like an outsider, I can pretend that I am a woman of magic and wonder from a land of mystery and joy, like any good backpacker.

Q:  End of story then?

A:  Except that I’m considering names for children, like Dieter for a son, and Ophelia (or Ofelia) for a daughter, and of course their nicknames would be “Deet” and “Offie”.

Q:  I understand that you got into backpacking because of your uncle Reiny Pudzer.

A:  Yeah. There’s a name. I’m glad I’m a girl so I can’t have a name like Reinhold. I was sort of a tomboy, and he and Aunt Lydia didn’t have any kids, but they he came from a big family and their relatives were thick as flies and all had kids, so he would take all us nieces and nephews out hiking and camping and Aunt Lydia would sit at home in the kitchen and cluck and ruffle her feathers. But we always came back OK.

Q:  How old were you when you started?

A:  Oh, about eight or so. But we took it easy. Uncle Reiny was pretty good. He’s kind of a funny old guy but he’s nice. Sweet, almost. Kind of prickly on the outside but he has a good soul. Gets flustered sometimes but he’s never mean. Not really. He didn’t push us. We did more as we got older. Mostly it was kind of like an outdoor party.

Q:  I understand that sometimes it was actually a birthday party?

A:  For sure. I was born on May 30, Memorial Day. It was more of a big deal when I was younger. We used to go to the parade downtown first (small town), and then went out of town a little way to a park after the parade. We kids felt like we were going out to the wilderness. My parents ran the show but Uncle Reiny was sort of a technical advisor.

We ran around a lot and yelled, and ate sloppy joes and had a great time. It was really special. I always thought the parades were for me. I learned better when I got older, and kind of fell off the birthday party wagon somewhere, but the memories are still there. I don’t celebrate my birthday any more, but I have really, really good memories. My parties were the best that any of my friends ever went to, including their own.

Q:  What did you do besides birthday parties?

A:  Well, it was sort of whatever Uncle Reiny was in the mood for. We camped some, and hiked, and as we got older we did a one-night backpack trip, and then two nights, and so on. Nothing formal. It just happened.

Q:  And that’s how you got into backpacking?

A:  Sort of, a little at a time. First I’d just carry a goofy beat up old rucksack, and then went through the external-frame pack phase, and then the internal-frame phase, and as I grew up I eventually evolved into a fairly gnarly ultralight backpacker. Now I make most of my own hiking clothes and even my packs and shelters.

Q:  How much did your uncle influence all this?

A:  Well, if it hadn’t been for him I’m not sure I would have started. I look back on it now and it was all pretty clunky, kind of like trying to build a house out of twigs and shoe box cardboard, but if you’re a kid you don’t care. If you have fun and someone looks out for you and gives you some inspiration and encouragement you can learn on your own when the time comes. It’s the experimenting and playing that are important.

Q:  Do you have a story to tell us about the early days?

A:  Sure do. I thought I’d tell my “Uncle Pudzer builds a fire” story.

 

 

---

 

We were stopped for lunch one day early in the spring. We were in our grade school years, and on an exploring hike in Uncle Pudzer’s back lot, which was pretty big and had a lot of trees on it – a small, private forest almost. A couple of us kids decided to build a fire. It looked easy on TV. We got a few sticks, made a pile of them, and sat on the ground rubbing them together.

Uncle came by munching a sandwich and watched us for a few minutes. Finally he finished and while licking the mayonnaise off his fingers he said, “Well, you want a fire then, do you? I can show you if you want. We’ll have one going in a minute. Just watch close now.”

First he moved all our crooked sticks out of the way and told us to clear a patch down to bare earth. All of us started scratching like chickens with our little feet, bumping into each other and sending dry leaves and grass and twigs flying all over.

“OK, OK that won’t do kids,” he said. We were covering up the cleared spots as fast as we were clearing new ones. He got us all to form a ring facing inward and holding hands, and then had us scuff our feet from the middle to the outside. This was fun. We all rotated clockwise together. He had us start singing “Ten boxes of sticks on the wall” and scraping and kicking, and by the time we’d counted down to no boxes of sticks on the wall we had a circle about 10 feet across. It was like a little folk dance with us as tiny peasants.

We had enough room cleared to roast a boar.

“OK, kids,” he said. “You done good there. Now Kenny, you and Bill run and find some tinder for me.” And Kenny ran off, not having any idea what he was looking for. Bill didn’t want to look dumb so he went too, chasing Kenny.

Then he told Albert: “Albert, you get us some nice kindling,” and turned around to me. “You go find my coat on the back porch and get the matches. We’ll need those too. They’re in the top pocket.” Then he sent John to the truck to get a lighter, just in case. He delegated Carrie to find some rocks to make a fire circle. She was only five, and just said “O Kay,” and stood there sucking her thumb.

Albert was still there too. He tried to get Uncle’s attention to ask what kindling was, but Uncle had turned toward the trees. After saying that he’d select some prime wood for our fire, he stood there eyeballing the trees like an art critic. Albert followed him, too shy to make a sound but hoping to catch on. Uncle had forgotten to give Mary Ann anything to do so she followed Albert.

Uncle turned and saw Mary Ann and told her to stay close, so she could learn how to pick the best wood. That’s when he saw Albert and sent him next door to borrow a saw from Mr. Dorfman. “And tell him I hope his leg’s better where the rooster pecked him last week, and I’ll have the saw back tonight. Give my regards to the Missus while you’re at it then.”

Then he looked down and saw Mary Ann waiting to receive her lesson. “Did you get that kindling yet?” he said. “No,” she said, afraid to correct him. “By golly, you got to get hopping then. Look for some little skinny twigs like fat dog whiskers. Now go. Go. Look sharp once,” he said as he patted her on the shoulder and wandered into the trees.

I got to the porch but didn’t find Uncle’s coat. I walked around the outside of house looking up and down but didn’t see it. I knocked at the back door and asked Aunt Lydia if she’d seen Uncle Pudzer’s coat because he was going to show us how to build a fire and we had to have some matches.

“Oh, that dumbhead,” she said. “He’ll just burn us all out. Teaching you kids how to set fires like that. You go run back there and tell him to quit that or I’ll show him what for.” And then she closed the door on me. For a little while I thought about crying. I didn’t want to let anybody down. I was just a little girl.

Back in the woods Albert had returned without a saw. He found Mr. Dorfman who only said “Tell Reiny he’s already got my saw. I loaned it to him about two years ago, and I’d appreciate it if he could find the time to return it. Between him and the damn animals around here I’m about done in. Look out for that rooster on the way out.”

John was back without the lighter. He said the truck was locked.

Carrie was standing in the middle of our fire circle sucking her thumb. Albert and I went looking for rocks. John came along. The only ones we knew of were in Uncle’s gravel driveway so we went out there and filled our pockets. The biggest ones were no bigger than ping pong balls. We were proud. We shared some with Carrie, but she just stood there holding one in each of her tiny hands.

About that time Uncle Pudzer came back out of the trees with an armload of dry branches. “Got that saw yet, Albert?” he said. “No, sir,” said Albert, “He says you borrowed it two years ago and he wants it back.”

“That ornery, so-and-so,” said Uncle Pudzer. “He knows that ain’t right. Here I am trying to teach you kids an important lesson and he’s playin’ tricks on us. Do I have to do all this myself? Well no never-mind. We can break these sticks up ourselves, you watch. Carrie, did you get some rocks, what are those things there, you call those rocks?”

Carrie looked down and started to cry. Uncle Pudzer looked at her for a minute, then at us. Then he said “Oh, by golly wait a minute. Look at all those rocks you got! You done real good there Carrie! I missed ’em the first time. You’re my real favorite little sweetheart, you are!” He knelt and hugged her and whispered something and she stopped crying.

“Carrie’s got the prettiest rocks. She’s my little sweetie. She done good, she did. We’ll build our pretty fire on them, but we need some big ugly rocks to make a circle and hold the fire in. You kids go get some ugly rocks. You can do that, so scram now. Carrie, you stay right here and watch these rocks for us, OK? You make sure these pretty ones don’t get away now, OK?” Carrie nodded, happy again.

Albert and I ran off to find more rocks.

We discovered what we needed out at the front of the house, around Aunt Lydia’s flower bed. Grapefruit-sized rocks. Big heavy ones. Ugly ones. One by one we picked them up and carried them deep into the back yard where our fire circle was. After ten or so trips we had enough, and made a nice circle with them, filling the inside of the ring with the gravel we’d gotten earlier.

We now had a paved fire ring.

Uncle Pudzer emerged from the woods with another armload of firewood. “Sally,” he said “where’s those matches now?” I told him I couldn’t find his jacket. “Seven of you out here and you can’t find one jacket! Boy oh boy kids these days.” He raised his bushy eyebrows at us and then frowned. “It looks just like this,” he said, grabbing the sides of the jacket he was wearing and flapping it at us. Then he reached into the breast pocket and handed me a book of matches. “Ach, you kids,” he said. “Now don’t lose these. We’re gonna need these, you hear?”

“Johnny, you get that lighter yet? We might need that one.” John shook his head. “I tried but the truck was locked,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He looked at me and then hung his head. I put the matches into my pants pocket where they wouldn’t get lost. “Jesus was a patient man,” Uncle Pudzer muttered. “Try to remember that.” Everyone was quiet for a moment. We all looked at each other. The early spring dusk began to edge in on our afternoon. We didn’t know what he had meant by that. We weren’t sure what was going to happen next.

Then we seemed to hear voices. Out in the woods somewhere. Faintly calling for help. Mary Ann stumbled out of the trees behind a ball of twigs as big as she was. She dumped them onto the ground and smiled. “I’m hungry,” she said, “Can we eat now?”

The voices kept calling in the distance. I turned and looked back toward house, which was far off toward the front of the lot. I thought I saw Aunt Lydia looking out of the kitchen window, but I wasn’t sure, it was so far. We felt almost lost in the deep wilderness way back here.

“Now which one of you is missing?” said Uncle. Then he counted us and came up short by two. Kenny and Bill were out there looking for tinder, whatever that was. He caught on. “Must be those two boys. What in hell are they doing out there?” he said. “You kids stay right here while I go find them. Don’t move now. I’ll be right back and then we’ll have some fun.”

He took a step back and tripped on our rocks. He sat down hard in the middle of our fire ring and fell backward over the rocks on the other side. “Damn, damn, damn!” he said, “What I sacrifice for our youth! I tell you this ought to start getting a whole lot better pretty darn soon now! I’m not gettin’ any younger here. Damn that hurts!”

We weren’t sure what to do. Carrie looked like she might start crying again. I thought I might too. Uncle rubbed his back and kneeled down by her again. “Carrie, you’re my sweetheart,” he said, “I’ll be back in a minute now. You look after these kids and I’ll be right back, OK? Then we’ll have some fun, OK?” Then he kissed her on the cheek and headed off into the trees, looking for Kenny and Bill, who were calling louder now.

“I’m hungry,” said Carrie, and went back to sucking her thumb.

In a few minutes Uncle Pudzer returned with the two boys. They both had their pockets stuffed with dry leaves, dry moss, and last year’s cattail heads, those big puffy sausages that explode like clouds of cotton lint when you bend them. Between the two of them they had gathered lots of tinder without knowing for sure what it was, and had a full load of it.

Their only problem had been getting a little too close to the duck pond in the far corner of the lot and sinking up to their knees in muck. In trying to get free they’d fallen down a few times and were pretty well covered in goo, but they’d found what they were sent for. Uncle Pudzer had suffered the same fate in pulling them out, and was wet up to his knees as well, and had muck on his elbows. He returned with a boy under each arm, and set them down carefully.

Then he set us to breaking up the firewood he’d gathered. We used Bill and Kenny’s tinder and a small part of Mary Ann’s lifetime supply of kindling. Uncle Pudzer constructed his fire as carefully as a priest building his first temple. When he said “OK” and asked for the matches I pulled them out of my pocket and handed them over. At least that part worked out OK. I had kept them safe. We were ready.

But Uncle still wasn’t quite satisfied. He wanted this to be a one-match fire. He wanted to show us how it should be done. He wanted to impress us. He wanted magic for us. He walked around the pile of tinder, kindling and sticks eyeballing it from all sides, touching it here and there, adding or removing a stick or wisp of fuzz until it was just right. Night was near. He returned to the spot he had started from. We were all getting really hungry by now.

Then he asked me for the matches.

I told him I had already handed them over. “What?” he said, “When was that?” “A minute ago. When you said ‘OK,’” I said. “Then you did some more with the fire. I didn’t see them again.” A couple of the boys backed me up. We traded glances. We weren’t sure how we were going to get out of this lesson. It was nearly supper time by now and our parents would be looking for us. This wasn’t really fun anymore.

Uncle Pudzer just stood there. “OK, nobody move,” he said. “You all look down at the ground. That book of matches has gotta be here real close. You all just look down and you’ll see it.” But we didn’t. He had us get down on our hands and knees and feel around in the grass for the matches but we couldn’t locate them. They were just gone.

While we were hunting in the gloom we heard Aunt Lydia’s voice, nearby. “What the heck is going on out here?” she said, “What are you doing with them kids now? I thought you had your heart set on burning the forest down, so where’s that fire now? It’s getting cold out here. Everybody’s hungry.”

Uncle Pudzer just shrugged and mumbled something. He looked down at the unlit fire and shrugged again, lifting his hands palms up. “I don’t know. Maybe we should try this some other time,” he said, as he took a step back as if to get a better view of this mess. His failed lesson. His sorry evening mess. Then he put his hands on his hips and hung his head for a second as if in thought.

Before you could say “Whoops!” he bent over and picked up the book of matches, which he had been standing on. “OK, kids, now watch,” he said with a big grin. “We’re gonna do it this time!” He knelt on one knee, struck a match, and carefully poked it into the bottom of his little temple of twigs.

Something in there caught fire, then something else, and something else again. In a second or two we had a teeny campfire. In 10 seconds we had a tiny campfire, and in 30 seconds the whole thing was ablaze. We were so happy that we were jumping up and down. Yay! Yay! Even Carrie, who pulled the thumb out of her mouth and clapped hands with a big smile on her face.

“Ach, you dumbhead,” said Aunt Lydia, “You’re always doing that. You should learn once.” Then we noticed that she had brought a tray with her. Full of sloppy joes. The same very good, very special food that we had at all my birthday parties. She had been in the kitchen reminding herself out loud what a big dumb man she had married, and knowing that his little lesson would take all afternoon, and had prepared supper for us all, in case we didn’t kill ourselves first, and in case we were still hungry.

And we were.

As Uncle Pudzer lovingly tended his fire, he held Carrie on his lap while she ate. He hugged her and kissed her cheek. The rest of us sat around the fire and ate. In a few minutes Aunt Lydia returned with a bag of marshmallows which we roasted for dessert.

After we were all done, Uncle Pudzer showed us how to put out the fire, and we carried everything back to the house.

He and Aunt Lydia stood out front and said good night to us as we all headed for home. All our parents would be worried, or mad, or both, but things had turned out very well after all.

As I walked toward home, as Uncle Pudzer’s house was disappearing in the gloom I heard Aunt Lydia say “What the hell happened to my flower garden, there? Where did my rocks go?” But I didn’t go back to explain. Uncle would know how to handle it. He could handle anything.