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
- Write a 6000 word essay on why Henry David Thoreau was a dork.
- Use your essay as a fire starter.
- Buy a nice pair of flammable pants and give them to your next door neighbor for his birthday.
- Commit random acts of senseless befuddlement.
- 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.