Story Break
Setting A National Park On Fire
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.