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
- Review all the reasons why Henry David Thoreau was a dork.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.