Open Fire
Honesty may be the best policy but it’s important to remember that if you screw up, dishonesty can be a pretty good second best policy. – George “Flamethrower” Nilrac
Fire Types
The oldest type of fire is a kind we’ll call the “open fire”. It’s loose, free to wander, may get away at any moment, and if you use it, it’s up to you to watch it. Think of it as “free range” fire. This is all true.
Have you ever seen any photos from a 19th-century factory? Pulleys, belts, buzzing saws, racing pistons, and whooshing steam everywhere. Come to work with an unbuttoned shirtsleeve and before you can sneeze your arm gets pulled off and diced in the machinery. You’ll never see your fingers again. Back then it was up to you, not the boss, to watch what you were doing, and if you lost a couple of arms, legs, or eyes, you were encouraged to move on to another job elsewhere.
Open fires are like that. Talk about herding cats. This kind of fire is more like trying to herd houseflies. You don’t even have to do anything, just sit there, build it carefully, light it with love, tend it gently, warm your hands or try to make a cup of coffee and BINGO one stick pops, shoots sparks up, they start flying away and get into the treetops, and then you have a whole lot of excuses to think up while you sprint across the landscape trying to save your hide.
If you have to go this way, if you have to have an open fire, then start with some basic knowledge.
There are really two basic types of fires: those on top of the ground and those started in some kind of pit. There are several ways of arranging your firewood, but the most important difference is really whether your fire can just run away any time it wants, or whether it has to climb out of a hole first.
Digging holes in national parks before starting fires in them is only slightly less welcome than burning the parks down, but it can be a little safer, if more work. You can dig a simple trench or pit, or make something called the “Dakota pit fire” which involves a U-shaped tunnel in the ground, sucking air in at one to feed the fire at the other end, which serves as a chimney. This is especially good for fighter pilots who have been shot down and need something to do while eluding capture and waiting for rescue. A fire like this is in a deep hole and out of sight. And it’s pretty easy to put out and bury in a permanent sort of way.
Usually though you’ll dig a simple straight trench whose sides are just high enough to support a cooking pot, start a fire in the trench under the pot, and have one end of the trench pointed into the wind. You won’t worry about where to bury your parachute and which armed partisans might be hunting you with assault rifles. Not if you’re backpacking. On most days. In most parks. In this country.
Like the various vectors that cats and houseflies might adopt while fleeing your control, the direction of wind isn’t a fundamental constant of nature. As soon as you dig a trench to aim into it, it will change just so it can blow smoke back into your face. But the trench will offer a margin of safety, and all the dirt you dug up will help you to bury the fire when you’re done.
The issue of above or below ground aside, the basic types of open fire then become those that have the sticks either standing on their ends or lying down.
Tepee fire: Sticks standing up, and leaning together make a tepee-like structure. When you see an illustration of this kind of fire it always looks nice and neat with lots of straight sticks on even ground, leaning in together and coming to a tidy little point at the top. Real sticks are covered with bumps and warts. They are never straight, and don’t like to do what they’re told.
Sometimes they come close enough to make a recognizable structure, sometimes they don’t. If you build this kind of fire put some tinder and kindling down first, then stack up the fuel sticks around it in a cone with the tinder and kindling inside. Light the tinder when you’re done laying in the sticks, and keep feeding the fire from the upwind side as it burns. This kind of fire tends to fall over early on while it burns down. If you add fuel to the downwind side, the fire will slowly walk in that direction, before it starts running in that direction. We told you so.
Crisscross fire: With this one you lay the sticks down flat. This is handy for lazy people because the sticks want to do this on their own anyway. It’s called going with the flow. You can sound smart, cool, New-Age and lazy all at once by phrasing it this way.
This type of fire really benefits from a trench. With or without a trench, you lay down some of the bigger sticks first, going, say, left-to-right, parallel to your trench. Then lay another layer at 90 degrees, and so on, until you think you’ve got enough fuel. The trick is to keep it all loose enough, and mix in kindling and tinder as you go.
An alternate way of doing this is to start with just two larger sticks as a foundation, and leave a kind of hidden compartment down there to put the kindling and tinder in, underneath everything else. You always want to leave things loose though, to allow airflow.
Most people don’t know this, but fire needs air to burn. Ask someone about this and you’ll get a rational, reasonable answer. “Of course,” they’ll say, “everybody knows that.” But set that person out on the ground with a pile of sticks and a match, and they’ll get totally confused on you and weave all the sticks into the tightest most compact airtight wad you can imagine.
They’ll use a whole box of matches on it with about as much luck as trying to light a brick. They will blow and huff and wheeze and maybe get some smoke out one end, but that will be about it. Then they’ll go and try to siphon gas out of your car, figuring that all this fire really needs is a gallon or two of unleaded poured right over the top of it. Once they do that, by golly, it’s really going to work, for sure this time.
If this happens, then stand back. Way back. Maybe a quarter mile. After driving away in your car. And never accept an invitation from any of these people for a summer barbecue. They understand only the nuclear option.
Fires needs lots of air. Build fires so they can breathe and they’ll do pretty well on their own. They like breathing. Try it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ahhh. So relaxing, so energizing. Just what your fire thinks.
Breathing makes a fire feel light and airy and personally fulfilled. Use the right sticks for fuel, put in the right tinder and kindling, build it up just right, and all you will need is one match. The fire will catch, you’ll cook lunch, the fire will burn down quietly, and you’ll be able to put it all out safely, and go on your way. There will be no need for air tankers, firefighting crews, or criminal trials crammed with prosecutors.
When you build an open fire like this (if you decide you really need one) you should think about three categories of fuel.
Fuel Types
Tinder: This is the stuff that explodes into flame if you only look at it cross eyed, or just show it a picture of a match. It’s what kick starts the fire and lights the other two kinds of fuel.
Tinder can be the shredded dry stuff under a layer of bark on a dead tree, or fine wood shavings (note: it’s getting harder and harder to find trees that still shave). You can use dead dry grass, wax paper, or navel lint (about the only good reason to have a really large, slovenly hiking companion).
Some outfits even sell blocks of magnesium metal that you can scrape with the blade of a knife. Make a pile of shavings, light it, and you’ve got a sort of thermonuclear tinder: a white-hot 2,500 degree F pile. Warning! For external use only. Do not eat or apply to skin or clothing. Do not try this while on medication.
Kindling: Part two of our fuel saga. Kindling is small twigs, split wood or heavy cardboard. Kindling is safe around small children once they’re past the stage of trying to eat everything or shove it into their nostrils. Relatively speaking, kindling is anything bigger than tinder and smaller than fuel wood. Kindling does not go around looking for a chance to explode into flame, but it does fill the step between the really, really flammable stuff and the semi-reluctant, sort-of flammable stuff that you want to cook over. Kindling is pretty easy to light but doesn’t burn long. It’s an intermediate, middle of the road sort of fuel.
Fuel: Real fuel. The big gun of the fire world. Fuel is usually dry standing wood and dead branches. For backpacking you really want pieces that are small enough to break up with your hands. If it’s too tough for that, then it’s too thick. Learn how to admit defeat and surrender early in the game. You will be happier and less dangerous. More efficient too. You want to cook a meal, not begin a long-term relationship. In a pinch, you can try dry, braided grasses or animal dung. Dry is the key word here, following right after “in a pinch”. Followed, even more distantly, by the idea of dung.
Someone, somewhere listed coal, oil shale, or oil sand lying around on the surface as possible campfire fuels. Don’t count on finding any of those. If you have to resort to dung, you’re probably backpacking on the wrong continent. Remember, this section about open fires is only for people who really want to do it the hard way, but still want to be potentially practical. Stoves are usually much, much better. Dung is way, way out in left field. If you want dung, go out to left field and please leave us alone, especially while we’re eating. Don’t offer us any of your food either.
Finding kindling, tinder AND fuel right where you need them, WHEN you need them is a little like expecting a big tax refund when you haven’t paid any taxes. Finding wild fuel is a lot less convenient than people tell you, which is one really good reason to use a backpacking stove and leave that tricky fire thing to someone else. While you’re out backpacking you normally have enough problems with hunger pangs and mosquitoes, let alone treasure hunts for firewood and the effort of trying to keep cooking fires under control while your stomach is growling, assuming that you find firewood. And you may not.
The Evolution Of Fire And Who Still Uses It
There’s a Harvard biological anthropologist named Richard Wrangham who believes that humanity started with an ape learning to cook. I don’t know about your family, but this is definitely true in mine. Unfortunately, my father was unable to complete his training and only got as far as predictably incinerating food beyond recognition. And swearing a lot.
Can’t forget that. One of his specialties. Swear, and if that doesn’t work, swear harder. And so on. Eventually either he or the universe got tired and gave up, and it wasn’t always predictable which one it would be, so there is some value in this technique for the diligent swearers out there.
When done frying a couple of eggs down to the point where they became indistinguishable from the stuff that plastic dinner plates are made of my father would run cold water into the frying pan to cool it, thereby ruining it. Do this to a hot frying pan and it puckers into a sort of shallow cup shape that never again sits flat on the stove. This is what I had to evolve from. It wasn’t easy.
In my mother’s family though, on holiday occasions, the men did most of the cooking. Mostly turkey, stuffing, gravy and potatoes. The women handled the rest with the customary grace borne of daily practice, since they cooked the other three hundred and sixty-odd days of the year. We all ate a lot on those occasions, and then the men retired from both the kitchen and table and sat around with loose belts and lied to each other.
Later on, just past the middle of the 20th century when television reached the northern plains, the men had the option of watching football on TV as well as lying to each other. In the kitchen the women did the dishes and gossiped about the men, or sometimes just swore at them. Without their day-to-day kitchen expertise and long-suffering tolerance we would all have died young, and miserably, and in great hunger. This is true. It was fun.
Primitive humans, some of whom may also have been among your relatives, probably first discovered fire by seeing it coming at them. The survivors were the ones who were good at running, and knew when to do it. The earliest cooks were the curious survivors who went back to poke among the ashes of wildfires and found treats like baked boar, grilled gazelle, munchable mouse, rack of raccoon, and melt-in-your-mouth mastodon.
That was it! The eureka moment of evolutionary history! They liked it! They really liked it! Fire and cooking have been following us around ever since, and exclamation points too (!).
There are rumors that Neanderthals may never have mastered fire, which may be why very few if any top chefs these days are descended from them. They didn’t entirely die out, as you know if you’ve ever had a job. Few chefs, but quite a few people in management are direct descendants of these sturdy but slow and dangerous folk.
Take a look at your boss, but don’t stare. They don’t like that. It’s like a challenge, and they may react instinctively in unpredictable and violent ways. Maybe you’ve already witnessed some of this at work.
When you can, look at your boss’s neck. See it? No? Try looking from the sides, and the back. Still don’t see it? Well guess what? There isn’t one. Try not to rile him. Or her. Remember, Neanderthals were a group of humans with large brains but still without the cleverness or patience to sit and rub two sticks together. That’s why they never got any merit badges in fire making. To rip and tear raw meat they evolved large, crushing teeth and may use them on you if they feel ridiculed, or even if only inspected too closely and with too much curiosity. Exercise caution here.
Peking Man (probably also Peking Wife, to tell the truth) was thought to have roasted meats, and possibly even chicken feet, which could have been the beginning of Chinese cuisine. At any rate, roasting spitted animals over open fires may have been virtually the only certified culinary method for many thousands of years, until the Aurignacian people of southern France suddenly began steaming food inside leafy wrappers for some unknown reason. No one has to tell you where this led. First to the Enlightenment, then the Revolution, and finally to vichyssoise and foie gras, but only after a sustained period of trial and error.
One bright day in the ancient past an anonymous person invented pottery and began getting fancy. He or she laid down the well-used pointed stick as a means of holding game over the flame, and created the concept of “throwing things into the pot”. This was a time long before the concept of patents and even of lawyers, and the idea was quickly stolen by absolutely everyone with any sense at all, and it spread like crazy. Pretty soon people were living in houses, working in cubicles, driving cars, emitting cell phone ring tones at every opportunity, and using Tupperware.
Good old fire was forgotten except for a few Boy Scouts and a handful of backpackers. This last group is today nearly the only bunch of humans still primitive enough to think that cooking over burning sticks is a pretty neat idea.
Exercises
- Write 500 times: “I promise never to start a forest fire.”
- Pretend you’re a fighter pilot who has been shot down behind enemy lines. Dress in camouflage if possible. Sneak into the woods with only a sheath knife, a book of matches, and some string. Live off the land for a week, and keep notes in a secret diary. When you return home, to prevent anyone from learning about your adventures, eat your diary.
- Make a pit fire. But not in your clothing. If you find that your pits spontaneously burst into flame you have a problem, but you already know this. Try doing your laundry more often. Bathe. Hang loose, but not with us. Please.
- Sing a song using the phrase “love me tinder”.
- Try descending from a long line of bachelors. If it works for you, and if you like it, then you’re just like me. If not, then you’re just like everyone else. Too bad for you. Being referred to as “normal” isn’t always a compliment, you know.
- Cook something unusual, perhaps a food that can only be eaten with a straw, on Thursdays in the autumn, under a benevolent and cloudless sky, in a strange and far-off land. You get extra credit for doing this over an open fire of your own making, especially if you do it naked.