Like - Building A Fire
When I was in college I lived across the street from a real wild man. He was a nice guy but was totally out of his gourd. He was only capable of speaking by shouting while frothing at the mouth. One day he dropped off a quarter cord of wood in our backyard apropos of nothing. It was the best thing he did as a neighbor because that wood taught me how to build a fire. For the rest of the semester, we’d come home, split logs, make a fire, and hang out in our living room tending to the flame. I became a devotee of the log cabin method where you stack two logs in a row and two more on top with a bunch of kindling in the middle. In my experience, it’s the easiest way to get a fire going. That’s important because it sucks to start a fire and fail. You question yourself and, worse, it makes the people around you question you, too. Since that magical run with a quarter cord of wood, I haven’t had many real chances to build fires. But last week while camping in Joseph, OR, I got a prime opportunity once we learned the fire ban was no longer in effect. The first night was easy, but it rained on the second day. It wasn’t super heavy rain, but it was enough to prompt one of our neighbors to walk over with a package of Duraflame logs after listening to me hack away with my little hatchet to make kindling. It was a nice gesture of camperly hospitality, but we were cooking hotdogs and s’mores that night and you can’t cook food over compressed sawdust soaked in gas. I didn’t sweat it though. I took the kindling I whittled, a few paper towels and a paper bowl to make a nest, then I stacked some logs, and sparked a lighter. With a few well-timed huffs, puffs, and paper plate fanning, I watched the fire catch and burn. I still had it.
(p.s. here’s a fun KLF song about building a different kind of fire)