Starting Fires—What it Takes
In my lifetime I’ve started hundreds of fires: campfires, cooking fires, grass fires, bonfires for brush and limbs, and more. I find fires a fascinating blend of heat, light, technical skills, architecture, sound, physical exertion, and beauty.
I can remember starting my first few fires. They were a LOT of work. Kindling is the fine stuff—twigs, pine needles, old bird’s nests—that catches fire with relative ease when exposed to sufficient heat.
Then you pile on bigger stuff until you can drop entire trees on a fire that is hot enough. Kindling is difficult to find in some environments, and then you have to supply the heat, which could involve flint and steel, a bow and a stick, or even a match (preferably dry).
Then there’s the matter of gathering wood, which varies widely in difficulty according to where you’re building the fire. It can be a fascinating process, ranging from gathering twigs to cutting down trees that weigh as much as a fully-loaded tractor-trailer rig.
Early on I discovered that my only reason to go camping was to build fires, and then I learned to skip the camping. You could build fires anywhere.
As a boy I got in trouble more than once for making a fire where it didn’t belong, or for cutting down trees that were not mine. I think some of that was scary for my parents to watch.
Learning More About Starting Fires
Over the years, I’ve discovered that there seem to be endless ways to make a fire better, faster, more beautiful, hotter, safer, and more. There’s always something to learn.
In just the past year I’ve learned, to name just some things:
- How to start a fire faster, more efficiently. I can walk out my back door, start a blazing fire, and be back inside before ten minutes have passed.
- A completely unforeseen way to create effective kindling in moments
- How to balance dried and green wood to produce a wide variety of fire intensity and duration
- Better ways to use a chain saw in cutting down trees—always sick or potentially destructive in some way—that can be cut into logs and split to almost any size
- How to sharpen a chain saw with far greater efficiency and sharpness
After sixty years of building fires, I’m still learning. Because I want to. Because I love learning new things. It’s not just more productive. It’s FUN.
Starting Fires in Your Life to Learn New Things
Every day of our lives, we have opportunities to learn new things—some intellectual, some occupational, some emotional—but (1) we do have to look for them, and (2) we must be willing to admit our ignorance before we can embrace something new.
Build a fire in your belly to be a happier, stronger human being. Commit to learning how to be a better parent every day. Oh, you’ll make monumental mistakes, just as I’ve dropped a few trees where they weren’t supposed to go and watched a couple of fires burn out of control in the dry grass.
You’ll get scared. You’ll feel stupid. Doesn’t matter. Keep being WILLING to learn. Stay aware of opportunities to learn. And then . . . you’ll learn.
It’s a very fun way to live, and we can communicate that willingness to our children. Not only can we teach them important principles but—more importantly—we can teach them to be eager to learn all their lives. That’s an asset without price.
