Campfire

There really is something magical about a campfire. Normally inattentive groups of people can be transfixed for hours by a single flickering light when they would probably lose interest in a television show after five minutes. This is one of the many things that restore my faith in humanity.

A fire builds the most primitive form of community - people who have found light in the darkness around them. Isn't that what all communities are based on?

1. Prepare the fire pit. Clear out all the leaves and anything else that would burn for about ten feet.
2. Dig up the grass where you are going to have the fire pit. You can put it aside in the form of sod blocks to replace it later.
3. Place stones to border the fire pit.
4. Gather wood. You will need logs about 2½ to 6 inches in diameter and 1½ to 2 feet long (for an average size fire). You will also need smaller sticks and twigs, and dead leaves (or paper - if you want to cheat). All kindling wood should be dry.
5. Stack the wood. My favorite is the log cabin style. Place the two largest logs parallel, and place two more parallel logs on top, perpendicular to the first two. Continue, going from big logs to small, until you are out of logs.
6. Put the smaller sticks inside the logs. They should go from the center to the holes in between the big logs.
7. Put the twigs and leaves/paper on top of the sticks.
8. Light the leaves/paper (use matches, a lighter, a flint and steel, or whatever). If you had enough leaves, they should light the twigs, which will light the sticks, which will light the logs.
Now you have a fire. You can add more logs as the first logs burn.

A campfire at night is the most comforting thing in the world.

Modern appliances combine the ingredients of fire in a convenient way. A lighter has flint and steel to produce sparks and flammable liquid for fuel. Late-model range tops are large lighters. But lighters run out of fuel, and there are miles of pipeline between your stove and the closest oil refinery. And of course, the hum of a rangetop has its merits, but it doesn't have a fraction of a good campfire's ethos.

We spent a long time without machines. We watched our shadows sway in the light of our burning timber. We duplicated our mitochondrial heat with dry brush, sleeping next to heaps of smoking embers in the winter, making beds of glowing coals covered over with earth. This was the first heated mattress: dirt and coals.

Fire took a long time to invent for a reason: It's really hard to make.

In Kansas, we'll spend a lot of time crouched over pits, sweating. This is not a bad thing. A keyboard does not develop much muscle. Your heart and lungs are not strengthened by mouse-clicking. When we fly in and drive in we will not be carrying range-top ovens or water boilers. We will burn things for our heat. This is not as primitive as it sounds.

The basics of firemaking are broad. You'll be considering tinder, kindling, temperature, wind, and indigenous foliage. Some wood burns hotter than others. Some wood needs to be aged. You can burn things besides wood: peat moss, harvested in blocks like snow, dried. Burns like paper. Dry clothes burn nicely.

Tinder, kindling and wood

Heat is a result of the chemical reaction between fuel, air, and spark. Gasoline, alcohol, and peat moss all burn at different speeds and produce different amounts of heat, but they are all the same thing to a camper: fuel.

Assuming we don't have reservoirs of natural gas, we'll have to build fires with the things that are around us naturally. Dry brush, dry leaves, trees, moss. These things fall into three categories: Tinder, kindling, and wood.

Tinder is the lowest form of fuel. Pine needles, dry brush, wood shavings, lint: these are all tinder. They make up the core of the fire. When you light a campfire, you light the tinder. To prepare tinder, break it up by rolling it in your palms.

Kindling is tinder's rich cousin. Kindling is things like pieces of dry wood, gasoline, or punk — the rotten insides of tree trunks. Arrange kindling in a wigwam shape on top of the kindling to create the largest possible surface area for airflow.

Now, wood: wood is where the science is.

Hardwood — wood from a deciduous tree — makes a good, slowburning fire. Its coals last a long time.

Softwood — wood from an evergreen tree — makes a short, hot fire.

Green wood produces more smoke than seasoned wood. Seasoned wood produces better fire. Seasoned logs have contraction cracks radiating from the center because they have no sap. You can season wood in a year. If you put it in the summer sun, you can season it in a few months.

Trees that grow next to water are much harder to burn than those on high, dry hills.

Preparing for fire

We will not turn the rolling Kansas plains into charcoal. We will choose and create good sites for our campfires.

Avoid windy areas that can whip the fire out of control. If necessary, build a windbreak with a pile of logs or rocks. Clear a ten-foot area of all flammable material and and gather your tinder at the center. Don't build fire under overhanging branches: heat rises. Don't build fire against old treestumps. They can smolder for days and burst into flame with a gust of wind.

Starting fire

There are countless ways you can create enough friction over tinder to start a fire. Over the years people have refined the art of rubbing things together to minimize work and maximize output.

Cultures all over the world have invented variations of the bow-and-stick fire — the twisting motion of a stick over tinder to produce friction and eventually ignition. Cut a keyhole-shaped groove in a flat piece of wood, tapering the inner surface so that, overturned, it can hold a small clump of tinder. Insert the end of a pointed stick in the rounded part of the keyhole and turn vigorously between your palms, with a leather thong, etc. As heat rises, air circulates into the tinder through the tapered groove in the wood; heat eats oxygen; when you see smoke, press harder and move faster; when you see a glow, blow gently to feed the ignition.

If this sounds difficult, the Eskimos held the blunt end of the stick in their mouths while they twisted it.

The Iroquois Indians modified the bow-and-stick fire for ergonomics, employing the principle of the flywheel. Today, the flywheel is used most commonly to cap the end of an automotive crankshaft to connect the engine to the transmission. Physics fills the gaps where it is needed. The Iroquois pump fire drill consists of a drill stick, a leather thong, a crossbar, a flywheel, a baseboard, and tinder. The baseboard is notched to hold tinder; the drill stick is wrapped with a leather thong and connected to a hand-held crossbar; below the crossbar is a heavy flywheel fixed to the drill stick. Press down on the crossbar and torque supplied by the twisted leather thong spins the drill stick into the tinder. When you come back up, the momentum of the turning flywheel twists the stick and the leather thongs. The process is repeated. It's like using a bicycle pump.

Strike steel against flint. Tiny pieces of steel become superheated and flake off. This is a spark: a tiny, glowing-hot piece of metal. You can find flint in a depleted lighter — a waterproof lighter case will have a sizeable piece contained in its bottom.

Put your geek glasses to good use: focus the sun's light to a point on a pile of pine needles.

Friction isn't the only thing that produces heat: pressure does too. Natives of the islands in the South Seas built a fire-making device similar to a combustion chamber. Take a piece of bamboo with one open end. Carve a hardwood plunger shorter than the length of bamboo that fits snugly in the reed's hollow. Drop a bit of kindling into the bamboo tube, grease up the sides, and slap the plunger into it repeatedly with your palm. The compression generates enough heat to ignite the tinder.

If you're a real technophile, you can start a fire with a car battery. Attach a wire to each terminal — one to positive, one to negative. Touch the wires for a second over tinder. Presto. Take the battery out of the car before igniting the kindling to avoid starting an engine fire. Alternatively, you could attach each wire to the corresponding terminals of a pair of large flashlight batteries.

Once you've got the fire started, add fuel at proper intervals and in proper amounts to keep it going. Don't make it so big as to be visible from the neighboring farmhouses, and don't smother it with person-sized blocks of solid wood. A good way to keep a campfire controlled is to arrange logs around it, pointing inward. As the logs burn, push them into the fire.

Using fire

You can do more with fire than cook.

Dip the end of a cattail in oil and set it ablaze: you've got a torch.

Cut notches in the top of a tin can for air circulation and fill it with hot wax or animal fat, placing a wick at the center. Light it; you've got a stove.

Surround a fire with upright stone slabs or planks of green wood to deflect the heat in a specific direction — for example, into a tent. You've got a space heater.

Hold green wood torches under a beehive. While the bees are staggering around from the smoke, take their honey.

Light a flame on a cold night. Arrange seating. Allow the crackling of the fire to augment hushed whispers about things like ghosts in trees, or perhaps spurned lovers in the ocean. Supplement flame's warmth with mitochondrial activity. You've got heaven.

For the quest

Tawrell, Paul. Camping and Wilderness Survival: The Ultimate Outdoors Book. Tarwell: Ontario. 1996.

Brothercake
http://www.brothercake.com/site/personal/cooking/fire/

The Ranger Digest
http://www.therangerdigest.com/tips___Tricks/Fire/body_fire.htm

Primitive Ways
http://www.primitiveways.com/pt-bowfire.html

Northwest Journal
http://www.northwestjournal.ca/I1.htm