2 October 2023
To Build A Fire
Most of you know I’m a crossword fanatic. I do the L.A. Times Crossword every day and often do the New York Times Crossword. What I don’t do of the NYTimes, I save for hurricane downtime. Anyway, today’s L.A. Times puzzle had the clue “North Carolina University.” Years ago, it was “North Carolina College.” It was four letters and I always knew the answer since my cousin Jimmie taught at said college/university – Elon.
For whatever reason, the other day I thought about the Jack London short story “To Build A Fire.” I mentioned in an earlier post how my Mother dragged me kicking and screaming down to the Morton Public Library one summer to give me something to do. I fell in love with the Hardy Boys mystery series and it was off to the races. By the time I reached 9th grade, I had already read Gone With the Wind and other large tomes. Somewhere about that time I discovered Jack London and probably first read Call of the Wild. As a Boy Scout, Jack spoke to me. I read his short story “To Build A Fire.” You can get it on Amazon for Kindle for $0.99.
If you are not familiar with the story, a man, against all advice, decides to hike through extremely cold conditions in the Yukon and breaks through the ice and soaks his lower body. Under the extreme conditions, he knows he has only minutes before he begins to freeze to death so he crawls under the branches of (probably a spruce) tree and uses the bark of the tree and the branches to begin to build a fire.
I think I remember he only has a few matches and must make the first attempt at starting the fire count. He carefully constructs the structure of the fire and gets it to ignite. Just as he thinks he’s saved himself, the heat of the fire melts snow on the spruce which falls onto the fire and extinguishes it. He freezes to death.
Sunday’s crossword puzzle had a clue of a Jack London short story about freezing to death. I got the answer!
That short story had an effect on me. There have been several times while on the trail that it became critical to build a fire quickly. In one case, my friend Charlie and I were hiking in the Smokies when it started to rain. We were on an exposed ridge fighting the wind and rain and falling temperatures to get to a shelter on the trail. When we reached the shelter, I realized Charlie was going into hypothermia. I made him strip and get in his sleeping bag while I went to find kindling for a fire. Everything was wet, wet, wet. I remembered how the man in the short story stripped back the bark of the spruce. The front of the bark was wet but the back was dry and once you started striping, most of what came off was dry. I didn’t have spruce but I did have eastern red cedar. I striped the bark and then found some dry twigs the same way and was able to build a roaring fire for Charlie with one match. I consider that one of my greatest accomplishments.
When I was a counselor at Camp Kickapoo, I often had to demonstrate how to make a fire by friction. It’s much harder than people think and you have to have exactly the right materials. You use a bow drill. You have a plank of wood with notches cut into the edge so you can fit a stick into the notch. You wrap the bow string around the stick and using a sawing motion, you create enough friction to start the wooden plank to smoldering and eventually, with some kindling, to ignite. The trick is to use yucca as a stick. I’ve tried everything and only yucca works. Fortunately, in the southern U.S., yucca is quite common. Of course, both the plank and stick have to be very, very dry.
I’ve even started fires using flint and steel. You can certainly make sparks but the trick is to get the sparks to ignite kindling. I found the best thing to strike the sparks into is steel wool. I can almost always get a flame going quickly that way.
If you are an outdoors person, probably the most fundamental thing you need to know how to do is to build a fire in any set of circumstances. Read Jack London and you’ll learn a lot.
It’s already started raining but at least I was able to get my walk in this morning (1.5 miles). I met an unknown neighbor as I walked out the door and we got to conversing and then I ran into my next door neighbor Mary Kay and Bubba and then Chris and Tucker. I admit to being out of shape and out of breath on the walk. Chris walked with me back to the house to make sure I was OK.
I then showered and boxed everything up I needed to take to UPS. The store I got to is on State Road 84 and I’ve had mixed success there. They seem to have a lot of turnover and are always training someone new. Usually there is a line that coils around the inside of the store but today I was the first one in. The guy behind the counter really knew what he was doing and I was in and out in record time. I sent the old iMac and Apple Watch to be recycled. I think the reason Apple pays for that is the rare earth metals in the electronics. China is the largest producer of rare earth metals and I’m sure the U.S. isn’t thrilled about that. It makes sense to extract them from recycled electronics.
I also managed to send the extra volume of Flora of North America back to Oxford University Press. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before they reimburse my credit card.
After the UPS store, I headed to Winn-Dixie to pick up a few items including Blue Bell’s Dutch chocolate and vanilla ice cream. As luck would have it, Tootsie Roll miniatures were on sale also. A win-win!
I made it back to the house just before the rain set in. Yesterday, we had a prolonged downpour to the point that my street resembled the movie A River Runs Through It. I kept expecting to see Brad Pitt fly fishing in my front yard. No such luck.
Fortunately, it didn’t creep up to my front door. Just what I don’t need is another flood in the house. It looks like an all day rain today.
My cousin Jimmie provided me the recipe for her Sweet Cream cake. It’s her son’s favorite and her granddaughter’s. A rainy Monday sounds like a good plan to bake a cake. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Stay tuned!