Fire is an elemental part of the outdoor experience. Whether it is enjoyed with friends in the summer, keeping you warm on a brisk evening, comforting you after being out in the snow, or trying to keep one lit during a rainstorm. Depending upon the outdoor experience, the fire provides you with sustenance through cooked meals.
Therefore, it was only natural to think about fire as I contemplated my goal of reconnecting with the outdoors. One of my outdoor mentors was my Uncle Bruce. I’m sure that I’ll have more stories about Uncle Bruce, but one of my strongest was when we were on a multiple day camping trip. I was 13, making my brother probably 10. Being kids of course we wanted the job of starting the fire. Uncle Bruce would only give us a single match each. We each got to try to get a fire started, but if neither of us did, then he would build and light the fire. I remember the first day, we didn’t get it and thought that it was simply unfair. But as the week went along, and we watched him build and light the fires, we learned about what we did wrong and reformulated our approaches. We learned the two basic needs for starting a fire, oxygen and a ready supply of increasingly larger fuel.
However, despite that great start in my outdoor life, fast forward 20 years, and my wife and I would relatively frequently have a fire in our backyard fire pit, but I would get it started with some gas out of the lawnmower gas can. Pour on the gas, throw in a match, and WHOOSH! a giant flame and a cloud of black smoke would appear. It was easy, but my fire building skills were being lost, and I actually started to find it hard to get a fire started without gas sometimes.
When I started my outdoor reconnection efforts this summer, I decided to start taking back all of those fire starting opportunities. To build up my skills instead of letting them continue to decline. I took a page out of what I had learned from Uncle Bruce, no longer was I going to use gasoline, lighters, or paper in starting my backyard fires. Fire making became a longer process, but I was going to do it with axe, knife, and match (matches if need be).
I assembled my fuel in order of size, splitting wood with axe or knife as needed. Fire starting became a contemplative and deliberative process rather than a haphazard one. Any time you are lucky enough to be building a fire in your back yard, you aren’t in a hurry anyways, I figured I would use that time wisely. I reconnected with feathering of fire sticks by cutting small but connected shavings along the length of a stick to increase the surface area. I actually remember as a kid not liking to feather sticks, because it seemed like a lot of work, without seemingly improving the resulting fire. But now I found that I liked it as part of my fire building process. I usually cut one to three feathered sticks.
This also gave me a chance to talk about the process with my own boys. Because I was going slowly enough, each step could be pointed out and discussed. Often, in honor of Uncle Bruce, I’ll give each of my boys a match and let them try to light the fire after it is built. Most of the time, it is a success if they get the match lit enough to get it to the tinder, but they’ll be far more prepared than I was on that first day of the camping trip with Uncle Bruce.
My fuel progression for a fire while car camping this past summer at a local state park.