Tag: small useful fire

Small, Useful Fire: #3

ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

A series of memories around a fascinating subject – fire

Two days of hiking in the rain, with temps in the 30’s, just above freezing. We had spent the previous night in a small shelter with 20 other hikers and about that many mice, so there hadn’t been much actual sleep. We were tired, and tired of being cold.

We crawled into camp in the last few minutes of daylight. Tents were going up. I could hear people thinking how nice it would be to sit around a nice, blazing campfire for a while. Some kind trail angel had left large pieces of dry wood in the shelter and it had been arranged in the fire pit, There were obvious signs of attempts to get it burning, but there had been no success. Now it was getting damp.

You can’t hold a match to a large piece of wood and set it on fire. It’s too big of a jump. You must start small, with kindling, and add progressively larger pieces of fuel until the heat load is enough to start the burn in the large piece. It’s a simple principle. But there is a major deficit when any available kindling has been rained on for two days.

I admit to being prideful when it comes to starting fires – one of my many faults. That was part of why I decided I would have a fire that night. The other reason was that I knew people could die of hypothermia and I didn’t want to be one of them. I was hoping this potential blaze would feel my affinity for fire and respond.

Looking in sheltered places, I did locate some less damp sticks and leaves and took my stash to the fire pit. My hope was that a small flame would dry out more of the kindling, if I could keep it alive. It takes getting close and intimate, and it takes patience. I knelt and started tending “the baby”. That’s exactly what it is, a baby fire. It must be given another leaf, another twig, another blast of oxygen, and never allowed to die.

No one wanted to help with this and some probably thought I was crazy to waste time trying to burn wet wood. I was too cold to do anything else. My daughter was setting up our tent, leaving me free to be crazy. I put my face close to the flame and blew gently until I had no more breath, then turned and got a gulp of fresh air, over and over. The dampness was creating a lot of smoke, but that gave me hope that things were drying out a little.

The end of this story is, of course, that the fire progressed as I had hoped. As the larger pieces of dry wood caught and turned into a healthy blaze. It was lovely and it was regarded as near miraculous, which added to my pride, but I knew. It was no miracle but rather persistence, motivated by need. We all enjoyed getting warm again before getting in our sleeping bags for the night.

And my personal attraction to a small, useful fire grew. An intriguing, mysterious gift is what it is… just sayin’.

Small, Useful Fire: #2

ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

A series of memories around a fascinating subject – fire.

Those two trees were a major fixture in the backyard. At one time, before we moved there, they even had a border of heavy timbers defining the area around them, because it was hard to mow around their roots. I especially like trees, at least most all of them, so it was hard when some kind of beetle infested them and they began to die. I clearly remember the day when my landscaping friend and his brother came over to cut them down, carefully, one piece at time, until there were only stumps.

The mound, covered with ferns, but the stumps are in there.

I don’t like stumps nearly as much as I like trees, although I have done some interesting things with them. These stumps were not the interesting kind at all. It was an easy decision to get rid of them, but not so easy to figure out how. Although they had been cut very short, they had multiple exposed roots and the mound on which they sat seemed impenetrable. There are people who would have hired a stump grinder or a backhoe and the stumps would have been torn out in a hour. But, I have never been a big machinery person, and I am patient. A small, useful fire would be just the thing…

And so it began. Numerous campfires were built on the mound and the stumps got smaller. It wasn’t quick, because they were stumps at least eighteen inches in diameter, and our campfires were always extinguished within an hour or two.

Then came the day that I decided to clean the file drawers. Years worth of bank statements, old tax returns, outdated warranties and instructions for things we no longer owned, and more – it all had to be destroyed and paying to have it shredded was not an option. It was not an option because I like to burn things (things that should be burned).

I sat by the stumps, feeding the fire for hours, shifting my position to keep out of the smoke. By evening all the paper was gone but the mound still glowed with heat. I did not want to douse it with water but for safety’s sake, I did. Smoke billowed out. The flames disappeared.

Smoke rises from one of the outlying roots, still burning.

The next morning, I saw a small trail of smoke, rising from the mound. It looked like a small volcano. The ground was still warm too, and I realized that fire had been slowly advancing underground, along the roots, during the night. The mound was collapsing. I couldn’t have been happier.

Fire underground. Who would have thought of its usefulness?

This story also reminded me of the underground fires in Centralia, PA. We drove through the area and saw wisps of smoke rising randomly over the landscape. The coal mind there has been on fire for over 60 years. That fire has turned Centralia into a ghost town. As fires go, it is neither small or useful.