Hi fellow Outdoorsmen,
Today I want to appreciate the need to learn something as basic but important as making a fire
Learning Fire Skills
Fire is one of the greatest skills that we've learned as humanity has grown and evolved. It's got so many positive implications for us as a species that it's difficult to equate it to anything else. Without fire and combustion, we would not have most of the things that we take full advantage of today. Cars, planes, anything really is affected by the ability to have fire. Kind of crazy to think about and certainly a fun thought experiment!
The computers we use, cars we drive, food we eat, water we drink all is positively affected by the discovery of fire. We wouldn't be able to move goods without fire, as much as the environmentalist fruitcakes think that this isn't the case. Granted I am not saying environmentalism is a bad thing but poorly placed environmentalism is not helpful to the long term benefit of humanity. I digress though and could potentially elaborate on that in a #ThoughtfulThursday post in the future!
The little man has been enjoying with me learning how to better start and utilize a fire for things. One of those things that we've been trying to do and get better at is building a fire from scratch that is able to easily get started and be sustained in various conditions. One of the core tenets of building a fire is to have the starting material be as dry as possible, which completely makes sense because if it's wet it won't light!
To the chagrin of these carpenter ants though, we found this incredible downed limb of a tree on one of our walks recently and immediately grabbed it to stick it in the fire! We weren't assholes though and burned the ants alive unless they didn't leave the log. We cracked open the wood and soon realized why the tree limb broke and fell! These things set up a significant colony in the wood. There were thousands of the critters in there! Lol. We opened it and let them escape as much as they could before we split the wood more and added it to the fire.
One of the things I have been trying to teach him, and what he's learned pretty well thankfully, is the necessity of building a fire properly in order to maximize the success of said fire. It's best to have a fire built kind of separated out, with big logs at the bottom but layered so that things are able to criss cross and form a support structure. We then have a flat layer that we build the initial fire on. I know there are different ways to do this whole thing but I've found this one to be pretty helpful. It keeps the fire, once it lights, off the ground and allows it plenty of air flow so that it can grow. Eventually the layer that it's sitting on catches fire enough that it then falls down into the layer below it which lights it on fire. I've had pretty good success with this method thus far!
We then keep adding small sticks to the top and near the sides and it eventually grows into a decent fire that can sustain itself even if we add some wet wood to it. It takes a bit before that happens and we try to dry some sticks and small logs nearby the fire to make it more successful. When we get a nice roaring fire though, you can throw a sopping wet log into it almost and have it dry up quickly and burn nicely!
One thing I love relaxing and looking into are the nice rolling embers of a mature fire that's slowly losing it's strength and starting to die down. There is definitely something therapeutic to the changing oranges and reds that you can see! I can see why people used to look into fires like this and almost hallucinate and claim they saw all kinds of stuff.
One of the funny things that the little man has insisted he try and I let him, because it's best he learn, is being able to hold a little ember in his hand! He tried to touch one without any protection and immediately found out why that's not a good idea lol. I don't think it's a good idea to stop them from doing this unless they are sticking their hand into the fire or something foolish. But if they go to grab a small coal, we shouldn't stop them so they learn what it feels like and will teach them a decent life lesson about being careful!
He came up with the idea of using leaves to grab the coal after he burned his fingers on the first attempt. He kept going up and up with the number of leaves until it was comfortable for him to hold it so that was good. He initially tried it with one, then two then made it up to 4 or 5 I think before it was comfortable enough to hold.
Of course during all of this, we had a big bottle of water to keep nearby in case things got out of hand and if he burned himself. We thankfully only had to use it to put out the fire at the end!
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