Playing with Matches
When my boys were little, any flame was a source of deep intrigue and a potential hazard. On many a camping trip, marshmallows set ablaze at the ends of long, flexible branches were held dangerously close to hair, clothing, flammable tents, camp chairs…. Their eyes glowed with wonder and awe at the dancing flames, as all our eyes are drawn to the glowing orange warmth-bringing, potential-food-cooking wonder that is fire. I can’t help but imagine how the first humans who harnessed it must have felt when they found a way to bring it under control inside of fire rings and mud ovens, to use it to keep themselves warm, to cook or smoke the animals they had killed.
My fascination with flames extends to many arenas of my life. I heat my home with a soapstone wood stove on one side of my house, a pellet stove on the other. All day every day from now until mid to late March, often on into April, fires will be going. Each morning they will need to be kindled. Throughout the day they will need to be fed and poked. I love that I can pull my reading chair up close to the soapstone stove on a cold winter day and settle in with a good book and hot cup of tea and feel the waves of warmth holding me in a soothing, hot stone radiating embrace.
My cabin in the Adirondacks has only a wood stove as a heat source, and there the need for fires comes more frequently and is a near daily necessity come mid October, on through those last days of the “season” into November, when I finally have to pull my docks and winterize my outboard motor, store it in the shed, and make that last, sad row across the lake and head southward. At the cabin, fire, in a manner I can’t fully understand, even keeps my food cold in my gas refrigerator. We have two fire rings, one near the cabin, another near the lakeshore, and many a night has been spent looking down at the fire, mesmerized by those dancing flames, the faces of family, friends all the more comforting in that warm light—then tilting my head back to look up at the over-arching blur of the milky way incomprehensibly far away above me.
My fascination with fire, however, extends beyond the more abstract/poetic to the more pragmatic. Next to one fire ring at the cabin, I have constructed a “rocket stove” out of 21 clay bricks. It looks like a small chimney, a miniature fireplace at the bottom. When you insert sticks horizontally into the bottom hole, using a small piece of grate to allow air to rush beneath the twigs, the fast in-flow of air toward the back wall of the chimney, then up out the top results in a very efficient burn, one where all of the gasses are burned off, and hence no smoke comes from the stove once the fire is going strong. With a few handfuls of twigs, you can make a small, concentrated, smoke-free fire perfect for cooking, the whooshing of the stove sounding something like a small rocket readying for liftoff.
I have also tinkered with building many differently designed “gasification stoves.” The simplest of these can be made from two tin cans, one with a slightly larger diameter than the other. By poking holes along the upper, inside rim and bottom of the inside can, it is easy to create what is known in “permaculture” circles as a “top lit updraft” gasification stove, or, a TLUD for short. For the one I carry with me on camping trips, I also bring along a 9 volt battery and a small fan salvaged from an old iMac. By aiming the fan at a hole in the outer can, you end up with a flame that looks very nearly like the flame of a regular gas stove—blue-red-hot and smoke-free. With it, you can cook an entire meal using some quickly gathered twigs no larger than finger-width. The process of gasification entails causing the wood to give off its gasses (smoke), and then igniting that smoke above the off-gassing (smoking) embers. When all the gasses have burned out of the wood, you are left with charcoal—and if you douse that (now mostly carbon substance) before it burns away and turns to ash and toss it in your garden, or just back into the ground, you will essentially be sequestering carbon for millennia—carbon that would have found its way into the atmosphere as the wood rotted….
For some reason, building devices that use what has become known as “primitive technology” has fascinated me for decades now. In the corner of my backyard, next to my home rocket stove, is the 3rd iteration of a “cob” oven I made nearly a decade ago. Cob is a combination of clay, sand and straw (or other pulpy matter), also known as adobe. My cob oven has walls that are nearly 10 inches thick, and it will hold a temperature over 250 degrees for many hours after the fire has gone out. It was relatively easy to build, and instructions can be readily accessed online. Its most difficult (and fun) step entails mixing clay, sand, straw and water with your bare feet on a plastic tarp—the goop squishing up between your toes as you dance and pivot and form it into the proper consistency. Ovens like these have been used for centuries, a large one often built in the center of a village that was fired up weekly or so for people to bring their risen loaves, meats, pies…. Pizzas cooked when the stove is at its maximum temperature—the embers pushed to the side, the ashes wiped away with a wetted cloth that hisses and steams when it touches the 700+ degree stone—are ready in less than a minute, the crust charred and puffy, the toppings crisped, the cheese bubbling and browned….
All this playing with fire certainly appeals to the boy in me who first poked a stick into a roaring campfire, pulled it out, held that single flame in front of me, blew on the tip when the flame expired, making it glow red-red-white. Seeing how the harnessing of fire, likely human beings’ first technological step forward, can be more efficiently put to use…tinkering with it, using old, ancient-even methods, may well speak to something primitive, elemental in me, something I hope I am kindling, fanning, building higher, hotter.
*All photos by the author.
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As evocative as ever, Arnie 👏
I can still taste the crispy, lightly charred edges of the pizza as it emerges from the cob oven …such a pizza being as fine a meal as I could ever want:)