How To Build A Fire

HOW TO BUILD A FIRE

“Most people think burning a brush pile is easy,” Jimmy said. “Just splash around some accelerant and put a match to it.”

We’d just finished clearing some ground next to his grandmother’s apple orchard so she could expand her vegetable garden next Spring, a job the sweet old lady described as “just fittin’ for two 16 year old boys with too much time on their hands.”

“You know how city people are.” Jimmy pulled a wad of red rag out of his jeans and scrubbed his face. “Always rushing and missin’ life’s mysteries.”

It was a hot day, one of those July afternoons in Tennessee when the air is so still insects refuse to fly in it. Our shirts stuck to our chests and backs with sweat. Whenever we stopped moving, the farm cats swirled around our feet. The dogs sprawled in the dust next to the barn like the air had been let out of them and they’d gone flat. It gets so dry in Tennessee in the middle of the summer that the grass turns brown and hibernates. A lot of people think it’s dead, but it’s just sleeping till the droughty part of the summer passes. The grass had shrivelled into spider-like sprouts with the dirt showing between.

“No, no, eskimio,” Jimmy said. “The key to a good fire is in the building of your burn pile in the first place. A good fire like this is a work of art…or at least engineering. It must be created.”

I bet we made a hundred trips dragging the shrubs, mainly briars, and saplings to the clearing where our rising mountain of brush soon grew as tall and conical as a Plains Indian’s teepee. We’d hacked, snatched and torn off the shrubs and trees near to the ground leaving stumps and stubs (or “stobs” if you live in middle Tennessee) across the clearing like the shattered stubble in no-man’s land on a European battlefield.

More than half of the saplings we’d cut down were scrubby cedar trees, what my uncle called a working man’s Christmas tree. The sun baked the needles until the tar and sap oozed out into sticky, amber glass beads. Soap wouldn’t get that gooey mess off your hands; the tar resin would have to be rubbed off, and even then you wouldn’t get it all even with turpentine. The smell was so pungent it stung the inside of my nostrils and opened my sinuses like menthol until they started running.

“This smells like the bathrooms when my mother cleaned them,” I said, watching Jimmy rearrange some fronds I had already stacked. “This cedar ought to burn well.”

“Maybe.” Jimmy’s tone suggested he had superior insight into the subtleties of successful trash pile burning and would reveal them if necessary.

Ever since we were kids together, my contributions to our projects were always respectfully listened to, but I always knew Jimmy was thinking two steps ahead of me. “I’m afraid that this cedar has wilted and packed down too tight. Got to get some air in there.”

We stabbed small sticks of pine into the pile from different angles as if it were a giant pin cushion.

“These kindling sticks will burn more quickly than the rest of this sappy brush, and these holes will let the fire breathe,” Jimmy said. “In the fire business, oxygen is fuel.”

Next, we wadded sheets of old newspaper into balls the size of bowling balls and shoved them into the sides of the pyramid at different angles. Grandma Emma never threw away her newspaper, preserving these records of current events in stacks along the sides of the back porch so that you walked in a narrow path between them like a WWI trench. She would never run out of stuffing for packages and wrapping paper. We used a month’s worth of news in our burn pile.

I felt the balls of dried newsprint crunch and compact even more as I shoved them elbow deep into the branches and shrubbery fronds.

 “I don’t care what people say, you got to have a good accelerant to start a real fire,” Jimmy said. “Lots of people use kerosene, but you practically have to stand there holding a match to it just to get it going. Other people use charcoal fluid, but that just gives you a flash and goes out.”

I nodded.

“Gasoline is okay if you are experienced in these things,” Jimmy said, implying that he was experienced. “But you are looking at a man who has possession of some white gas.” He held up a battered, red gas can chest high in case I doubted his word and looked at me like he expected me to applaud. I was afraid to ask what white gas was, but I knew he would explain anyway.

Jimmy and his father built and flew model airplanes, and the small engines on those models required a refined, higher octane gasoline which is highly flammable. White gas.

“This gas has probably got some condensation in it since it has been sitting in a corner of our garage awhile, so we will have to use a lot of it. The trick is to douse it around evenly.” Jimmy splashed the gasoline up and down the pile clockwise and then counterclockwise until he had satisfied himself that there was enough accelerant to get what he called a “good burn going.”

Not even the core of our teepee of limbs went ignored.

Holding the can high above his head, Jimmy poured the rest down the center of the pile.  The can gurgled and belched as the gas raced out of the spout and saturated the core of the pile. The sun beat down on our burn pile, and the gasoline fumes mixed with the smell of the cedar sap, growing so toxic I had trouble breathing.

 “Hurry up,” I shouted to Jimmy. “I think I am getting lung cancer.” My eyes began tearing up.

“Safety first,” Jimmy said. “I am going to wash my hands just in case I have even a drop of gas on them.”

While Jimmy went to the house, I found some shade, shooed the farm cats away from my feet and watched the ragged chickens orbiting the pile for insects escaping the fumes. The bandana I’d tied to my head was so saturated with sweat that it trickled into my eyes and stung them. I took it off and rung it out like a washrag.

We had created desolation. Where there had been an untended lot of scrub brush and saplings and choking weeds there was now a lifeless moonscape. It was impressive.

Jimmy returned, holding his hands up in front of him. “Can’t be too careful.”

“You know the Indians believed that every living thing has its own spirit, even these shrubs and saplings,” I said. “This makes us mass murderers of the Indian spirits.”

“Then we better make an offering to appease them,” Jimmy said, waving his hand in the direction of the pyre. “…a burnt offering.”

I did not see how burning up the Indian spirits’ earthly abodes would make them happier, but I let it go.

It was Jimmy’s idea for us to stand on opposite sides of the pyre so that we could set it on fire at the same time. We should have used a fuse to light that fire, a long one. I thought of this before we even started to light the fire. Why not use a fuse or hurl a ball of fire at it? I said nothing. That is just the way I am.

We bent over with our box of wood matches and held a match to the striker, ready to stretch out to touch our matches to the white-gas soaked brush.

“One! Two! Three! Go!” Jimmy shouted from the other side of the pile.

I struck.

I don’t remember much about what happened next, just scenes frozen in place like photographs in a slide show.

I do remember seeing the flare of the match like an exploding star on the end of a tiny magic wand. The next sensation I felt was the air being sucked out of my chest and from my immediate vicinity; it was three seconds before I heard any sound at all, and that sounded like God himself being punched in the stomach. I was physically sucked toward the pile and then thrown sprawling back onto the ground about 20 feet away. I don’t think I was in the air the entire time. I may have bounced once or twice.

Dogs, cats and chickens rolled outward like fur bowling balls before springing back into animal shapes, running and leaping in panic.

The entire teepee of brush rose four feet into the air, turned bright orange and flashed a wall of heat at me so intense it could have burned my image into the ground behind me. My sweat soaked clothes were instantly dried.

The teepee of orange flame hung there above me long enough for me to shout: “Good God A’mighty!” (I now have a keener appreciation of what Moses went through encountering God on Mt. Sinai.)

Before I could stand up to run, (and being sprawled out like that on my back turned out to be lucky for me), cannonballs of fiery newspaper wads shot out in every direction all at one time including just over my head. This must have been what it would have looked like to Frances Scott Key if all the shots fired at the battle of Fort Monroe had been condensed to a 10 second broadside. Cannonballs of fire landed in every direction and bounded along the ground until they hit something and exploded in a blast of ashen shrapnel which sailed around in the air, smoking if not still in flame.

The dogs and farm cats who stopped to look back took off again as if they came under an artillery barrage with these balls of fire landing amongst them. At one point, every one of those animals had four paws in the air at the same time with their tongues dangling out of their mouths, flapping like capes in the wind as they fled. The scruffy chickens were blown into the air at the same time like a spooked covey of quail. They thudded to the ground and ran about with their wings flapping until they could find a tree to hop up into. Several chickens shot up onto the roof of the barn and sat there in a row, squawking like loutish football fans irate over a bad penalty call.

Jimmy appeared from the other side of the fire. His hair, what was left of it, was blown backwards on his head. It was also smoking as were his clothes. One sleeve of his shirt was burned off at the shoulder, and patches of cloth were missing. His eyebrows were gone as far as I could tell which was difficult to determine because his face was sooty black.

“You okay?!” Jimmy shouted to me. He sounded like he was under water. I patted at the smoking places on my own clothes and nodded.

We stumbled across the clearing away from the roaring fire. Over my shoulder I watched a laser beam of white flame shooting straight up 20 feet into the air out of the center of the teepee where Jimmy had poured the aviation fuel. It looked like something that would burst out of a volcano. Without losing any velocity as far as I could tell, the geyser of fire began to swirl and bend like an evil genie materializing from a bottle and roaring like a jet engine in the run-up to take off.

This roar was immediately followed by a loud, rapid crackling and popping as the flame found new deposits of cedar sap, sounding like a slab of bacon dropped into a red hot skillet or a violent rainfall on a placid lake surface. Jimmy and I began to run as if we were being chased by machine gun fire over no-man’s land.

We hobbled and limped around the back of the barn where we sheltered from the heat.

 “I bet you could make steel with that flame,” Jimmy observed.

I started to say something about us being smarter next time, but instead, I said, “Your hair is smoking.” I raised my hand to my own head and felt hair break off in my fingers.

“We won’t need a haircut for two months,” Jimmy said, finding the silver lining in this cloud. “Save some money there.”

When we peered around the corner of the garage, exposing our eyes and foreheads only, the flames were racing up the outside of the pyramid like whitewater rapids flowing skyward in defiance of the laws of gravity. Up, up they raced to the pointed top, feeding the geyser which began to change colors—yellow to orange, then red followed by an interesting shade of green. The tower of flame began to dance in the air, swaying and twisting, whining and whistling, moaning a new song every time it changed colors.

“We have created a dancing statue, a pillar of fire,” Jimmy said, smiling at the fire like he could not stop looking at it.

It wouldn’t take much of an imagination to see a blazing Indian spirit presiding over this conflagration. Would Jimmy and I be cursed or offered three wishes? The flame was so beautiful that I decided on the granting of wishes, and just so I would not be considered greedy, I elected to make only one wish. Some people might wish for riches or world peace; not me. I wished that this summer that I was 16 would never end.

“I don’t want to change,” I mumbled. I doubt Jimmy heard me. “I don’t want to change.”

And Jimmy said: “Do I know how to build a fire or what?”