A campfire is only as good as the wood it is built with, a simple truth learned the hard way by many a wayfarer who has hunched hungry and cold over a smoking pile of punky basswood. If you appreciate a good campfire--more, if you appreciate the difference between a good campfire and a great campfire--you're probably a connoisseur of wood and a proud builder of woodpiles. The credo of our breed might well be, "Not Just Any Stick Will Do."
Camping manuals often recommend carrying those dinky folding campsaws, some of which have nothing more than a length of serrated wire for a blade. The implication is that cutting wood on a camping trip is no big deal and you might not want to bother bringing a saw at all. The truth is, you can break enough wood over your knee to get by if all you want from a fire is enough heat to warm your Spam and maybe smoke-dry a pair of wet socks. But if you're after more than mere utility you flat-out need a decent saw, an ax, and a supply of premium wood. Accept no substitutes.
Thoreau's fire warmed him twice, which suggests the great holistic truth of open fires. The pleasure is much greater than the flame itself. It starts with the cutting, splitting, carrying, and stacking of the wood, and it continues through all the stages of building, lighting, and feeding the fire. It doesn't end until the last orange coal winks out in its bed of ashes.
The reason thousands of homeowners prefer real fireplaces to gas imitations should be obvious. An open fire appeals to all the senses. The crack of exploding resin, the enthusiastic whoop of flame sucking oxygen, the thump of a log settling into coals are sounds we learn to associate with contentment and well-being. And it smells good. If I didn't come home surrounded by a nimbus of campfire scent I'd feel the weekend had been wasted. Anyone with a fairly good nose learns the differences in the smell of wood. You can recognize immediately the bright fragrance of mesquite, the subtle sweetness of cherry, the cloying thickness of balsam and spruce.
In the upland forests of the Great Lakes region our campfire wood of choice is dead maple, air-dried on the stump. The best trees for the purpose are saplings, just a few inches in diameter, that died young in the battle for sunlight and survival, crowded out by bigger, thicker, more robust trees. Long after they lost their leaves, twigs, branches, and bark, they remain standing, bone-dry and clean, like ancient brittle lances. They can be brought down with a push, dragged to camp, and sawed into lengths. They split easily into kindling, and, burned in the round, roar with flame and heat--the kind of fire that burns effortlessly for hours, sends a white trail of fragrant smoke, and builds a foundation of coals that lasts all night.
Where there's fire, of course, there's smoke. When we were children my friends and I thought that saying the phrase "I hate rabbits" would cause pesky smoke to shift away from us. The habit stuck. We're adults now, too often distracted by adult problems, but when we sit around a campfire together, sipping drinks, eating, animated in conversation, we still squint and lean back when the smoke turns in our direction, and without thinking say "Rabbits!" It's a satisfying thing to build a good fire and watch it change your old friends into kids again.
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.