Better To Light A Fire Than Curse The Darkness: Part 2

To start a fire with nothing but flint and steel in these conditions might be impossible. Yeah yeah… I know. Y’all watched *Bear Grills or some fucknut on video start a fire inside a waterfall during pouring rain. Just because he did it doesn’t mean you can do it; nor I. (*Full disclosure, I’ve never seen a Bear Grylls show and I had to Google it just to find out I’d spelled his name wrong. Maybe his show is a fine and informative thing. How would I know?)

Conditions were bad. The weather has been not just miserable but almost maliciously so. The deep snowpack has partially melted (much to the relief of big game), but then a blizzard dumped a foot of wet snow on top of the half melted drifts. Then a day’s hard persistent rain turned everything into slurry. Then more snow fell on top. The ground isn’t frozen and it isn’t thawed. The forest is a basket case of mixed layers of wet dripping half-measures.

Perhaps you want to rattle off a thousand bits of tinder and material that could pave the way to success? I was having none of it. Like anyone else, I have a thousand methods of starting a fire. I left them all at the house. I intended to use as little knowledge and preparation as possible.

Having stepped out of the house, my brain instantly listed off some likely tinder locations. “This tree I remember at location X will surely have some…” Nope… I walked in the opposite direction.

As I walked, I chuckled that my “anatomically modern” brain was screaming out memorized locations of various resources. We really are meant to be predators.

It was bone chilling wet. Only about 20 degrees but windy and wet so it felt colder. Snow was lightly falling. I assumed I couldn’t do this. I’d unwisely set out not long before sunset.

I took off my gloves and started touching things. This tree bark? That thin piece of exposed cambium? Was it dry? Was it soft and fibrous? I took out a knife and poked here and prodded there. I found a little chunk of pitch. Score! Pitch won’t light easily but once it’s lit it’ll burn like uranium. I tried to brush ice off my find but that didn’t work. I got my knife all messy cutting the ice off. Now I had a dirty knife and a pea sized glob of potential energy.

Finding pencil sized twigs (and smaller) that were dry wasn’t hard. It almost never is. You just have to know where to look. For a match lit fire, I was set. I wasn’t going to use a match.

When you start a fire with a flint and steel you need very fine tinder. Much finer than branches and twigs. It’s called a “bird’s nest”. Or at least that’s what I’ve read. I’ve never had an in-person discussion of how to start a fire with iron age methods. Have you? If so, where the heck do you guys hang out and can I come? I’ll bring beer!

Anyway, I expected a “bird’s nest” to be the insurmountable challenge. Everything was soaked and thin, fine, materials are usually soaked more than other things.

I stashed my kindling and precious pitch glob back on my lawn. Then I wandered about looking for fine dry tinder. To my surprise it wasn’t too hard to find. You just have to look. Take off your gloves and run this plant or that through your hand. Some plants retain water. Some shed it. If I were a botanist I’d know the species of plant, but I don’t. All I know is that one particular species of plant was pretty dry. Well actually 99% of it was mashed to the ground in a wet mess. But 1% of the stems stood tall. On those stems were leaves. The stems were ice encrusted but the leaves were long dead and surprisingly dry. They were broad-leaved and nothing special. It’s what I’d call “grass”. Who knows the details?

So it came to this, some shit that should have been bailed in a hay field wasn’t. Most material of that sort was mashed into the snowpack, except some that wasn’t. The thick stems were of no use but the leaves were fine. I’d planned on gathering moss but I found grass. Go figure.

By now my fingers were froze. I headed back to my pile of kindling. I’d gathered a much smaller “bird’s nest” than intended. I fluffed it up in my hands, set it down, and the wind blew it away. Shit!

So I repeated the process and glanced at the sky. I was running low on time. The sun was invisible behind snow clouds but it was obviously approaching the horizon. There’s a reason I do these things as “practice” instead of “mission critical”.

I set down my second bird’s nest on a dry spot and fumbled with the flint and steel. My barn cat showed up and pushed the bird’s nest onto the ground… because what else would a cat do? I shooed it away and rescued the tinder which, fortunately, had fallen on ice (which is dry-ish) instead of a mud puddle made by my boots. Then I dropped the steel into the mud puddle.

Getting steel wet is no big deal, I wiped it off and got to work. I got a couple sparks but juggling the flint and steel and the glob of pitch wasn’t working. I think the ignition temperature of pitch is too high. I wimped out and grabbed a speck of char cloth. Char cloth is a sort of flat delicate charcoal made of linen. I plan to experiment with making some out of old denim jeans when I get around to it. It’s delicate stuff and my piece had frayed to a chunk much smaller than a dime. It didn’t work and it wound up blown to the wind. Frustrated with my modern human weakness, I grabbed a bigger piece, about the size of a small postage stamp.

Within three or for attempts I’d… cracked off a piece of my flint. Whoops.

In case you’re wondering, flint is less a geologic term for a certain kind of mineral/rock than a word that means “really hard”. To me, “flint” is “anything hard enough to bang a spark off steel”. I’m sure a geologist would disagree, but there was no geologist to consult. Just me and my pain in the ass barn cat.

This particular hunk of flint was just quartz. I scanned my predator memory and realized there were no quartz rocks within the immediate vicinity. I was in a sedimentary area. But I still had some rock left. I banged it a bit to reshape it and started again.

This time I got a spark to hit the char cloth. Char cloth is impressive stuff, it catches easily… all you need is a single tiny independent spark. No more than a speck will get it to smolder. It won’t burn with flame but when it smolders it’s hot. I wrapped it and the glob of pitch in the bird’s nest and blew. Nothing happened and then the pitch dropped out into the snow. Whoops. But I held the bird’s nest steady. I know better than to give up on lit char cloth. I shuffled the materials a bit and smelled a wisp of smoke. Uncertain where it was coming from I shifted the bird’s nest more and briefly let the snowy breeze blow air into the whole ball. That helped!

Thirty seconds later I had it smoking quite a bit. Then it burst into flame. I’d been undisciplined and hadn’t assembled the fire yet. I scrambled to add twigs, caught it just in time, and built from there.

I have a stone bench near where my dog is buried. I shifted the whole burning mess near the bench and sat down. I had a cat in my lap within seconds. I built the little fire and it was very warm. In the snow and the breeze it had a much bigger influence than it’s true size. I added more fuel and began to relax.

Wrap-up in part 3 is coming soon…