Man make fire, man feel manly

By silly_sad_machine

My father kept a fire burning in an old iron woodstove during the winter to heat our house. We lived in very, very rural Oklahoma, and while we had electricity and (eventually) satellite TV, central heat and air was a novelty to which we had never been introduced.

My father woke early - always. He was up long before we were, and when he finally woke us to get ready for school the fire was already burning hot. My sister and I would rush down from our bitterly cold second-floor rooms and scramble to be the first in front of the woodstove's single blower.

When I was old enough my father put me to building fires. He showed me exactly how to do it, as well. You laid out two sticks of wood about a foot apart, and you stacked about four more sticks of wood across the first two. The effect was to make a little cubby to shove in paper, cardboard and other household tinder.

I built a lot of fires in that woodstove during my teenage years, and I always used my father's method. As far as I knew, it was the only way to build fires. But it was amazingly difficult to do. Paper burns hot, but it also burns fast. You could cram that little cubby so full that paper wads were bursting back out onto the floor, and you'd still only get about 20 seconds of good, hot flame. With sticks of wood that were easily as big around as a softball, 20 seconds wasn't good enough.

My father never had a problem with it, though. His hands were like magic in the stove. He'd carry in a load of wood, toss in some paper and there was your roaring fire, no questions asked. But I can remember countless times when I admitted defeat, unable to get the fire to start after several tries. These were no "Leave it to Beaver" moments, though, and my father didn't toss an arm over my shoulder and give me a heart-to-heart. Not being able to start a fire was a black mark against my manhood, and he let me know it. Although he didn't put it so seriously (way too sarcastic to be serious), these were the things a man did, and by God I needed to learn how to do them.

Today I'm building fires in my own fireplace (our woodstove has a stone hearth built around it ... much better than my father's). It was built by my grandfather when he built the house, and its giant presence forms the base of the house's support structure.

The presence of an iron grate on the floor of the stove, however, prevents me from using my father's method of starting fires. It had been some years since I'd really built one, and I suddenly had to adjust and find my own method. In doing so, I learned something very interesting.

My father's method for building fires sucked.

How could the man honestly believe that he was teaching me to build fires if he never taught me anything about kindling? Watch any survival show and you'll learn there are three keys to building a fire: tinder, kindling and fuel. The tinder catches the flame, the kindling stokes the flame and the fuel burns and puts out heat. My father's method involved wads of newspaper (tinder, I guess?) and gigantic sticks of just-seasoned wood. That's it. And yet, somehow, he pulled it off.

As it turns out I can build a pretty good fire too, and it doesn't take me 10 tries, either. Although my father didn't teach me a good method for actually stoking a fire, I think now that maybe that's not what he was trying to do. Maybe he wasn't really trying to do anything, but what he did do was give me a deep and abiding fondness for a roaring fire in a black iron fireplace. It makes me feel like a real father and a real man like nothing else I've done in my life, and burning a fire in our home is like rekindling the heart of our family's legacy.

No, there was no way he was aiming for that. I think he just wanted an excuse to call me a puss.