To Build a Fire

My sister taught me how to build a fire. That, and how to smoke a bong.

These were not related occurrences. She taught me how to build a fire years ago, when she was the upstairs tenant of an off-grid farmer in deep rural Idaho– behind Jackson Hole. In this attic apartment, the only heat to be had during the eight months of winter was a wood-burning stove, so knowing how to make a fire was not a matter of convenience. Early every morning, my yogi sister would sit in lotus pose in front of the little stove in the living room with a stack of logs and a little kindling. She’d carefully insert each piece through the narrow opening, positioning the wood just so in the pitch black interior. Then she’d arrange her starter, grab her zippo, and spark a flame.

The first appearance of fire was only half the task. A candle-esque burning is a vulnerable life, delicate, and more than likely on its way out. After the flame comes a process lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes, of lovingly breathing the blaze to life.

The most surprising thing about this process is that the flame needs rougher handling than you would believe. Just because it’s small and sensitive doesn’t mean it wants whispers. What it often needs is great, exhaustive lungfuls of expiration, gales that press it to the brink of extinguishment, inspiring it to come roaring to furious life a moment later.

The other surprising aspect of fire-building is how resistant wood is to flame. Even old, knotty logs, cured for over a year, covered in brittle bark and by every indication screaming to be engulfed, will not be lit by the lighter, by burning paper, or even a thin pile of twigs. No. These logs need coaxing. They must be warmed up first, the latent moisture that they’ve clung to despite all evidence to the contrary must be released, and then, tentatively at first, they’ll smolder, then smoke, then, at the last possible moment, catch.

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Had you told either one of us a decade before that my sister would be the one living in bum-fuck nowhere, and I would be the one living in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, I don’t think either one of us would have believed you. We would have told you that you must have got our names backwards, as our parents so often did.

No, my sister was the worldly kid, the college athlete, the girl who saved up to buy a Louis Vuitton clutch when she was a pre-teen. Kids in junior high called me “goat girl”-- and I don’t think they meant it as a compliment.

But c’est la vie, I guess, that her choices made her a lover of the mountains and of open, empty spaces, of tent camping and hot springs, music festivals and yoga retreats. And my choices led to housing situations with central air instead of wood stoves.

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Okay, so my sister didn’t exactly “teach” me to build a fire. What I’ve related here were just observations. She and I were born too close to have the kind of mentor-mentee relationship that some sisters get. Most people thought we were twins until we were six or seven years old, and that, more than anything, set us up for a relationship governed by competition, rather than collaboration. We had to fight, and set ourselves as far apart as possible, so as not to succumb to the other’s gravity and be swallowed up.

Most of our thirty-ish years together has been a process of learning how to bridge the chasm we hollowed out between us. And we’ve just managed a foot bridge, one built plank by insubstantial plank. When she taught me how to smoke a bong (embarrassingly recently) I could feel how far we’d come. First, because I could admit, out loud and to her face, that I didn’t know how to do it. Then, she didn’t laugh. Instead she coached me, kindly and patiently, not with the sternness of an older sibling annoyed at having to bring their little sibling along nor with the contempt of someone embarrassed to be related to you, but gently. And I think I did okay.

This was not the first time she got through to me. I remember another moment, when she asked me if she could practice her private yoga offering on me. I said sure, being the magnanimous little sister I am. I went to her apartment and dutifully followed her instructions. When I farted, she quipped, “better out than in, I always say.”

Near the end, she coached me into goddess pose, squatted, feet flat on the floor, praying hands folded between my knees. She asked if she could give me an adjustment, and I agreed. Somewhere behind me, she put her hands on my shoulders and said clearly, “I can see that you’re carrying the weight of many worlds on your shoulders. But you can put them down for a little while, if you want.”

I both did and did not appreciate that she made me ugly cry right then. I mean, it clearly needed to happen. I clearly needed to hear these words. But still, crying always gives me a headache, and I like to avoid it whenever possible. She didn’t want me to stop crying though. When I apologized, between sobs, for this outburst, she said nothing. Just continued rubbing my back.

At the end of our session, I apologized again, scoffing, “wow, that was embarrassing.”

“No,” she replied, as gently as she’d ever spoken to me. “That was just you being there for yourself. But don’t forget,” she added, before I got back in my car and drove away. “I’m here for you too.”

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I did get a badge once, in girl scouts, for building a one-match fire. I can’t say I remember anything about it. Since then I’ve more often been one for barbeque lighters than matches. I did learn, during some survival classes a few years ago, how to make a bow-drill fire with two pieces of wood and an elk knuckle. The problem with bow drills is that they are very, very hard to use. It requires a lot of muscle, a lot of endurance, and a lot of practice. I think I pulled it off successfully once, using ultra-soft yucca wood. And as I recall, my arm was sore for a week after.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been practicing my fire-building skills. We have a wood burning fireplace in our house now. I save up bad writing, junk mail, packing material, and our dried out winter wreaths to use as starter, and we buy a mix of juniper, pinion, and oak from a local woodsman.

I can’t sit cross legged in front of it, because the opening is raised about two feet off the floor. But it’s just the right height to kneel, which adds a pleasing sacredness to the act. Once the logs are arranged just so, the kindling placed, the position of ash and coals from yesterday's fire analyzed, it’s time for the lighting. It’s easy to create an impressive blaze for a minute or two. Get enough paper and cardboard in there, enough snapping and crackling dry needles, you’ll see flames. But it won’t last.

It’s better, as my sister taught me, to start with a small flame. A tennis ball of kindling, catching a cross-hatching of four or five pencil-thin sticks is adequate. Only a connoisseur will be impressed with the result, but it will be beautiful if you’re willing to look close. The flames that lick slowly around your bigger logs won’t be golden hot. They’ll be blue, green, purple, and brown. They’ll be so fluid and smooth you’ll want to reach out and touch them, like a chameleon convinced sink water is a branch it can climb. This fire is small but it’s hot, concentrated and efficient. It will not smoke up your house, it will not pop embers across your nice carpet. It will burn out from a roasting heart, warming the logs, then scorching them, then finally, catching.

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My sister is an abominably lucky person. She’s gotten out of jams with every flavor of authority figure you could imagine. How to be lucky was never a lesson I learned from her, but I learned plenty of others.

For one, she taught me that you can learn a lot from people who never intend to teach you anything. It’s unavoidable. It’s because all else equal, humans will imitate other humans, and my sister could never hide who she was. I don’t think she’s ever tried. And watching her move in the world was the most indelible lesson I’ve ever been taught.

But she’s also taught me a lot about changing hearts and minds, most particularly, my own. She showed me how to choose the right materials– cultivating vulnerability with gentle touches and well-laid stories. How to disarm a critical mind and comfort and relax other, more tender parts. She doesn’t need poetry or soaring rhetoric to kindle an incendiary feeling– she is brilliant at using a simple statement of truth to do this work. She knows intuitively that fire needs air, that it has to breathe so as not to snuff itself out before it gets a chance to live. She knows how to help with that. And she knows that even the driest wood is capable of resisting change, but that warmth, no matter how small and unimpressive it’s manifestation might seem, gives a flame the best chance to catch.