I choose to venture into the outdoors to gain tangible control over my life. Being disconnected from society, even for a bit of time, requires me to make my own choices: what to wear, what path to take, when to stop or push on, what even to enjoy. The longer the trip, the greater the importance of self-reliance, though most of my trips are usually done in mutual dependency with at least one other person. A group of four may be the best as it allows for two canoes, perhaps my favorite form of travel when out for several days.
To be in the wild for any period of time one needs to be able to build a fire in a wide variety of conditions and places. As I look back on a lifetime of camping, the ability to build a fire in almost any situation may be my proudest achievement. Today, I think gaining that skill may have also taught me a leadership lesson.
Building a fire requires preparation, a spark, fuel, patience, and a secret ingredient.
Building a fire may be the single most important act of agency and self-reliance when out of doors. You need a fire to heat (or even purify) water and cook a meal. And a crackling wood fire centers warmth for conversation and fends off the dark chill of the evening. I remember a few winter nights in northern mountains where a vigorous fire, slowly sinking into a stamped-out snow pit, provided essential warmth.
I grew up and learned to camp on Boy Scout outings and then on long Camp Hayo-Went-Ha canoe trips. We relied on fires for every breakfast and dinner. Later, I came to appreciate the value of a small gas stove for its concentrated power and the liberation from the need to collect firewood. For the increasing number of humans to enjoy the diminishing amount of wilderness without denuding campsite, we all need to be able to enjoy the wild without building a fire. (For a fascinating examination of what wilderness means in changing times, I highly recommend the podcast How Wild). Still, the skill to build a fire remains a necessity that can be the difference between comfort and cold, or even life and death.
Constructing a Fire requires preparation, a spark, fuel, patience, and a secret ingredient. First, one needs to give time commensurate to the seriousness of these tasks: selecting the right location, clearing away debris on the ground, and collecting material to start and then feed the fire. After starting the fire, the flame must be careful attended to, and twigs, sticks, and then logs slowly added. I am not as good as my father or my wife in building a large fire in a fireplace where one lights a match then walks away to let it burn. And as a young camper I always envied those who built a large campfires that leapt into flame (though I later learned that often was done with the aid of an accelerant).
The spark is of course key to any fire. I have seen fires started from a struck spark and tinder, but I have always relied on a match. On camping trips, I take care to store several packs of matches in dry containers in various places. Even in my daypack I carry both matches and a back-up disposable lighter. I find immense satisfaction in carefully constructing a starter fire, lighting the dried leaves and pine needles, and watching it – fed by hand with ever bigger sticks – grow into a cookfire or log-burning blaze. I will brag if done with only one match. It’s a testament of the power of a single small action to catalyze a powerful change.
A single match does not cook a meal, however. To build a fire in the out-of-doors requires the right fuel, and patience. When camping from a car, or close to civilization, a wad of paper usually serves as the basis for a fire. On an extended backpacking trip I rely on finding combustible materials in nature. The gold standard is birch bark, but that’s a rare find on most of my camping trips. Rather, I seek out dried leaves, some dead grasses and plant stems; if there are pine needles I also incorporate them into a pile of duff.
Sticks of various sizes I use to construct a teepee over the mixed pile of natural material. Or, I pile the dry ingredients next to a log, often to shelter it from a wind, and then lean the sticks over the fire-to-be. It’s important to get the right amount and mix of sturdy stems, short twigs, and pencil-thick sticks carefully positioned to catch fire. But before lighting a match, I set aside a collection of fuel: more leaves or bark, perhaps some wood splinters or shavings, and sticks of various sizes. With that mix of fuel close by, I light a match and ignite the dry material. As it catches flame, I lean in small twigs or even more dry grasses, slowly feeding the flame as it grows and the pre-constructed stick structure starts to burn. Fire moves unpredictably, and I need to be ready to add the right size fuel to where a breeze has shifted the flame.
Fire requires not only the spark and fuel, but also oxygen. If there’s not any wind to further the chemical reaction, I often kneel down by the flickering fire and gently blow on glowing remains of burnt material (did you know that while air is 21 percent oxygen, exhaled breath still contains 16 percent oxygen?). As the flame grows, more fuel must be added, but too much wood, or something too big or too dense, can smother the fire. Patience and attention are thus necessary skills to bring to fire-building.
Variety may be the most important quality for good fire building. When starting a fire, I cannot predict what material will burn best. Leaves are sometimes damp even than they seem dry, some grasses flare out too quickly, and even birch bark sometimes only smolders. Wood can look flammable but be a little too green or a little too rotten to burn well, and different types of trees and shrubs have different densities of volatile wood or concentrations of pitch that affect how they burn. Thus, I am more successful when I use several types of fuel when building a fire so that something catches quickly; having several types of wood at hand then allows me to feed the flame the best-burning wood.
Having a diversity of sizes in terms of wood enables me to transform a small pile of burning leaves and grass into a wood fire big enough to cook on. A dry log may be just right to keep an established fire burning into the night, but if put on a fire too early it may not fully inflame. Having a hatchet or axe on a trip can help reduce a big piece of wood to tinder, but on backpacking trips I never want to carry the additional weight. Thus, collecting branches of various girths helps manage a fire.
I suppose this secret ingredient is obvious when considered, but I realize that diversity makes building a fire possible when out in nature. I also think that diversity brings me joy in fire building. In the Northwoods, a big clump of birchbark may easily presents itself, but I still like to look for some dry oak leaves, white pine needles, and/or alder twigs to complement the curled white bark. Taking the extra effort to change habitats slightly to find some grasses adds to the pleasure of being in nature. And the rare find of a filigreed sheet of dead cedar leaves excites the pyromaniac in me as I know it will flame quickly with a robust crackle when lit.
Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” came to mind as I wrote out this essay and I went back to read that classic short story of the solo traveller in the Yukon who struggles to survive in Arctic conditions. It turns out there are three fires in the tale: the first fire barely gets a mention, because the hiker easily lights it when he stops for lunch, using bark from inside a pocket and a cache of driftwood. The second fire is at the heart of the story, after the hiker has fallen through the ice of the frozen river he has been following. “He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which he fed it.”
However, calculated patience and reliance on his experience are not enough. The fire-builder has failed to consider the bigger situation and a heat-loosened dump of snow from overhanging pine boughs fall and puts out his fire. The third fire, assembled quickly from a clump of branches, is not successful. “A large piece of green moss fell squarely on the little fire, the burning grasses and tiny twigs separating and scattering. He tried to poke them together again, but in spite of the tenseness of the effort, his shivering got away with him and the twigs were hopelessly scattered.”
Fire “meant life” to the fated traveller in Jack London’s tale and the story emphasizes the danger of individual hubris. “To Build a Fire” represents how small items can be assembled to ensure success, but how inattention to detail can still be fatal. Would a fellow hiker have noticed the danger in the chosen location for the fire? That question is unanswered, but the hiker does turn on his companion, a dog, in one last unsuccessful attempt to survive.
In our current times, perhaps too much has been made of diversity, along with its “woke” partners equity and inclusion. On their own “DEI” cannot overcome all challenges. A diversity of fuels may be necessary to successful build a large fire, but I have never conjured one without a match. For London’s protagonist, a diversity of firewood does not save him. But neither does his independent style and self-confidence.
I taught a leadership class for a number of years, and always looked for aphorisms of wisdom. That exercise, and time spent camping with others and working on community development initiatives have taught me that “none of us alone is as effective as all of us together.” Diversity, in terms of bringing a combination of resources together to ignite change, may be the most applicable leadership concept I have learned from building fires in the wild.
We celebrate great leaders, and mostly we talk about them as men (and sometimes women) who are in charge of significant endeavors or organizations. They start and run companies, are elected to political office, execute battles and wars, and coach winning teams. Increasingly such leaders acknowledge those who work with them to achieve greatness, but the singular achievement still seems paramount. And while we know all leaders work alongside others, perhaps we undersell the range of skills and knowledge those teammates bring to the enterprise.
Nature offers us many lessons, if only we take the time to pay attention. Recently, the former head of The Nature Conservancy, the largest environmental nonprofit in the country, wrote from his experience that “more diverse teams made us better at problem-solving. We did our jobs better because we could draw on different perspectives and ideas.” Whether we are leading an established endeavor to burn brighter, trying to kindle a passion into a successful initiative, or merely trying to survive, diversity may well be a necessity.
Walks with Tom 