Before the World Burns:
How to Make a Fire
Here
is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around,
with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard;
and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture
which is exclusively an interaction of man on man--a sort of breeding
in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization
destined to have a speedy limit.
--Thoreau, "Walking"
Workshops
June 1995
The scene is the first Northern Lights primitive skills gathering,
on a 200-acre piece of land at the foot of the Valhalla wilderness in
southeastern British Columbia. I'm drawn here by the enthusiasm of my
10-year-old daughter, Nashira, for all things "Indian," and
by my own long-standing desire to become more competent in the business
of survival.
There are workshops in every facet of primitive skills: firemaking,
felting, flint-knapping, roadkills, shelter, cordage, basketry, hides,
tracking and snares, basic survival skills, edible wild plants and medicines,
knifecraft ... with experienced instructors from all over the continent,
and from as far away as Sweden and Australia.
Some teach these skills in university courses; many of them make a
circuit of the seasonal camps in various parts of the northwest. Seeing
guys with buckskins and face paint speaking with Brooklyn accents, is
a bit funny, but we all have to start somewhere, sometime.
Nashira likes the flint-knapping pit, at the edge of activity, best.
Here, a dozen students in safety goggles chip away for hours in the
sun, having grasped the inner geometry of obsidian, which is required
for making edges sharper than surgical steel.
Another of our favorites is the felt-making area. Also in a far corner
of the field, but in the cool shelter of trees and with the soothing
sounds of a nearby stream, a half-dozen gentle souls work in silence,
patiently rubbing and matting fibers of wool together to make hats,
boots, capes, or a designed blanket for Glen, the event's host. The
chief felter has a bushy gray beard and head of hair that looks like
it has been, well, felted.
The root lady, squatting barefoot in the dust, splits spruce roots
expertly with a knife, along their sinewy lengths. She's collected these
from local trees as part of her workshop with a dozen helpers. She'll
weave the roots into watertight baskets, and the students will watch
closely as they make their own.
In the central circle under a giant tarp, a hundred diligent novitiates
of all ages bend intent over fire-making supplies: slender dogwood sticks,
split boards of cedar, bow drills of bone socket and carved wood spindle.
In the hide-working area, people are busy scraping skins, washing
them with brains, twisting them dry, or stretching them. Because the
brains have to be fresh, they are bought from the grocery store in the
nearest town. Many people throughout the grounds wear buckskins: smoky
brown or dove-white, loincloths and dresses, vests and pants, and moccasins.
In the evening, people gather and talk about the state of the world.
A hundred or so squeeze under the tarp in the rain. The world is going
to hell in a hurry, we all agree. Some are doing things differently:
living from the land, in the old ways, the native ways. I raise the
question: "But what would happen if we all tried to do that?"
The answer from the moderator, a veteran of years of practicing these
primitive skills, is that "People won't all want to do it. And
as far as I'm concerned, that's just fine. Let them suffer the consequences
of how they live. They got themselves in the mess they're in."
Drumming every night by the long fire trenches is a treat. Sometimes
with facilitated dance steps, usually with the spirit of the moment
and the fire. One night "the Old Bullshitter,"a grizzled old
mountain-man herbalist, tells his tales. Another night a guy in a cowboy
hat and flowered shirt dances around, clowning and telling jokes, goading
the drummers on with percussion when he runs out of words.
An underlying, largely unspoken current runs through this event and
all of its participants: a growing awareness of the connection with
what we're doing and global issues. Necessary questions: how many of
us can sit by the fire? Will there be a trench stretched across the
breadth of each continent, a scar made to mark a rite of passage into
a new adulthood?
We look, meanwhile, to each bite we take, each implement we use to
eat. How did we travel to this place, and where did the fuel, metals,
plastics, and machinery to make it all come from? How much land is used
for these things and how much can we afford to keep using, and for how
long?
There are lambs on a spit, turkeys in a pit: wrapped in tin foil.
Potatoes by the hundred baked on coals ... wrapped in tin foil. The
food trip has to be together: "for health reasons". Milk from
cartons, vegetables from cans. Food-grade bleach to sterilize the water.
Basic skills, brought to bear. How long will it take you to make your
bow, your arrows, and learn to shoot? How long will the game hold out
if everyone you know does the same? What will you do instead of all
this, then, when the systems break down and the deliveries of milk and
vegetables and fuel and autoparts are stopped from lack of supplies,
or staggering prices, or unacceptable levels of toxins? Or, is there
middle ground to steer in this path to comfort, between the dirt-bare
basics, and the levels of luxury we now enjoy?
November 1996
I struggle to get a fire going in my woodstove in the morning as I prepare
to write this on the computer. Glossy catalog paper does not ignite
to a clean flaming burn for kindling, not anywhere near as well as birchbark.
I start to write, thinking about the episodes at the primitive skills
gathering that had the most emotional content for me:
- Fire-making
Easier said than done. It ends up taking me a couple of hours,
with much trial and error, and patient coaching from Matt, the brawny
young instructor who moves among 50 or 60 others trying the same thing.
Our materials are wands of dogwood or elder seated in boards of incense
cedar, and tinder balls of cattail fluff and dried wisps of birchbark.
With just the right twisting, bearing-down motion of the hands, we
must generate enough friction to create a burning coal that can ignite
the tinder. Despite my efforts, I get only smoke and a charred, glazed
socket where the spindle seats.
Matt instructs me to try a different board, or better yet, make a
new one, with a fresh socket. More work. And again, I get only smoke.
Frustrated, I'm about to give up and try another workshop, but Matt
checks back and gives me a tip, demonstrating. I can see that when
the smoke increases, he bears down harder, while still turning the
spindle straight and fast between the palms. Then there is a coal
in the socket, glowing in the dust ground from the action of the spindle.
He dumps the coal into a handful of tinder and blows on it, until
it explodes into a ball of flame at his mouth. He tosses it into the
air, smiling.
In another ten minutes, I manage to do the same. This is a critical
time, and I don't want to let it go out now, after all that effort.
I wave it around a bit, fanning it: suddenly, a little flame! That's
all it takes. I blow it up to a raging miniature holocaust, my heart
beating fast--my initiation is complete. The 10-year-old beside me
grins and goes back to his bow-drill.
The catalog pages smolder under the kindling, which is about to go
out. I stick my hand in with a larger round of wood, hoping it will
catch. I burn my knuckle on the stove in the process. The little flames
sputter and dwindle. I go back to the writing, where the screen stays
uniformly lit, hoping for the best.
- Midnight Sweatlodge
Standing around the fire waiting until someone comes who is planning
to lead the ritual rounds. When they arrive, they begin telling their
expectations, some history of the tradition, which they learned from
Blackfoot Indians. I stew away, listening silently, raging inside
at the discrepancy between this person's formal expectations of how
the ritual must go and my own experience of sweatlodges inspired by
native tradition, but flexible to the needs of the people in the moment.
Is there any room for compromise here?
Then he says that we all must remain clothed. Strange ... isn't part
of the magic of this experience, to be naked with Mother Earth? Isn't
this bit about clothing just another cultural artifact like the modern
society we're trying to get away from? In the end, there is input
from others of my bent to go with the naked sweat, with those who
want clothes free to wear them; we can all deal individually with
our needs around the clothing issue.
After the sweat there is a profound sense of unity among us around
the campfire, and we exchange bare-chested hugs with each other before
departing into the pre-dawn darkness.
The fire in my study dies. I pull out the charred sticks of cedar,
the unburnt rounds of pine and maple. Start again with pages from The
Farm Mechanic's Construction Book (1949) (useful, in theory; but
I've never used it until now). Plus some newsprint from the Banyen Books
catalog, Branches of Light. Lay in fresh kindling and watch it
take off, hear it crackling behind me. I turn to throw in a round, almost
squashing the flame. Adjust it to tilt, just so---ah, the secret of
air flow, and arrangement to keep that happening. In this way I can
add another big piece, with the flame able to stay strong between them.
- The Felt Camp
Here the vibes are magical: very mellow, hardly any speaking.
Someone's putting wool through a carding machine; another is soaking
a tray of carded wool with soap solution. Others are working it, the
basic part of the process: rubbing smoothly, lightly over the surface
of the wool, vibrating the fibers so they mesh, ever more tightly
together. It's easy work, but takes persistence and patience. I kneel
beside the blanket project and add my pieces of wool, smoothing them
into the fabric of the whole with my hands. The people beside me do
the same, smiling and looking back to their work. The shade here is
cool and delicious, as is the sound of the creek nearby. The sounds
of chipping flint and obsidian, in the dusty, hot knapping pit across
the grove of trees, filters through dimly and is lost in the afternoon
light.
Avoiding the Issue
A year and a half after Northern Lights (having skipped the second
annual gathering this year), I still wonder why, after I was so inspired
by the accessibility of all these primeval skills, have I procrastinated
again and again ever since, in my resolve to undertake a systematic
learning of them on my own, at home?
The first thing that happened, when I returned home in June 1995,
was a road blockade on the access to the woodlot in my watershed.
Thus began an explosion of political activity which has continued to
blaze or smolder in my life ever since. It raises important new questions
about areas of competence required to sustain basic life needs (in this
case, water). Is non-violent action a "primitive skill"?
Also, I was faced immediately with a number of chores and tasks around
the homestead that, though I wouldn't call them primitive skills, are
jobs of a basic nature, integral to a lifestyle that is closely adapted
to the natural world. They are basic skills appropriate to a lifestyle
where the level of comfort I call "basic" is several notches
of civilized evolution beyond what would be possible with animal hides,
natural shelter materials, stone tools, wild plants.
The homesteading lifestyle in this bioregional culture relies on the
garden, copious quantities of firewood, canning and freezing more than
on drying of foods, and on maintaining a household that uses home-generated
electricity, a truck, a computer, money, eyeglasses, food supplements
and medications, books, condoms, a telephone, post office, and on and
on. Much of this lifestyle is sufficiently close to the natural world
that I depend on, that there is little time or, indeed, apparent necessity
to practice other skills I don't use.
I keep telling myself, however, that I should be learning the "real"
basics. Why? For starters, there is this stubborn idea, which comes
from growing up in the age of nuclear threat and eco-destruction, of
preparing for the collapse of civilized support systems. This prudent
anxiety was part of the reason I began exploring back-to-the land practices.
I've lost the edge of fear that peaked in the early '80s, the Reagan
years, and acquired, meanwhile, a deeper resonance with earth-based
values and practices as being worthy in their own right.
Part of the attraction of the Northern Lights event was the opportunity
it provided to join with others of like mind in a common pursuit, a
tribal sense of community. Most of us don't belong to the aboriginal
races of this continent, but we do have an identity of sorts. The word
used widely at the gathering is "Abos." This communal spirit,
too, is valuable in itself; when humanity finds itself on the rocks,
we will need each other and all our skills to pull through together.
So why haven't I buckled down to the learning of cordage and wild
plants, shelters and snares? Actually, I have, a couple of times, gone
into the woods behind my house, Mors Kocharski's book, Northern Bushcraft,
in hand, to make tinder out of old jeans, or to attempt (unsuccessfully)
to strike sparks from rock with the back edge of a pocket-knife blade,
or to hunt out wild edibles, or to do woodworking tricks with a knife.
But now winter is here, and though I may wander out at some point
and shoot a deer to add to the chickens, vegetables and fruit already
cramming the freezer, I'm unlikely to stray for very long from the computer
and the cozy little stove now simmering away at my back. After all,
I mean to enjoy the first winter in five years in which I won't be trying
to learn telemark skiing.
Where do we go from here?
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present....Unless
our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon,
it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty
and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy
comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested
by it that is a newer testament--the gospel according to this moment....I
hear a cockerel crow far or near...and with a sudden gush return to
my senses.
--Thoreau, "Walking"
In a time of the history of the world when the forests are the last
great slave market, I hear an Abo prophet shout, "Citizens! Vikings,
Mongols, Romans, lend me your ears! There is a new way coming!"
And I have to wonder, will we still be around when it arrives? Will
our home still be viable enough to sustain us in the era of our awakening?
I, too, postulate an awakening, because without it there is extinction
and suffocation, mass misery and unartful collapse of the most serious
order.
It comes down to the now, the moving now. Because without a new and
moving now, the bones of our ancestors move us too slowly. With a new
and moving now, we can come free into the present future and say, thank
you ancestors for bringing us here, now what is to be done?
To stop the programs and looping routines long enough to wonder, what
next? Which direction, of all those possible, may be more advantageous
than the one I'm on, we're on collectively, up to this point? We stand
on a point of time, with blankness all around. One path appears before
us: steps by steps continuing, an echo of the past. These steps too
lead into darkness, but the motion of our past movement impels us blindly
forward. If we were to stop and look around, we might envision creating
footsteps, by our own simple walking, in paths as yet unexplored. There
is a frontier yet to be tasted: not in any continent but that of the
human spirit. Here too we may suppose it's all been done: but the next
moment is unprecedented, the conditions changed. The dynamics of the
whole have come into play as never before, and will continue to create
novel contexts by which to judge each next move. This game develops
new and evolving rules, and twists of rules, all the time. Random factors
are at work, giving us continual opportunities to change our expectations.
My cat, I notice, is a creature of habit. A predator, he leans on
expectations of my behavior, another creature of habit. When the second
alarm goes off in the morning, he arrives in the bedroom waiting by
my clothes shelf to rub against my legs as I dress. If I linger in bed,
he waits impatiently there, wondering what went wrong. His pattern is
bred to watch the pattern of prey, those stupider animals on which he
feeds, which run in predictable paths and so are caught through his
watchful presence.
Do I pattern my behavior on mouse, or cat, or something more watchful
still? In my freedom to choose my action at every moment, to walk at
will through an untracked wilderness, is a power so often disused as
to astonish me. To abdicate such power collectively is to allow the
unimpeded, hyperbolic advance of planetary eco-collapse which appears
on every graph of world-watchers since the middle of this century.
Even this perspective, one might say, is not new anymore. It's just
more fuel for the flames: computer time, paper weight. What words can
poorly convey, however, spirit can take beyond. By leaving these tracks
in the sand, I might see the route of my own departure.
Somewhere we fly together, dreaming, singing. Somewhere the dance
goes on without end. The footsteps we leave are only the measures of
our stride; ripples the mark of our course on the waters. Our freedom
yesterday gives us nothing but another choice today.
Isn't this mysticism? Of course. What else drives the world, gives
us hope and purpose, than a connection with life-force, full force,
filling us as full as we dare? Mysticism is a primitive skill.
Walking on the frozen flats at the head of the lake, I notice my tracks
go straight; when I decide to change direction, the new direction is
also straight; I walk a large zig-zag pattern. Coming into the sparse
brush, I continue walking straight until I notice deer tracks, meandering
with gentle curves through the brush. This brush is sparse enough that
a straight path would still be convenient. Yet, following the deer's
tracks, there is a different consciousness at work. This meandering
course of gentle curves, I discover, can only be made step by step,
moment by moment, with decisions always tentative, subject to influence
by the next whiff of air, the next attractive bud, the next whim of
inspiration or pure serendipity.
Walking: this, too, is a primitive skill.
© Nowick Gray
March 1997
