Andy, Tyler and Watson give morning attention to the campfire.
The primal central point is a magnet for boys of all ages.
Over the past summer and fall, our all-family gatherings—the 22 of us—were primarily outside, in a large mowed field just up the hill from a nice stream with good flow, a swimming hole and lots of good flat rocks for skipping. You could look out from the set of sturdy wooden picnic tables spread with foods and stoves and coolers and see four or five tents pitched at all angles not far from each other—our own little weekend bedroom community.
And you could see—no matter the time nor temperature of the day or night—a good healthy fire midway between our kitchen and our bedrooms. A campfire is pretty much an inevitability when there are boys around—and we have many of those, from ages four on up to a number we won’t mention—but at least to the oldest of those boys it took on an even more compelling appeal this year.
The pull begins with early morning visible breath and hands extended over the twig-fired comeback from embers. This is the strongest time for the ladies, who otherwise leave things pretty much to boys and men. And it’s often just one hand at a time stuck toward the fire, as the other is warmed with its wrap around a cup of coffee sending its own little visible vapor into the air.
Twigs must lead to branches and sticks, and the sticks to fallen limbs and even trunks, which is the call to action to boys and men, with those at either end of the age sptectrum the proudest of what they drag out of the woods. Methods of sizing down for burn—breaking over a knee, jumping on a branch, using the crotch of a tree split as a leverage point, resorting to the hatchet—become the next arena of accomplishment for males doing their duty to keep the family warm.
Once things are built to a warming morning crescendo and unless it’s cold, interest wanes a bit through the day aside from the occasional under-10er who delivers a scoop of dead leaves or lunch-used paper plates toward a nice burst of flame just to let people know there’s still a fire and there are still men attending to it.
The fullest fire begins to rise as the sun falls away. Bigger logs go on, hot dogs get roasted and people talk about the virtues of teepee vs. criss-cross fire structure. Camp chairs come in a little closer and a lady picks hers up to move it, noting that dang smoke always follows her.
Marshmallow and s’mores become not only the last dessert item of the day for shorter people, but also a fine technique for putting off the trip to the tent for the night. Parents around a campfire have been shown to be significantly less sugar- and bedtime-vigilant than those same parents at home.
Come Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, the campfire migrates to out back of Papa and Gigi’s house, where the supply of wood for the firepit has cured for a year from its last-year greenness. But the overall process is the same . . . boys gather twigs, bigger boys break limbs and then the big stuff gets teepeed or criss-crossed on into the night. It’s cold outside, but the fire has a pull on everyone, at least for a hand out over and a back-away from that smoke that never fails to follow beauty.
The story above first appeared in our January / February 2022 issue.
