Dad's Mini Lesson - Building a Fire
Hot Hot Hot
Hello again, friends!
It’s finally getting brisk outside (and by that I mean it occasionally gets down to seventy degrees here in Central Florida), which means it is my favorite time of the year: stick gathering.
Whenever my wife and I walk around our neighborhood, I’m always on the lookout for a great stick that I can bring back home and add to my collection. I do this starting as early as the beginning of September. Stick gathering is great because once you have amounted a goodly sized pile, you can use that bounty for another classic activity: lighting a firepit.
This is something that brings me great joy and I don’t get to do it all that often down here in the Sunshine State. So, I thought today’s mini lesson could be a light one (pun intended) about how I go about putting together a very quick, instantly burnable fire.
So, aside from the pile of sticks that I’ve worked on gathering, I also keep a gallon ziplock bag filled with whatever lint I manage to pull from the dryer. I collect that all year, truthfully, because nothing lights up faster than dryer lint (aside from maybe Christmas trees?? but that’s a story for another time). It’s easy to collect and hey, nice to have some use for that shit, right???
Now, if you need, you can even keep the junk mailers that come to your mailbox with annoying frequency and stash them with the lint. You know, those ones that you usually put straight into the trash? If you keep a stack of them saved, times when it’s damp out and the fire doesn’t want to light can be made a lot easier by scrunching in a few of these dumb paper sheets. Then it feels good because you’re not adding trash to the landfill, you’re making a cozy fire!
I buy wood when it goes on sale at Publix, which is about eight bucks a bag, which isn’t too horrible, but obviously if you have a cheaper option go for it! Lots of people just sell it by the cord. I like these bags for convenience, sure, but also because you can know that the wood will be dry when you go to use it. I keep the bags stored in a location like my garage so they can stay out of the damp and rain (because we have that year round here). Wet wood is hard to light and also very smoky.
I like to go with a strong triangle/pyramid formation to get a very quick light. I bunch up a variety of sizes of sticks for this. You need to have the little tiny twigs, but also some medium sized guys to get the fire cooking so that your larger wood can have time and temperature to light without a lot of fuss. As you can see here, I’ve scrunched in some dryer lint between the sticks. You can also use your leftover cinnamon brooms after the smell has all wafted out (just small pieces broken off, very few, wedged in), but be careful with this, because some people can have a strong reaction to cinnamon oil. If in doubt, just don’t use it!!!
Now, we light! I use a lighter and try to spark multiple points around the pit, where I’ve stuffed the dryer lint, which means it will light evenly and fast.
I’ve owned this firepit for a few years now. It wasn’t exactly cheap - it’s the knockoff the fancy smokeless from Lowes - but you don’t have to spend a lot of money on a firepit to get a fire going. The one I owned before this one cost maybe fifty bucks and I used it for almost a decade before it finally rusted out. As long as you keep it covered and safe from the elements, you can use it a very long time.
I try to keep all of the wood contained beneath the lip of this particular pit when I light it so hopefully it won’t smoke so much, but c’mon, it’s a fire, buddy! It’s just going to give you a little bit of smoke no matter what you do.
Light and enjoy with a delicious beer! This all took me less than ten minutes, from set up to execution. Some of that time can be saved by doing the pre-work that I mentioned up front: collect sticks early in the year and keep them someplace dry, have a couple bags of wood stashed and handy (we had a lot of it downed from the previous hurricane; one nice thing in a sea of bad shit), and store a baggie of kindling like dryer lent and shitty mailers handy for immediate use.
Once the initial wood and kindling gets going, your logs and wood are bound to shift positions. This naturally occurs when the smaller stuff burns through. Sometimes you need to move things around in the firepit to make sure that air is circulating properly. Don’t use your hand, even if you’re tempted! My wife got me this nice pair of tongs a few holidays ago, but you can get a pair of them for pretty cheap at any home supply store. I’m a Lowes Lesbian, so that’s where I go!
I’m really lucky because we have a nice concrete patio where I can store the firepit, which means that if anything falls onto the ground, there aren’t any worries of it lighting anything on fire. I keep the trees trimmed up high here, too, so they won’t be in danger of catching.
My dog is getting older now - she’s fourteen, which is hard to believe - but she still likes to sit out with me and watch the embers die down.
Join me this Thursday when I talk to Yashwina Canter about urban gardening - this was a lot of fun - and the week after that, Alex Chee will teach us all how to make a perfect martini!!!!!!!!!!! RAD!!!!! Consider getting a paid subscription so you can reap all that good, good information!
Love,
Dad