A friend recently forwarded this article he first read in 1985, and shared that he thought it was the best he read on what really is behind the human enjoyment of a real fire. I enjoyed reading it, so thought you might as well! And if you have ever been annoyed by someone "tinkering" with a fire you built you will likely laugh out loud at several parts. Enjoy. One dark night on the edge of winter in a national park, I saw fires glimmering in every campsite. They were small but earnest fires, lofting sparks into the trees and barking like angry terriers at the shins of campers. An earnest fire. All about them stood people warming cupped hands, watching the flames and talking. In summer, the campground would have been full of amplified music and the harrumphing of camper generators producing heat, light and noise. But there was no bottled music here, no gray glow of television. People were bathed in the healing yellow balm of firelight, at peace with one another and the night. They had come to the mountains for this ritual of fire and reveries and shared story. They had come for the fragrance of wood smoke and the holy warmth. Man has always wondered at fire. Early peoples put it on the edge of nature, believing that an ancestor, like Prometheus, stole it from the gods. FIRE! We still approach fire with near religious devotion. We choose wood carefully. We lay it out according to rules. Perhaps a green maple log for the back of the fire, to burn slowly and support other logs through the night. Kindling is carefully stacked in ricks over crumpled newsprint or pine shavings. Ash, yellow birch or oak is pyramided on top, perhaps with some apple wood for aroma. It is a ritual as rigid as communion. A firestarter is like a priest, and it is a breach of decorum for anyone else to tinker with his fire. We are finicky and ritualistic because fire is unusual in its power over our minds. Fire is a strong stimulus to dreams and poetry, the things that make us human but are often locked out of our minds by our avidity for wealth and power. Fires loosen the hold of events and open the gates of feeling. We look into the coals, where flames are flirting into blue, and wood is changing magically into light and smoke. We grow heavy-lidded watching the pulsing translucence of velvety embers. Perhaps our minds are adapted to firelight the way our eyes are calibrated to the sun. When the fire flares up, we feel something familiar and ancient. The English essayist E. V. Lucas wrote: "The smoke of the open-air fire is charged with memory. One whiff, and for a swift moment we are in sympathy with our remotest ancestors, and all that is elemental and primitive in us is awakened." It is not the primitive of tooth and claw, the fear of animals in the night, but the primitive of reverie and companionship. The warmth of a good fire is remarkably like the warmth of love, and makes us think about our connections with one another. Staring into the flames of a winter blaze, we lose the meanness of the day. It is hard to be critical or aloof by firelight. Fires are for romance, friendship, talk and song. "The wisest counsels are offered beside the fire," wrote Lucas. "The most loving sympathy and comprehension are there made explicit." It was around the fire that the household gathered, that mankind perfected speech, made up songs and explored the mysteries. It was around the fire that our ancestors sacrificed to their gods, and smoke that carried prayers heavenward linked religion and domesticity. That link between fire and faith has been broken in modern times. The break began when medieval alchemists, seeking to transmute base metals into gold, put fire inside furnaces, where they could no longer see its dazzle and sensuousness. By the mid-18th century, household fires were being enclosed as well. A stove kept more heat in the room and sent less up the chimney. From stoves, men moved on to furnaces and hot-water pipes. Fire lost its hypnotic power. "Who could be witty, who could be humane, before a gas stove?" laments Lucas. "It does so little for the eye and nothing for the imagination." In his book IN THE IMAGE OF FIRE, religious scholar David M. Knipe writes about a friend's belief that "the destruction of sensitivity in modern life was largely due to the loss of open-hearth fires in homes. Hearthless homes have no 'center,' no focus, and they provide nothing to gaze into for that reverie which is essential to every human." Hearth and home. As working fireplaces were found in fewer homes, we adopted depressing substitutes: the ceramic log that cleverly conceals a gas jet; the fireplace of fake flagstones and celluloid, lit from behind by amber-colored electric lights. We still want to look into flames. Perhaps the attentiveness carved in our minds by millennia of firewatching is what makes us stare vacantly for hours into the television screen. A software producer capitalized on this by marketing a video fireplace. You just pop a cassette into your VCR and curl up next to a blaze crackling on your television screen! No smoke. No ashes. No heat, either. But fire will never lose its hold on those of us who seek its contemplative glow -- and find within its dancing flames a renewal of our faith in one another.” Peter Steinhart Condensed from Audubon January, 1985
