Tis The Season … Let The Bonfiring Commence

Oct 4, 2011 by winjaw

Okay, so “bonfiring” probably isn’t a word, but for sake of this blog, let’s just pretend.

Cooler weather has finally arrived, which among our Clan means one thing.

Time to burn.

As I mentioned in a previous post here, the SONS of Thunder and I are one with fire. If it can burn, it will; if it can’t, well, we’ll find a way.  Outside, we have four designated fire areas. We designated said areas because too often I’ve watched the SONS stare off into the woods behind our house and start a sentence with “wouldn’t it be really cool if we …”

That would be a “no.”

Anyway, said fire pits include a chimenea, a basic pear-shaped and clay-made device made to, well, burn things. But it falls under the “ambiance” level of fire pits, meaning no human sacrifices. And it only takes really small pieces of wood. And I have to look up how to spell “chimenea.” Every. Single. Time.

But the Little Black Dress thinks it fits the whole “decor” thing, so we play along.

We also have small portable pit No. 1 and bigger portable pit No. 2. They are those iron things that you can put on your back deck.  I say portable because they are, well, portable, meaning you can basically move them wherever The Dress tells you to. And they come with some dome-shaped, wire mesh lid so sparks don’t fly out, land on your roof and burn you house down.

The SONS fail to see the point of the lids. To them, the lids deter from the overriding, deciding factor of any good fire.

Height.

The SONS have become quite adept at fire-making. Just recently, Eldest perfected creating and implementing char cloth.

And what, pray tell, is char cloth?

Let’s turn to gold ol’ Wikipedia: “Char cloth (also called charpaper) is a swatch of fabric made from vegetable fiber (such as line, cotton or jute) that has been converted via pyrolysis into a slow-burning fuel of low ignition temperature (capable of being ignited by a firesteel) that can in turn be used to ignite a wood splint to start a fire. It is sometimes manufactured at home for use as tinder when cooking or camping and historically usually provided the “tinder” in a tinderbox.”

In English, all that means is you can wave an unlit match in front of a piece of char cloth and it’s on fire.  Isn’t that easier? Now you don’t have to go find any “jute” or look up “pyrolysis.”

Bigger portable pit No. 2 was located beneath a tree with high branches. Let us just say that the lower elements of said high branches no longer exist. And as the SONS reached for greater and greater heights, it finally dawned on me that I needed to move the portable pit, or else watch the entire tree burn up, fall over onto my house, light the woods on fire and in a very short order, make about 300 families in my subdivision homeless.

But The Dress likes where the No. 2 pit is and the SONS are now capable of making a fire much larger than the dimensions of said pit. And there’s that whole tree branch issue.

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It is, shall we say, something to meet standards used by the Inquisition when they were into that whole burning everyone at the stake thing;  something to cause Joan of Arc to shudder in remembering similar devices centuries ago.

It fits our needs.

And so this past weekend we made some char cloth, got some new lighters and cleaned out the fire pits. We cleaned the pits the old-fashioned way – we threw in a bunch of wood and basically burned any and everything out of the way.  Which was fine with me, as the SONS still have little to no concept of a broom and the term “sweeping” as suggested by The Dress.

We burned pretty much all day, and I can attest you probably couldn’t even find a single pine needle in our back yard now.

Unfortunately, since the SONS are, well, the SONS, rules are needed.

Said rules include: one cannot shove a burning stick into the back of another; one cannot build a fire outside of a designed area – despite how woody the woods look; one cannot build a fire so big it encroaches on the designed fire area of another; one cannot throw firecrackers into a fire without fair warning, with said warning being more than two seconds before they blow up in your face; one may only use pine needles to help start the fire, and may not dump an entire 39-gallon trash bag full of pine needles into the fire after it’s already started just to win the “height award;” and so forth.

The evening wore on and the fire materials collected earlier finally hit empty. Time to put out the fire.

The putting out of the fire has become not only a ritual but a contest among the SONS. Lots of liquids are drunk in preparation of the “I put mine out first” award.

The SONS do not use water to put out fires.

And almost every time The Dress makes some comment about raising a bunch of wolves or something similar as the contest begins.

And if you are totally lost about how those fires are put out, let’s just say it’s a guy thing.