One of the things all of us going on the Last Great Alaskan Bucket List Adventure looked forward to was the sitting around the camfire at night part, probably the highlight of all camping trips. When Bear Grylls, Cody Lundin and Mr. Primitive Technology make a fire to do this, it looks so EZ! Even just rubbing 2 sticks together is EZ for these guys! You will notice though that in just about every "how to make a fire" video instructional on Utoob, the fire-mkaing pro does this in nice weather. Maybe there is snow on the ground, but it is not being done in a drenching rainstorm with wood that is soaking wet from says, weeks and months of rain before that. Fires in general require a supply of dry wood, just for starters.
All 3 of us like to make fires, and this is one thing I thought I could actually
DO on the Adventure, but even this relatively simple task was too much for me, despite the fact I had pre-prepared and brought with me a variety of fire starting methods and materials to make a video instructional of my own on fire-making for the SNAP Card Gourmet video series. I had Tinder of several types, Fatwood for Kindling, Flint & Steel, Magnesium Sticks, Strike-anywhere matches, Water & Stormproof matches, Bic Lighters, Butane mini-torches, even the latest in Plasma Lighters that you can recharge via USB. The goal here was to make up for the video where tongue-in-cheek I made my camping & cooking fire by dousing a large pile of wood with about half a bottle of oil based lighter fluid to get it going.
Anyhow, all 3 of us pride ourselves on being semi-competent campers and being able to make a roaring fire under most conditions using the traditional method of building it up from a small little TeePee fire with just a few embers and maybe some newzprint for kindling to something large enough to roast wienees and marshmallows around and tell Ghost Storiez. We were all humbled by the Alaskan Weather.
It has been raining non-stop for the entire summer here on the Last Great Frontier. and everything is soaked to the bone. Even the pre-cut commercial firelogs from the wood bins at the grocery storez and campsites protected in little bins were damp enough through & through to resist lighting up until quite well dried out by an already underway bonfire. Not one of us got single campfire going without the assistance of the Magic Bottle of Lighter Fluid. We even resorted to building up a pile of commercial charcoal for grilling and piling wood on top of that to get our campfire going. By itself, also this wuz not good enough.
These are campfires also, not cooking fires which tend to be smaller and use smaller pieces of wood so you can control the heat of the fire better while you cook. One of these fires unless made indoors or well covered would have been
OUT in minutes over the last few daze here, if you ever got it going to begin with. Whih answers the question of how our ancestors cooked back in the day before the Franklin Stoves and Cuisinarts. They did it in
GOOD WEATHER! Until they moved indoors for most of their existence fire was
NOT an every night luxury enjoyed by all for cooking and heating. You had it most nights probably, but the nights you
MOST needed it were the nights you didn't have it. It also takes a
BONFIRE to keep one of these going in a fairly heavy rain, the fire has to be enough to evaporate all the water falling on it.
MOST people in the early Ag era as Serfs probably could not afford to burn that much wood every night. There are legends about kids getting a Lump of Coal in the stocking for Christmas, most were probably
HAPPY if they got that. Read "The Little Matchstick Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen sometime.
In the end of course we did get our Campfires going despite the rain and the wet with the help of the Magic Lighter Fluid from the Age of Oil. One of the endless products we don't realize how much we depend on to live our papered existence as beneficiaries of all the inventions, products and resources that go into making our lives overall quite EZ to negotiate, so EZ even a Cripple can negotiate it, as long as he has friends around who aren't so sick of his requests for help they start ignoring him and disappear for hours at a time to do their own thing. This experience made me realize that even if I could get together a full size Convocation with several Diners attending, I couldn't go to it myself anymore. I would be the Cripple at the Convocation, the Dependent One, the Burden who Needs All the Help. All of you non-Cripples out there think and believe you would have endless Patience to help your Crippled mothers & fathers and wives and children, but you don't. Everyone gets tired of helping Cripples all the time. With Crippled Kidds who got that way through no fault of their own, Parents feel particularly Guilty and will do this longer than most situations
(even taking care of crippled kids well into adulthood), but even there they get sick of it.
Back when I moved up to Alaska and got together with the guy who I went in on the first Gym program with, he told me "now you are
FAMILY", with the subtext that meant that I could depend on him and his family as
MY family also, and they would be there for me if I needed them. But of course, in the end they were not there and he was not there either. He fired me after all. You can't fire your family, although people do disown family members and do stop responding to requests for help from perpetual fuck-ups like drug addicts in the family. For those of you married people out there, you believe your Spouse will take good care of you when you are an oblivious piece of senile meat in the wheel chair, but she won't, she'll park you freezing in the backyard while she collects your Social Security check and entertains your best friend or bizness partner in the backyard with that fabulous lasagna she used to cook up for you.
Hopefully, you get more dependability, loyalty and help from AZ's 5th Dimensional Energy Entity Companions than you do with your fellow Homo Saps as you negotiate your way to the Great Beyond for a final rest from this bullshit. Cripples go to the Great Beyond all alone. That is how it is. I am all alone for whatever time I have left now. There will be no more Convocations, no more Last Adventures for RE, other than the Last Adventure of the Imagination I have here with my keyboard. My life as a part of the society, as a friend to other Homo Saps is OVAH. Now all I am is a brudensome meat package in need of a rapid disposal into the waste bin of human history on earth. Just a piece of eternal trash in the mozaic of life in the multiverse.
RE