The bonfire thread inspired me to tell this story; sit right back and I’ll tell you a tale of my younger days.
All right, so it wasn’t that much younger. I was 13 at the time, IIRC, and a Boy Scout. Boy Scouts are, of course, known for making fire. And playing with fire when the leaders aren’t looking and they can get away with it. Scouts like fires, the bigger the better, and the people I was with decided that “bigger” hadn’t yet been taken out to its fullest extent.
Fortunately for those participating, the camp we were at was relatively poorly supervised by adults. Of course, it was a leadership training camp; technically, all the Scouts there were supposed to be the cream of the crop. That was the first mistake they made.
The second mistake was issuing us Dutch ovens and telling us to cook our meal for the night over a fire pit.
Digging the fire pit took most of the day. Actually, it may have started the day before and continued into the next day. We dug with shovels for a while, and then realized that empty coffee cans worked so much better once you were deep enough to climb into the pit.
The digging continued. Eventually, it stopped because… well, eventually we had to get a fire going in there. Before starting to fill the hole, we tried to ascertain the height of the hole. This was accomplished by putting the shortest kid (me) in the hole and seeing whether it went over my head. (It did; it was a few minutes before they let me back up).
Now, when building a fire in a normal fire pit, there are rules one follows. Tinder–usually dried leaves at Scout camp–goes first, followed by smaller twigs and then logs. These rules were thrown out the window. We had a fire pit about five feet deep and five feet across, and we filled it with whatever was available.
(For the record, that’s about half a cord of wood, I’m pretty sure.)
It took about an hour to fill.
Boy Scouts also don’t start fires with any sort of flammable liquids, right? Well, sometimes that’d be right. There was no lighter fluid readily available, but as everyone knows, insect spray is highly flammable (it even says so on the cans–what a stupid thing to say. “Hey! I burn!!!”). Approximately an entire can of bug spray was used to coat the wood, which–after about an hour of trying and a good fifty matches–started burning.
(And as I think back on the fire, Don McLean is running through my head:
As the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight…)
The fire rose about fifteen feet into the air at first, but eventually died down to the point where one could see over it. And build a tripod over it to–you guessed it–hold the Dutch oven in which our meal was to be cooked.
Now, Dutch ovens are supposed to be placed on hot coals–say, 250 or 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Our fire was still roaring, however–and I estimate it was around 1000 degrees Fahrenheit in the center. This estimate comes from the fact that the lid of the Dutch oven melted and sunk into the food.
Dinner didn’t take very long to cook. And the fire was out completely a few days later. No, really.
Ah, to be young and stupid again.
LL
) The land they were building on had been an old hippie commune years before, so there were about 7 or 8 run-down shacks scattered about the property… when we got bored, we’d rip one down and build a bonfire at night.