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Consider the Campfire

campfire My friends and I were headed for the Seven Islands on the upper Saint John River one chilly and wet day, the sort of day that eventually overwhelms any rain gear with creeping rivulets down the neck and up the forearms. We landed our canoes near the little spring at Nine Mile Bridge to fill our water bottles. At the campsite next to the old bridge abutment we met four fellow canoeists, too chilled to sit still, standing under a tarp they had rigged over their picnic table. For cooking they had brought a Coleman gasoline stove, which was roaring lustily under a steaming pot. They were uncomfortably cold. No quantity of hot cocoa was enough to warm them on a day like this.

Consider the irony of the situation: there was the fireplace that is part of every St. John campsite, but it was dead, just wet lampblack ashes left by previous campers. Next to a fireplace and within a short distance of abundant firewood our new acquaintances were damp and shivering. Why? The use of the campfire simply was not part of their expectation or experience. They had not come prepared to make fire. They stood around and stamped their feet when they easily could have been warm and dry.

Campsites along the Allagash and Saint John are authorized for fires and firewood is abundantly available. Yet many campers, lacking traditional skills and outlook, do not appreciate the utility and pleasure of building a campfire for warmth or cooking. This is partly the result, we suspect, of a fashionable ecocentric attitude that forbids any exploitation, however harmless or sensible, of the natural environment. But even more it is the result of campers’ learning their skills from equally inexperienced peers, from magazines, from selections in store catalogs, a process in which gadgetry subsitutes for accomplishment. As my colleague Rus Peotter likes to say, “In order to do a thing, one must first imagine being able to do it.” After all, you can’t build a fire on a rainy day, even if it occurs to you to do so, if you’re convinced it’s an impossible task.

So if you weren’t lucky enough to learn camping from Dad, don’t despair. Our goal at mainecampsite is to pass along a few traditional and practical ways of traveling and camping in the backcountry of northern Maine and similar locations. Our experience suggests that the latest high-tech camping gear and techniques aren’t necessarily the best means of a comfortable and satisfying sojourn in the woods. We’ll introduce you to try some traditional methods and equipment.

Many people assume that a campfire is somehow primitive or limiting. We think that’s more true of portable stoves. Using a portable stove, instead of wood fire, is like playing one of those pre-programmed electronic keyboards instead of a real piano. The electronic gadget produces music immediately without much effort, but you quickly exhaust its creative possibilities. Same with the portable stove, which can cook quantities of mac-and-cheese, canned beans, and pancakes-with-burnt-spots-in-the-center, but is useless for grilling, baking, or heating more than one or two things at a time. Cooking over a campfire is like using a good restaurant-quality gas range: any quality of heat can be applied to several tasks at one time. On our canoe travels in northern Maine we’ve cooked bread, cakes, brownies, pizza, roasts, barbecue, reduction sauces, multi-course meals – almost anything you can imagine cooking, you can cook over a campfire. I don’t need to add that food tastes better outdoors, so why not bring the means for the best possible cuisine?

At right, the coffee pot waits to boil.
Nice scene, huh?
The temperature was 20° F.
A fire made things a lot more comfortable.

If you’ve decided to take our advice, please allow us to make a couple more suggestions. First, if your fire-making skills are non-existent or rusty, practice fire-building before you undertake a camping trip, so you won’t find yourself fretting over a reluctant pile of kindling while your stomach rumbles. Second, practice neatness. Don’t cut firewood within sight of your campsite. Don’t leave unburnt sticks and debris lying around. And of course you can tell the difference between dry, combustible dead wood, and green wood. (Judging from the charred green sticks we’ve found at some campsites, many people can’t.) While we’re mentioning the obvious, don’t try to burn cans, foil, or plastic. A fireplace isn’t a garbage can. But you know these things, and we apologize for mentioning them.

At left, cooking a well-organized breakfast: while a coffee pot nears boiling and a pancake browns, brook trout and sausages stay hot in a Dutch oven.
The oven also will be used to keep a stack of pancakes warm until breakfast is ready for the entire party. (Rus Peotter photo)

The knack to finding and using firewood is to be economical. It’s easier to carry your firewood as one or two big sticks in one trip than to drag awkward armloads of twigs and brush in many trips. Instead of wandering randomly near your campsite, breaking off a dry twig here and there, take a few minutes to walk away from camp (or better yet, use the canoe to find and carry firewood) until you’re well off the beaten track, then select just one or two suitable trunks of standing dead wood to harvest, and then trim to a size you can tote back to camp. With this deliberate method you can gather all the wood you need for the day, and you don’t have to tramp all the ferns and saplings within sight.

And finally, you need the proper tools. Since northern Maine is lumbering country it’s fitting that the two essential tools are saw and axe. For canoe trips, the metal bow saw (also called a Swede saw) that you can buy at most any hardware store is ideal, being lightweight and easy to store inside the canoe under the gunwale. I’d recommended the longer 36-inch blade since it weighs little and cuts better than a shorter blade. For backpacking trips I use a collapsing buck saw of my own manufacture, having been unsatisfied with the commercial pack saws I’ve tried. (Send an email if you’d like more info about this saw.)

A good axe is a bit harder to find, since most hardware stores seem to stock only the dullest imitations of axes. My own camp axes are made by Snow and Nealley of Bangor, Maine, which currently manufactures a 1¾ pound Hudson Bay Axe and a 2¼ pound standard axe. These can be hard to find in stores, but fortunately you can shop at http://www.snowandnealley.com/. I use a lighter axe (1¾ lb.) for backpacking and for canoe trips of smaller parties and a heavier axe (2½ lb. )for most of my canoe trips. Although the axe can be an implement of destruction, the firebuilder uses his axe with precision, even delicacy, to prepare kindling and split sawn sticks. (More about preparing firewood in future issues.)

The campfire can be godsend on a camping trip; it keeps you warm, dries your clothes, cook your food. Your skill with the use of fire will be well-rewarded.

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