To build a fire

I went over to the Klondike Saturday. The Klondike is a big gathering of local Boy Scouts. They all get together for a weekend of winter camping and training in survival skills. I even met a couple of boys who were learning how to hang and then, later, fold an American flag.

I got flag duty back in elementary school. Every morning we raised the flag out front, and every afternoon we lowered it and folded it. The principal was an alcoholic with a bad temper, so we made darn sure we didn't screw it up.

It made my mother proud that I was a flag folder, even though I was also reading The Exorcist at the time, which, for those who have never read it, is not exactly on the Book It! list for 11-year-olds.

Fortunately, my mother never really paid any attention to the books I read. I could have been reading Mein Kampf, and she just would have come over and tussled my hair and said, "He's such a good reader!"

I also had a brief stint in the Boy Scouts. Actually, the Cub Scouts-my Pinewood Derby car came in third, and I managed to get my Bobcat badge. Nothing else. To get the Bobcat badge, you had to know the Pledge of Allegiance and that was about it. To get any of the other badges, you had to jump fences and tie knots and be a good citizen.

I could barely tie my shoes.

I wasn't the brightest kid in the world. Like when the TV signal would go on the fritz and say, "We're experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by," I'd go and stand next to the TV, as if that would help get my favorite program back on the air faster.

"What are you doing?" my mother would ask as I stood next to the TV.

"I'm standing by, of course," I explained.

My mother would then sigh. She sighed a lot, sort of scrunched up her eyes and whined.

"Shouldn't you be reading The Exorcist?" she asked.

The Boy Scouts this weekend were learning the fine art of fire starting. They had out flint and steels and steel wool and birch bark, which are all fine fire-starting materials if there's no old oil and gasoline around.

That's what we used when we were kids, out roughing it in the woods. Two parts old oil to one part gasoline. We slept in an old canvas Army tent with a hole in the roof and one in the floor. If it so much as thought about raining you got wet.

Even so, we camped out a lot in that old tent. Mostly it was just me and the neighbor kid, Darrel. My grandparents had a nice woods with big maple and oak and shagbark hickory trees. It had a nice creek and an old wooden bridge, and one fine summer morning about 3 a.m. Darrel just about burned the whole place down.

Seems that he got the gas-to-old-oil ratio off a little bit and while I was asleep the jug caught on fire.

"The flames were shooting way up into the trees," he said.

Somehow he got it out. Not so much out of fear that he'd burn the woods down, but out of fear his old man would kill him.

Darrel's dad was no den mother, believe me. Which was one of the reasons why he was happy to go camping.

At any rate, once Darrel had the fire out and was able to get his bearings back, we were able to take what was left of the melted jug and make another fire.

Seems there was still a little gas and oil left in it. It made a nice little fire.

Of course, we had to blow on it a little and sort of work it up with little sticks, and, if I remember right, we may have just used a little bit of birch bark.

Have a good week.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.