The Softer Side of Fire-Making
Reflections on the hard and soft skill-building required for the apocalypse
Before we introduced ourselves and got into the weekend at The Wilderness Awareness School’s Wild Women’s Weekend last October, the weekend’s host passed the hypothetical torch over to Marina Rivera who would make the first ceremonial fire to begin the weekend.
Wordlessly, Marina stepped in slow, dancer-like steps towards a piece of wood that she held with one bare foot. She took several large steady breaths, closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she began. With one hand she held a piece of wood with a carved spike set to drill into the wood on the ground. Then she took a handmaid bow (you know like the archery kind) she sawed moving the spike back and forth causing friction between the spike and the wood on the ground. Every once in a while, she’d take some intentional breaths. And before long, there were small wisps of smoke rising from the hole the spike had drilled into the wood. When there was enough, she took a soft tuft of cedar tree bark and held it to the smoking bit of wood. At that point, this action was between her and the wood, it was hard to tell from my vantage point what exactly occurred. But soon, the smoke had somehow been transferred to the tree bark. Marina knelt and blew gentle, calm breaths into the tuft of bark. When soft flames rose up from the bark, she transferred the fire to a beautiful piece of wood that she had carved thin ribbons of wood that coalesced at the end of the main stick. The fire was transferred to those ribbons which were then transferred to a small pile of tinder in the fire pit. And, voila, there was fire…for a brief moment before Marina inevitably had to put it out because there was a fire ban.
Through this entire ceremony I could not take my eyes off Marina. There were few sounds other than her breathing and then the eventual crackle of the small flames and every one of the 50 or so attendees watched, rapt with attention. I had no idea what the tools she used were called. But I could tell something more than just fire making was happening. It was, well, kind of spiritual.
Even as I write that, I feel a little cringe-y casting some spiritual element to this. It feels a bit too “on the nose” with this kind of back-to-the-land kind of journey I’m on. But I did feel something watching Marina that was beyond the realization that I could actually learn these skills to stay alive in the apocalypse.
As I watched Marina make fire from what seemed like nothing, as I watched her take steady breaths, as I watched her seemingly tune out the 100+ eyes on her, it occurred to me that a skill like fire-making wasn’t just a hard skill, there was something softer in there, something rooted in intuition.
This was all but confirmed when we had broken off into smaller groups for workshops. To my delight, Marina’s fire-making workshop was my introduction to the weekend’s activities. And as she began and introduced us to all the tools she was using or can be used in primitive friction firemaking (a bow drill, cedar bark, feathersticks, and kindling), my excitement rose as I realized that by the end of that couple hour session I might finally learn how to make a fire from the materials already around me.
And then, Marina hit us with a piece of knowledge that stopped me, metaphorically speaking, in my tracks.
“I eventually learned that I can carry all the tools to make a fire–nature’s blowtorch,” she said. “While those are great, they’re a direct compensation for our lack of knowledge about our environment.”
“Holy shit,” I thought. I thought back to the last couple of camping trips where I had attempted to make primitive fire with just a ferro rod and some kindling (and I didn’t even know the proper name of the ferro rod that first attempt). I eventually had to light the fire with the lighters on hand. I was frustrated at myself, but also desperate because we had small children to feed, so I was going to make fire with whatever I had around me.
“As I get to know the land, I don’t need to carry those things,” she continued. “But that’s not what this class is about.”
Ha, of course it’s not. Of course I’m not going to learn the ins and outs of the land in order to make fire anyhow anywhere I want in 2-3 convenient hours. Nonetheless, I was totally in. I was ready to start that journey.
After the requisite rule-setting (we were working with sharp objects, after all), Marina demonstrated all the skills we would be learning from wood-chopping, fuel gathering, feather stick-making (those beautiful wood ribbons I observed from Marina’s first fire), and then fire lighting with a ferro rod and knife. As she demonstrated each of these skills, I realized a couple of things. First, a whole lot of work goes into the preparation of all of the materials before you even try to get that fire going. And second, Marina often used the term “get fire” versus “make fire.”
I asked about this and after she thought for a moment she said this:
“This requires skill, but also emotional attunement. I think that as human beings, fire is ingrained in our bodies. Not just center for community but who we are. I see metaphors for fire everywhere.”
Getting fire then implies that fire is already there, it’s just a matter of being open to it. I then recalled the graceful dance Marina did to get that first fire of the day in the middle of a circle of eager, excited women. I wondered if the pressure of that moment required an attunement to the task and the body to ensure you were able to get that fire.
And with this realization, this a-ha moment about “getting fire,” a quest I had been on from the very beginning of this apocalypse prepping journey, it occurred to me that the “hard” and “soft” skills a part of this journey aren’t all that different. They exist on a spectrum, if you will. And what I mean by “hard skills” are those quantifiable sets of objective skills that you build through time and hard work. By “soft skills,” I’m talking about those qualitative, subjective skills that are hard to measure like critical thinking and listening. Fire making–or fire getting–is the perfect example. While there are certain things you need to know to make a primitive fire–to gather the right kind and amount of bark, the specific way you use a ferro rod or bow drill in order to create a spark, how you chop your wood to get the right size of kindling. But when you get to the point of actually making the fire, there is no guarantee that fire will happen even if you know how to do all of the things that, in theory, would get you fire.
Getting fire requires presence and intuition. It also requires patience.
I am pleased to report that by the end of this workshop I did get fire. I chopped wood like a badass, I made some crude not-so-beautiful-but-still-workable feathersticks, I collected a beautiful tuft of cedar by scraping the inside of a cedar bark plank with a hatchet, and I created a spark with the ferro rod that caught a small piece of charcoal made from denim, once inserted into the tuft of cedar that spark continued to catch fire thanks to my gentle breaths, which I then transferred to that crude featherstick and placed in the fire pit. I made a fire.
But then in our final task to make fire with just one match within a matter of five minutes, the pressure caught up to me. I did not succeed at that task and my heart was pumping and I was frustrated with myself in the end wondering if I did have what it took to make fire.
Then I remembered something Marina had said earlier: “If the fire doesn’t come, you need to do something different.”
What was different was the pressure. I’m not exactly sure if Marina intended that to be the lesson because a whole lot of the other attendees succeeded in this one-match-fire task set out to them. But my failure actually helped. And also the review of my notes and Marina’s quotes afterwards.
“I personally believe it’s better to be calm and not have fire than panicking and having a fire,” she had said earlier. “Try to invite the fire on versus trying to make the fire.”
I had not invited that fire to come. It didn’t matter how much time I spent on all of the materials or all of the skills I had, in theory, applied as I was instructed. I was not in the right mental space to receive the fire.
There is, I realized, spirituality that is a part of this whole skill building process. There are soft skills, the sense of awareness that are part of every hard skill I’m working towards. The entire weekend organized by the Wilderness Awareness School seemed to have been organized around this spectrum of soft and hard skills. Half the sessions leaned softer (the mindfulness and nature play sessions) and the others (fire and plant sessions) leaned harder. But they all required an awareness of nature and ourselves that were very much on the “softer” end of the spectrum.
For that reason, I knew I was in the right place. I had never really been drawn to the hyper-masculine, hard-skill focused aspect of the traditional prepper community, but I wasn’t quite aware what the alternative was. There was a sense of grace within the Wilderness Awareness School approach to skill-building. This acknowledges that there’s spectrum on which we all exist and that we’re going to be drawn to one skill more deeply than another and that there is no really mastery of one skill or another. This isn’t a race, it is a matter of intuition that we are honing. And that intuition (with a bit of knowing the basics) could be that key to survival in the apocalypse.
I came into my fire finding as a child--my father was a firefighter for 20 years encapsulating all of my childhood. He thought that forbidding fire would only make me play with it badly on my own, so at a very young age (younger than my mother would have liked!) he taught me how to respect it, feed it, and be wary of its power. He was an odd parent, but I learned a lot and still have these skills and respect.
I love this. Such an important reflection on different sources of power (force vs. surrender/invitation). Few things I've experienced have made me feel more empowered than learning about fire. Strong in my body, yet full of a certain stillness.