First Fire

This afternoon Kristie and I decided to make our first fire in the firepit I received for Father's Day and relax in our new back yard furniture.

The firewood came thanks to our two trees in the backyard. The previous owners planted them too close together. Now their branches are literally growing together and clotting out all of the sunshine in our back yard. This leaves several of the branches dead. So I took out the trimmer and went to work.

Then I cut up and stacked the branches. However, I've burned my way through almost all of them.

Might be time to get some real firewood.

This reminds me of an interesting contrast from the Boston trip. When we visited Plimouth Plantation, we talked with a Wampanoag who was discussing how the natives went about 'burning' a canoe. Since they didn't have what westerners would call 'tools,' they relied on nature to help them with this. So they would select a rather large tree and then start a fire at the base. When the first felled the tree, the would begin to burn away the branches. When this was done, they would slice away the bark from the desired section of the trunk. Once this was done, a Wampanoag would spend days 'burning' out the canoe from the trunk. This involved constantly - for days on end - moving the coals around the inside of the trunk until the inside was hollowed out.

As the native was talking about this he said something I found very interesting, "Only a fool cuts or chops wood. What's the point? It's a lot of unnecessary work."

I thought of all the people back in MN who spent summers and fall cutting and chopping wood for the wood stoves and furnaces.

But what the man was saying was -in theory - correct. If you lived as the Wampanoag did, moving with your food supply, you had plenty of nature resources to take advantage of. Lugging saws and other tools would be prohibitive. So why not let fire do the work for you. Simply burn a tree down and then use fire to chop it into pieces. Or better yet, move your camp around the trees for warmth.

Of course, our next stop at Plimouth was the Puritan village.

And what was the first thing we saw there? Their wood pile, which was elaborately cut and stacked. Each piece of wood was cut into the exact same shape and length and formed a hexagon like figure. In the center of the stack were all the branches and smaller pieces, for kindling purposes. They were protected from the wind, which would otherwise scatter them about, by the larger pieces.

For the Puritans, this made perfect sense. Have several of these stacks close to the homes and buildings. Since the pieces are easily handled, one can quickly run to the stack - say in the dead of winter - and easily grab enough to last one's family through the night.

Two totally opposite ways of looking at something. Yet, these opposite views can help students see just how opposite the world views were of the natives and the westerners. This too helps get at some of the causes for the clashes that were to occur between the cultures.