Playing With Fire

When I was growing up, everybody knew how to deal with fire. There were no worries about climate change due to CO2 and smoke in the air was just a fact of life which nobody thought anything about. Everybody burned garbage out back, construction scraps went up in flames, and many people still cooked with wood. Dad bought a partially finished house around 1956 that had a huge pile of roots and branches from the virgin forest that had been cleared for the house. For a couple of years he hacked and burned that pile of wood so there was always a fire outside the kitchen window.

I remember being disappointed, when we moved up to the end of Austin Road, that we didn't have a wood burning stove so I could have chopped kindling like the Treger boys had to. We used stove oil. It came directly into the kitchen stove from the 45 gallon drum on a stand outside the kitchen. We also had a stove oil fired space heater in the living room to which I had to carry stove oil in a container. The outside drum had a tap at the other end from the kitchen line from which to fill a gallon container. I think that it is from those days that I got my liking for the smell of diesel - stove oil just being a little more refined.

The appliances that burned stove oil had a regulator near the bottom that had a dial from 1 to 6 or 8 that determined the amount of oil that came to the burner. You had to be  timely with your match too because if you allowed too much oil in, it was hard to light. Then you had to light a piece of newspaper to get the oil to light. Fishing boats still have diesel fueled stoves that work the same way. Lifting the lids would give a puff of exhaust. Perfume.

So growing up, most of us kids knew how to deal with fire. We could get a fire going in the dampest of forests. Sandwiches toasted over an open fire in some ravine, while fishing for little trout, still stirs my memories. We also learned how to start fires with fuels. It was easy, when you knew how, to toss gas onto a reluctant fire from an open can and avoid the WOOOF. In those days, people thought nothing of inserting an old tire into a pile of stumps and then using gas or diesel to get it going. A burning tire was sure to keep that fire going and the black smoke would be like a magnet for the local kids.

Most homes had a burning barrel out back and it was a kid's job to take the combustibles out and get them burning. That's another childhood smell memory, when paper started to burn, and sometimes the popcorn smell of singed hair. And you couldn't just light it and leave it. There was usually a stout stick involved that was used to poke at the fire to keep everything burning. Most construction sites had a fire burning and all the wood cutoffs went there. Nothing that could be burned was hauled to the landfill. Grass along ditches and in unused fields was also burned. The spring air was often filled by the smoke from burning grass. This was usually done responsibly and a hose was handy, or a kid with a rake or shovel, to keep the grass from burning where it shouldn't, like up a fence post.

Now, everything goes to the landfill. Smoke is obnoxious to some and there are regulations in most jurisdictions about burning. Paper products get recycled and so they should, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to burn your garden prunings instead of lugging them to the landfill? It doesn't make any change to the amount of CO2 let into the atmosphere whether natural products decompose in the ground or burn. Exactly the same amount eventually goes into the atmosphere, burning is just faster. And more fun.