The Campfire as a Technology

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Eleven. A few summers ago I was camped with two guys I’d met that same afternoon. Dispersed site, forest service road, the kind of place where you end up sharing a clearing with strangers because there’s only one flat spot and everybody wants it. We were polite about it at first. Nods, a little small talk, everybody keeping to their own patch of dirt. And then somebody got a fire going, and offered to share it because building a second one right next to it would’ve been strange, and within about an hour the three of us were sitting around it talking like we’d known each other for years.

One of them told a story about his father that I don’t think he’d told many people. I know I said things I don’t usually say to strangers. And in the morning we packed up and drove off in three directions and I never saw either of them again. But I’ve thought about that night a lot. Not because anything happened. Because of what the fire did.

That’s what I want to talk about today. So. I’m Henry Wilder. Last episode I talked about catch and release, and about learning to be somewhere completely without needing to take a piece of it home. Today I want to talk about the opposite kind of moment. Not being alone with the water, but sitting with other people around a fire.

Because I’ve started to think a campfire is a piece of technology. An old one. Maybe the oldest one we’ve got. And I think we’ve mostly walked away from it without noticing what we gave up. Here’s the thing about that. We don’t usually call a fire technology.

We call it primitive, which is sort of the opposite. But think about what technology is actually supposed to do. It’s supposed to solve a problem, and change how people behave, and hold enough value that we keep coming back to it. By that definition a fire clears the bar easily. It solves warmth, and light, and cooking, which are not small problems if you’re outside when the sun goes down. But it also does something else, something we don’t give it credit for, and that’s the part I want to get at.

A campfire is the only technology I know of that makes people put their phones down without being asked. Nobody announces it. Nobody says, all right, let’s all be present now. The fire just does it. You sit down in front of one, and after a few minutes your phone ends up in your pocket, or face down on a log, or back in the tent, and it stays there. And I’ve watched this happen to people who cannot put their phones down anywhere else.

People who check it at red lights, at dinner, in the middle of a sentence. You put them in front of a fire and something in them settles. I’ve thought about why, and I think it comes down to what a fire asks of you. Most of our screens are built to demand nothing and give you everything. You don’t have to tend them. They tend you.

A fire is the reverse. A fire gives you plenty, but only if you keep up your end, and your end is constant. You have to feed it. You have to watch it. You have to notice when it’s getting low and get up and do something about it, and you have to have thought ahead enough to have wood within reach, split small enough to catch. If you ignore a fire, it dies.

It doesn’t nag you or send a notification. It just quietly goes out, and then you’re sitting in the cold and the dark, and that’s the whole feedback system. So a fire keeps you a little bit occupied the entire time. Not busy. Occupied. There’s a difference, and it turns out to be an important one.

Your hands have a small job. Your eyes have a place to rest. There’s a low, steady task running in the background that never quite lets you check out completely. And that, it turns out, is the exact condition under which people actually talk to each other. I’ve noticed this over and over. The best conversations don’t happen when two people sit down across a table and face each other directly and say, let’s talk.

That’s too much. Direct attention is a lot of pressure. You feel watched, you get self-conscious, you perform a little. The best conversations happen sideways. They happen when both people are pointed at some third thing, and the talk sort of leaks out around the edges of it. A long drive does this.

Washing dishes with somebody does this. And a fire does it better than almost anything, because everybody’s looking at the same thing, and it’s moving, and it’s warm, and nobody has to hold eye contact, and the silences don’t feel like failures because there’s something to look at during them. That last part is the key, I think. Around a fire, a silence isn’t awkward. It’s just a pause. Everybody’s watching the flames, so nobody feels the pressure to fill the gap, and because nobody’s rushing to fill it, the gaps get longer, and the longer gaps are where the real things finally come out.

You can’t force a person to say the true thing. You can only make a space quiet and unhurried enough that they decide to. A fire makes that space almost automatically. I want to be careful not to romanticize this, because you know I don’t like doing that. Not every fire produces some meaningful conversation. Plenty of nights around a fire are just fine.

Somebody tells a story you’ve heard, the wood’s a little wet, you go to bed early. I’m not telling you a fire is magic any more than I told you boredom was magic a few episodes back. I’m telling you it creates a condition, and the condition is rare, and it’s getting rarer, and I think it’s worth understanding what the condition is so you can recognize it when you’re in it. The condition is this. Several people, in one place, with nowhere else to be, all pointed at the same slow thing, for a long enough time that they stop performing. That used to be normal.

For most of human history that was just what nighttime was. The sun went down, and there was no way to keep working and no screen to look at, so people gathered around the one source of light and heat and stayed there until they were tired. Every night. For a very long time. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say a lot of what makes us human got worked out in exactly that setting. Stories got told there.

Plans got made there. People figured out who they were to each other there, in the dark, around a fire, with nowhere else to go. We solved the problems that fire used to solve. We have heat now, at the turn of a dial. We have light, all night, as much as we want. We have entertainment that never runs out and never asks us to feed it.

And so we don’t need the fire anymore, and mostly we don’t build one, and I understand why. But I think when we retired the fire, we quietly retired the thing that came with it. The gathering. The sitting still together. The long, sideways, unhurried talk that only happens when a group of people is stuck in one warm circle in the dark with nothing pulling them away. We didn’t decide to give that up.

We just stopped building the thing that produced it. I notice it most with people I already know well. I’ve got friends I’ve been close to for years, and we can go a long time seeing each other in the normal way, dinner, a beer, a quick catch-up, without ever really getting past the surface. We trade updates. We report the news of our lives. And then once in a while we end up around a fire somewhere, and three hours in, one of us says the thing that’s actually going on.

The real thing. The thing the dinners never quite got to. And I always think, there it is. That’s what the fire is for. It’s not that these people can’t talk to me. It’s that ordinary life doesn’t build the conditions, and the fire does, and I could probably count on one hand the number of genuinely important conversations I’ve had in the last five years that didn’t happen in front of one.

I’ll give you a specific one, because I’ve been vague and I’d rather be specific. A couple of years ago a good friend of mine was going through the end of his marriage. I knew it was happening. We’d talked about it the normal way, the way you do, a few sentences over a beer, him saying it was fine and me knowing it wasn’t and not pushing. Then he came out to meet me for a few days on the road, and the first two nights were surface, same as always. The third night we had a fire going late, both of us tired, both of us out of small talk.

And somewhere in there, watching the coals, not looking at me, he finally told me the actual truth of it. What it was really like. What he was actually afraid of. I didn’t do anything. I put another piece of wood on and let him talk. That’s all the fire asks of you, and it’s all it asks of the other person, and it turns out to be exactly enough.

I’ll tell you the other thing a fire teaches, and it’s smaller but I keep coming back to it. A fire is patient work with a slow payoff, which longtime listeners know is basically my entire personality at this point. You don’t get a good fire fast. You get a good fire by starting small, and being willing to nurse a few twigs and a lot of hope for longer than feels productive, and adding wood in the right order, and not smothering it the second it looks promising, which is the classic mistake. Everybody who’s bad at fires is bad at them in the same way. They rush it.

They pile too much on too soon because they want the big fire now, and they choke the little flame that would’ve gotten them there. A fire will not be hurried, same as a river. You learn to build one the way you learn everything outside. By doing it wrong enough times to develop some patience about it. And then one night you get it going clean on the first try, in the wind, with damp wood, and nobody’s there to see it, and you feel quietly good about yourself for about a minute. That’s most of the reward.

That’s plenty. There’s more a fire gives you than conversation, and I don’t want to shortchange the rest of it. It cooks. And I mean it actually cooks, not just heats up a can of beans, though there’s nothing wrong with a can of beans. I take cooking over a fire more seriously than is strictly reasonable. Cast iron, a Dutch oven, coals raked off to one side so I’ve got a low steady heat to work over instead of open flame.

You can make real food out there if you’re willing to slow down for it. And the fire makes you slow down for it, which is the whole point. You can’t crank a fire to high the way you crank a stove burner. You get the heat the fire decides to give you, and you cook at that speed, and the food comes out better for it, or at least I’ve talked myself into believing it does. And then there’s the coffee. I have opinions about campfire coffee that I’ve learned to keep mostly to myself, because they make me insufferable at precisely the hour when everyone else is just trying to wake up.

I’ll say only this. It’s worth doing right, it takes longer than you want it to, and the cup you make badly in a hurry is not the same cup you make slowly while the fire comes up and the light works its way into the trees. Same beans. Different morning. That’s the fire again, teaching the one lesson it always teaches, which is that the slow version of a thing is usually the good version. So here’s what I’d leave you with.

If there’s someone in your life you’ve been meaning to actually talk to, and it keeps not happening, and every time you get together it stays on the surface. Build a fire. Doesn’t have to be in the backcountry. A backyard works. A fire pit on a patio works. Get the two of you pointed at the same set of flames with nowhere to be and no screen between you, and then just tend it, and wait, and don’t rush the silences.

I’d put money on where the conversation ends up. Because every good conversation I can remember from the last five years happened around a fire. That’s probably not a coincidence. Next time I want to try to answer the question I set out with at the start of all this, which is what the outdoors has actually taught me. I’ve been putting that one off, because it’s a harder thing to say than it sounds. Not the skills.

Those are fine. The other stuff. I’m Henry Wilder. This has been Miles of Quiet. Build one this week, and don’t put your phone anywhere near it. See who starts talking.