A good fire to light up life
Winter looms and I think of Zippo Johnny. He was an employee of the Zippo Lighter factory in Pennsylvania who suffered from short-term amnesia. Every day he sat at a desk in the factory with two chutes in front of him. Down one chute came a box, down the other a Zippo lighter. Curiosity made him pick them up and he found that one fitted perfectly into the other and he felt a little surge of pleasure at the neatness of it. Then another box came down the chute and another lighter. Curiosity made him pick them up and he found that one fitted perfectly into the other . . . and so on for ever. And the point of the story is that Zippo Johnny was a happy man.
No, I don’t believe it either, and I didn’t 50 years ago when I first heard it, but that doesn’t make it untrue. There’s a partial amnesiac in all of us. Every year, for example, I forget the pleasures of winter as reliably as Johnny forgot the pleasures of packaging. And just like Johnny I have the joy of rediscovering them.
Time was when I thought nothing of winter. It meant only a change of sport and wardrobe. But today I sense it coming with a mild foreboding. The garden shrinks back into itself. The cartilage in my knees, worn thin by squash and time and wicketkeeping, begins to register the drop in temperature. And as the sun skulks behind the Port Hills for all but an hour a day I feel a vague unease.
But at the same time there come such amniotic consolations: roast meat dinners with thick arterial gravy; sleep beneath a monstrous weight of bedclothes; and above all the lighting and tending of fire.
There are as many ways to build a fire as there are Boy Scouts. Me, I’m a stuffed tunnel man. I use two logs as walls, add a sloping roof of smaller timber, then cram the tunnel with crumpled newsprint, a little kindling and a single guilty cube of firelighter. (I know, I know, it’s cheating, but I never did become a Scout, and besides I want the thing to take first time, so I don’t have to kneel again on battered cartilage.)
A single match to the newsprint – oh where shall we be when the news is only electronic? How will we light our fires, clean our windows, underlay the dog’s water bowl? – and the flame nibbles at the paper’s edge, then gathers courage, flares in brief and bright expansion, and dies away as rapidly, leaving only the thin flame of the firelighter. At this point it is tempting to reach in and poke and fiddle and feed extra paper – tempting but wrong. A fire establishes its own architecture. To meddle is perilous.
A flame erupts at the back. It snakes up and through the tunnel roof like a reaching hand. The kindling catches. More spurts of flame break out. And suddenly you know you’ve generated something that no heat pump can compete with.
For fire defines us. We are the only species to have harnessed it, and shed our fur because of it. And when we stare into the hearth we forge a link with countless generations of our ancestors, who in caves or deserts, or high upon the flanks of windy mountains, have turned their backs on a hostile world and their faces to the heat and mystery of fire. And that is why a fire is good. And that’s the joy we rediscover every winter, like Zippo Johnny, the happy innocent who never was.