I had a BBQ going one time and one of my friends was going through a rough patch and didn’t really feel very sociable but would disappear into the woods, come back with a log, chop it into firewood and then poke the fire a bit while adding fuel.
He didn’t say much that day and spent at least 12 hours just tending the fire and one of my friends who didn’t know him said “Man theres always gotta be the fire guy”
It’s like yea… Before we had much technology we had the fire and if we were fortunate enough we had a guy who really liked doing that. People have probably been saying something like this for a million years.
I was at a hotel up in the Alps in France that had a fire going and the staff put absolutely no effort into it so it sat there smoldering on life support. So I took a log and rearranged things boyscout style and kept that sucker going till it was too hot to get near. Everyone gave me the weirdest looks like I was some crazy American. Like nah dude, gotta keep the fire going, it’s the best part.
I cannot abide a smoky fire. I usually try not to cut another man’s balls, but smoky stinking fires are one thing I would only tolerated so much of.
Man I fuck wit fire. Well, used to; my old, crippled ass can’t fuck wit much any more.
Point is that being the fire tender isn’t exactly a no skill job, and it comes with some serious benefits.
You gotta have at least a basic understanding of how fire works if you want to keep it going, and learn how to keep it controlled. That’s why fucks-wit-fire is such a coveted, but demanding, position. See, you gotta keep an eyeball on it. Stacking in fresh fuel in the right way. Keeping adequate air flow. Moving unburned fuel into the center. It’s a dance.
And for that effort, you not only get the delightful scent of wood smoke in your beard, and the glow of warmth across your flesh, you get to see the ever shifting beauty of the fire and the embers. A constant flux of colors and lights that seems alive. I’d hypnotic, meditative, and can be a spiritual experience if one leans that way.
Ash, drifting on breeze settles into your hair as sleep looms and you bank the fire, setting things up for the chilly morning to come, you look down at your friend glowing beneath ashes that only reluctantly settle in for the night.
You go to your rest warm, fulfilled, and at peace.
Do you write?
Here and there, yeah.
Mate i like your romantic narration and all but I have to break it to you, that delightful scent of wood smoke in your beard is actually a stink. That campfire smell gets everywhere and sometimes you have to wash your clothes twice just to get that stank out. Its still fun though.
I dunno, back in my younger days camping with my family I was always up in the smoke and my clothes were fine. Had long hair, and it was never a bad smell. As I got older and did have a beard, I can’t recall it ever smelling unpleasant the next day, and I’m known for catching even faint smells after years of taking care of patients where faint smells can be a sign of something important.
Maybe it depends on the wood? I know a pure deadfall fire can be stronger smelling, and you can get some strange odors indeed if you buy firewood that’s been sitting, though I can’t think of any that stank.
Ok well it might not be a terrible smell, but it is strong and stronger than I think a lot of people that have been around a fire realise. Perhaps because of o bit of nose blindness that you can get from sitting around that for too long but it can be a bit of a shock to someone coming from outside. At one point I lived for a bit at the edge of civilisation and Roma people would sometimes come around selling their wares on market day - and I’m talking the tent and horses type here. I tell you, I could have my back turned and I could smell them approaching from several steps away.
One fire guy is ok. Two fire guys is a disaster.
If you have two fire guys, one fire and one girl, you better bring the guitar before you join them. You don’t even need to play it, it just has to be there to pacify the fire guys.
I’m the fire wingman. I will not touch the fire if someone else wants to manage it.
ah yes, one fire and one girl
It’s an opportunity to play with fire and do something positive. Why wouldn’t I be that guy?
spoiler
I don’t feel called out at all
Don’t worry guy, we appreciate you
Thanks
I’m not that guy but I’m the other that guy
You that onion tho
*gently sizzles in butter*
I too, am of the order of fire watchers. May the flame keep you warm.
and protect the campsite LMBO
Last time I went out on a trip with the extended family (we’re roughly 20 people, give or take), it was in a rented big structure with a sleeping area, a dining area, and a kitchen, and a yard outside with a place to make a fire. We started a fire, but come dinner time they all wanted to leave the fire going and eat at the table.
I absolutely refused. No way in the world in leaving a fire unattended like that. I said we either stop the fire altogether (and restart it later), or I’ll stay watching it until someone comes to replace me.
In the end I took a plate of food and ate it by the fire alone, until someone indeed came to replace me and I went to finish the meal at the table. It turned out fine, but it really annoyed me how no one in my family saw sense. They kept trying to convince me to just come and eat dinner… as if the social togetherness somehow makes the risk of starting a forest fire unimportant?! There’s some smart people in my family, but some days I don’t understand how they can all be so blind to the obvious reality.
Personally it sounds like bliss eating a good meal alone by the fire.
I generally try to avoid “this” style comments but, almost word for word, this is what I was here to say.
Sure, it was alright, but I do love my family too ❤️
Lucky you.
Boy Scouts taught me the rule that if you are leaving and you had a fire, that it needs to be put out to the extent that you’d willingly stick your hand into the middle.
Scared it might be hot? Put it out more.
What if you put it out using all the left over hot water you made over the fire? Its going to be hot even though it is currently underwater!
Checkmate atheists
I don’t want to stick my hand in the lukewarm piss-mud. How long do I keep going?
That’s just making sure you did it right the first time
Why would anyone make a fire, and then make food that can’t be eaten at the fire?
Every time I go camping I think about all the knowledge we have lost now that this is further and further from our every day experiences and even just being a less common recreational activity.
I recently learned that the outdoor recreation curriculum was being cut from the school board I attended 30 years ago and that’s a big loss. I lived in a big city with > 50% of the population being born elsewhere and programs like these are sometimes the first opportunities these kids get to learn outdoor skills relevant to their new home.
That’s me. Just not white? Is being white a mandate for this role?
Traditionally, yes, but it’s not obligatory. Fire does not consider the color of flesh, nor the gender of it’s attendant.
No. Hearth fire tenders are needed where they are needed.
What’s with the trend of mentioning that people are white and connecting it with things they do? I also see live streamers do this a lot (including in reference to themselves) and it’s strange to me
Always some white guy in the comments going on about how white people doing white people things is not something worth mentioning.
I don’t think it’s outrage bait because again, often the context is someone talking about themselves, and no arguments are started. But this didn’t used to be a thing, so what changed?
@andrewrgross@slrpnk.net It’s definitely an American thing. Whites in America are called whites because we’ve disgustingly erased our previous cultural heritages throughout the generations. Colonial governments prefer homogeneity so they tell everyone “you’re not who you were before. You’re American.” Non-whites in the US have noticed this about us as well and in a shitty way they get punished for retaining their cultural heritages.
So in the internet age we joke about this lack of defined cultural tradition and make observational humor about filling that missing part of ourselves with odd things. Like being averse to spicy food (we’re not) or owning dogs with human names instead of having children (a thing poor couples of any race do).
This one was obviously a stretch, anyone can get fixated on the fire. I couldn’t tell you factually but I think camping is a more stereotypically white thing in the US so when you see a white guy take a particular interest in something unremarkable you can make a joke like “that’s his culture. Man is in touch with his history”
Damn, I was about to comment the same, didn’t know doing so would turn my skin white.
At least they haven’t taken garlic bread and sitting in chairs weird away from bisexuals!
People desperately want to associate aesthetic acts and preferences with demographics. I assume it has something to do with cultural desires to place people in neatly ordered boxes.
By acknowledging your privilege you don’t have to do anything to change it.
Your privilege to poke a fire with a stick?
Sometimes I don’t even vaguely get the drive-by downvoters. Like… what? Did I upset the Lemmy white supremacists this time?
To be fair, I didn’t down vote.
That’s because burning shit is more interesting than talking to you idiots.
Fire is a fickle little thing that if not attended, will die immediately or get wildly out of control. It moves, breathes and eats. Every piece of fuel must be assessed for moisture, shape, size, and the potential to create smoke or embers. Fuel placement is critical, depending on the purpose of the fire, you can make it burn faster, stronger, longer, or create a good bed of coals for cooking. Fire gives warmth, and light while also containing desolation and death. It is a balancing act with dire consequences for falling off either side of a thin line of control.
Occasionally a log will pop or snap, and throw out a little spark show, and that is cool.
I think you’re vastly overstating how delicate of a balance a campfire is in, but i wholeheartedly agree that the intellectual challenge of perfecting air flow, choosing the correct placement, and all that is a wonderful way to spend time
Proto-tv
There’s also the grill master or chef character that gets to stay to the side of party cooking delicious things for people. That’s me, and my dad, and maybe it’s you.
What that does not include is the other guests being idiots or uninteresting people by default. Social anxiety is what is, but automatically thinking negatively of other people is a hole that is very hard to climb out of.
You could say the same thing about friendship but something tells me you don’t know about that one
You didn’t really campfire if you don’t smell like campfire
Not a guy. Fire, good. Burn everything.
What’s skin colour got to do with it?
Americans…
Nothing.
The black men who do this know they are the white guys of their family.
What’s skin colour got to do with it?
Idk it’s probably cultural. Most non white people in the US have very little experience with stuff like camping and bonfires(there will of course always be exceptions). So usually if you are at a fire and there’s a mixed race group hanging out, 90% of the time the guy fiddling with the fire will be white.
You’re right. It’s a known issue. It’s predominantly white people going out and enjoying nature, for multiple reasons.
Public forests offer a variety of outdoor recreation activities that enhance participants’ well-being, yet participation remains low among ethnic minorities in the United States. These groups face multiple barriers, including limited information, transportation and financial constraints, safety concerns, fear of discrimination, and wildlife-related anxieties, which are often shaped by broader structural and cultural contexts.
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s funny that anecdotes of my lived experience as a brown person gets downvotes, but you sharing an academic paper supporting my lived experience gets up votes.
Your comment didn’t read like own experience fyi, it reads like some random claim
Not that comments explicit about experiences don’t get downvoted still
I wonder if we’re primed to be less likely to interpret statements about people of colour to be personal experiences, because most of the voices we hear are white.
That’s a good idea for a psychology experiment…
That’s actually a great question. Here I was thinking I made a mistake not announcing myself as a brown man, but why do we assume all speakers are white unless otherwise specified?
I think the Americans who know most about campfires should be Native Americans. It’s not fair that white people are getting to spend more time with the land they stole.
Use of campfires should be solely informed by personal interest and cultural ties to use of fire. If there were no systemic barriers, it would be down to cultural factors.
It should be like with tacos. Tacos are cheap and easy to make, so nearly everyone can enjoy tacos. With the barriers removed, tacos are most eaten by Mexican people, because tacos are Mexican culture. That’s fair.
n a t i v e a m e r i c a n s … o. O
Couldn’t you light a fire in a garden, park or beach? Even those shitty disposable BBQs are a form of fire, though I would recommend using almost anything else if possible.
Americans make everything racially charged.
I think this post is just observing stereotypes about camping overall that are really just a reflection of the historical cultural imagination about who camping is for. It’s not really as true as we think it is, because this tendency has been present among black folks and hispanic folks, and asian folks and women and everyone else who have been camping all along, they’re just not featured in film and TV often.
We northern ethnics relied on fire probably a bit more due to colder climate, shorter days in winter.
Nothing in the modern context, but 10000 years ago. If you were a black African and your fire went out, your food might not het cooked or that predator might take a chance to grab one of the kids.
If you were a white person in northern europe, your fire going out meant that everyone froze solid overnight.
Fire was just more essential in climates that developed white skins. Socially and genetically, that has an impact on behaviour.
That shit is way too niche to have evolved at a stronger pressure than random genetic drift. If you could isolate cultural factors and analyse the genetic correlation, I bet your R^2 would be miniscule
Genetic behavioural changes is a fascinating topic and the more studies that come out on it, the faster it seems to be able to act to have an effect
Just look at how quickly agriculture changes human societies living in the right conditions to practice it.
We are talking thousands of years, not even tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands.
Given any factor that is core to survival, there seems to be a genetic impact much more quickly than previously thought. It does have its limits of course, we are not talking something with a measurable effect over 3 or 4 generations, but 30-40 generations seems to be possible in some cases.
Maybe the village fire keeper was a lot more reproductively popular that we previously thought.
I am that white guy. You’re welcome.
It makes me feel weird about people that barely start a fire, and don’t tend to it. Like I’m holding someone else’s baby. Then feeding it. Then sending it to school. It’s my baby now, but it still has your name. Ugh.
You’re the dad who stepped up.
It makes me feel weird about people that barely see babies as property, the name attached is the value not the person who didn’t ask to be born and needs help.
(To be clear I’m not saying you do this specifically, it’s more a cultural thing where people will see other people as unworthy unless their name is on it)
Look in to my eyes. I am the baby captain now.
No, I mean… Captain of the baby. Not a tiny captain the poops in a diaper.
Its our fire now
…why would I thank you for fucking with the fire going? I’d want someone who helps it keep going instead of fucking with it.
Because the post uses “fuck with” in the sense of “man I fuck with peanut butter cookies, they’re the best” vs. “I would love some but peanut butter cookies fuck with my stomach”
The meme says “one white guy who really fucks with keeping the fire going.” He’s clearly not fucking with the fire. He’s keeping it going.
we’d drag discarded railroad ties down by a creek and drink beer and smoke weed. age 14-15. got beer by asking someone in line at the drive-up liqueur store to buy it. or go inside and shoplift something. was something to do i guess. not recommended firewood because they are soaked in creosote, but burn good. drinking not recommended. i managed to quit. friend never quit and died of liver damage 30 years later. cautionary note for anyone considering same habits.
Gotta keep the air flowing up through the logs, and put fuel on the hot spots…
The person doing it is often the person who started the fire, or the one who most wants it to keep going. It is the way.
The real trial is being this guy when other people decide they’re going to start a fire and by the time you get there they’ve done it all wrong and the thing is smouldering and coughing up smoke and barely staying lit at all as they cram handfuls of pine needles and barely dry leaves into places while there’s a full-ass log precariously balanced on top of it all and they’re saying things like “Maybe we should pour a little lamp oil on top of it?”
And then you have to be the adult and take over the whole operation.
