Heat (13 page)

I am not a savage. My drill slips out of the notched base. Both base and drill land in snow. I try again. After five minutes, I see no smoke. I touch the tip of my drill and feel no heat. I touch the notch in my base and feel cold wood. There are two possibilities: Rumford and Tyndall were wrong, or I am incompetent.

From my pack I take my block of magnesium and the striking plate. I shave magnesium onto the wooden base. The idea is to strike a spark into the magnesium, which will flare up suddenly with a very high temperature. With my knife, I strike sparks down into the magnesium shavings. They do not light. I strike again and again until, in one clumsy motion, I knock the base and the magnesium shavings into the snow.

From my pack I take my disposable lighter. I click it again and again. It will not light. It is time to dispose of my disposable lighter.

From my pack I take my storm-proof matches. I strike one and touch it to my birch bark tinder. The match burns out before the bark ignites. I try again. And again. I burn through seven matches before the birch bark lights. And from there, I build a small fire of birch sticks. On top of the fire I place my drill and bow, and then the notched pine base and the notched pine handle. I step into my skis and dispose of my lighter in the flames. A few seconds later, the fire burns through the lighter’s plastic casing, and with a disappointing soft pop, the flames consume what little is left of the lighter’s butane.

I watch as my little fire pumps carbon into a warming atmosphere, and when the fire dies, I pick up the remains of my lighter, spread the fire’s ashes in the snow, and ski away, down the valley, back toward the tree line, happy that no one was watching as I proved myself less artful than a savage, less adept than
Homo erectus,
and dumber than
Homo neanderthalensis.

If the world were populated only by people like me, we would still be living in trees and eating raw fruit. Climate change would not be an issue.

It is possible to buy, for under one hundred dollars, a mint condition book of matches from World War II with a cover that says, “Strike ’Em Dead; Remember Pearl Harbor.” Each match is printed with the figure of a Japanese soldier. When lit, the tiny soldiers burn from the head down. At today’s prices, it would cost several dollars to start a fire with a vintage Strike ’Em Dead match.

The modern match had many predecessors. One predecessor, called the “promethean,” was patented in 1828. It was a glass bulb filled with sulfuric acid. The bulb was wrapped in paper coated with potassium chlorate. Users could crush the bulb between their teeth to ignite the match.

At about the same time, the combination of sulfur and phosphorus was commercialized by an English pharmacist named John Walkers. He sold yard-long “sulphuretted peroxide strikables.” Aside from their inconvenient size, strikables had an undesirable tendency to self-ignite. By 1832, smaller versions were available, but the self-ignition problem remained. There were issues, too, with the manufacturing process. Women working in factories suffered from “phosphorus disease” or “phossy jaw.” The handling of white phosphorous turned the sides of their faces green. Their jaws wasted away and exuded pus. Their bones reportedly glowed with an eerie green light. Tissue necrosis brought fever and eventual death.

Twenty years later, red phosphorus replaced white phosphorus, and the invention of the safety match ended the problem of self-ignition. The match head contained half the formula, and a striker plate contained the rest.

In 1889, the pipe-smoking lawyer Joshua Pusey made paper matches and called them “flexibles.” A few years later, the Mendelson Opera Company advertised on the covers of books of flexibles: “A cyclone of fun—powerful cast—pretty girls—handsome wardrobe—get seats early.” Cast members may have printed the advertisements by hand. This led to the Strike ’Em Dead match and, in the European theater of war, a book of matches printed with instructions for derailing German trains. Matchbooks advertising restaurants and bars and hotels were inevitable, as was the birth of the American Matchcover Collecting Club and the opening of the Match Museum, self-proclaimed as the world’s only match museum, in Sweden. It was merely a matter of time before someone used matchbooks to promote cancer prevention and discourage smoking. The matches inside these matchbooks, like my bow and drill, do not light.

I telephone the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education. I ask the instructor what sort of wood is used on fire walks. “Cedar,” he says. “Always cedar.” Cedar crackles. It has a pleasant smell. Cedar is the obvious wood of choice for firewalking.

A typical fire walk burns about a quarter cord of cedar. A neatly stacked cord measures four feet high by four feet wide by eight feet long. A cord of cedar might contain twenty trees, or it might be a single tree, or only part of a single tree. The number of trees per cord depends wholly on the size of the trees. To walk on fire might be to walk across five burning cedar trees, or one, or only part of one.

A cord of dry cedar, burned, releases roughly the same amount of heat as 164 gallons of gasoline, burned. Burning a quarter cord of dry cedar would be comparable to burning forty-one gallons of gasoline. But gasoline burns far faster than wood. Gasoline releases its heat in a few almost explosive moments. To firewalk through forty-one gallons of gasoline would be to exceed the boundaries of prudence.

“It is important,” the instructor tells me, “for firewalkers to ignite the fire, or at least to see it lit. They need to understand that this is real fire. These are real flames and real coals.”

The cedar fire is struck with a lighter of the sort sometimes used to light a backyard barbecue. Kerosene might be used as an accelerant. “Never gasoline,” he says. He is adamant. “Never, ever, gasoline.”

Another safety tip: never cook marshmallows over a firewalking fire. Walking across hot coals is one thing, but molten sugar adhered to the feet is another.

Rain falls in the Anchorage suburbs. As I often do, I build a fire in my woodstove. My source of ignition is a novelty lighter in the shape of a double-barreled shotgun. Flame shoots from both barrels. A single wad of the
Anchorage Daily News
burns. The news ignites finely split and dried birch. The kindling ignites sticks of fuelwood, sixteen-inch lengths, mostly birch, with the occasional stick of poplar. One of the few failings of Alaska is the paucity of good firewood. We have no forests of ash, or oak, or hickory. On the other hand, we do not have to suffer through the ineptitude of sequoia or fig.

The fire forces water from the wood. A living tree is perhaps 50 percent water. Seasoned firewood holds about 20 percent water. Water does not burn. The separation of water molecules, the conversion of liquid to vapor, requires energy. It steals the heat from my stove. Wood steams in the young fire, the fire just after ignition, the fire that exists while the newspaper still burns.

The fire takes hold, its heat forcing cellulose molecules to dance. Pure cellulose is odorless, tasteless, and white. Cotton is nine-tenths cellulose. Reasonably dry wood is about half cellulose. Cellulose is six parts carbon, ten parts hydrogen, and five parts oxygen, the various parts forming rings, the rings themselves joined together one after another after another. A single cellulose molecule with a thousand rings joined together in one long chain would be at home in the cell wall of a tree.

The chains are tough. To burn, they need to be heated to the point of dancing. With heat, they fox-trot, they gyrate, they twirl, they cha-cha-cha, they twist. They do the Lindy Hop, the lock, the pop, the toprock, and the downrock. They dance with such vigor that they occasionally shed parts. They break. A carbon snaps off. In the updraft, in the convection storm rushing toward the chimney, two oxygens intercept the carbon, and the three parts join to become carbon dioxide. This is barroom dancing, where changing partners is part of the routine, where dancers may be alone or in pairs or in groups of four or five or a dozen. A hydrogen snaps off, and another, and two more, and the four hydrogens join a carbon to become methane. The methane finds more oxygen and reinvents itself as water and carbon dioxide. In the flames, another methane forms, picks up more partners, and becomes propane and then butane and octane, short-lived but lively. The dance floor rocks, crowded and chaotic.

My woodstove, in burning wood, makes and burns ethane and propane and butane and even pentane and heptane and octane, all of it coming and going, the net result a rising tempo, one dancer spurring on the next, all yielding heat.

The flame’s appearance is as it is, in part, because of glowing particles of carbon, of carbon heated to incandescence. The temperature affects the color. But the flame’s appearance is as it is in part because of impurities in the wood. Sodium shines yellow. Potassium shines purple. Copper shines green.

The fire pops. Pockets of steam or hydrogen or methane or pentane explode through the wood. Explosions send up sparks.

Ash accumulates in the bottom of my stove. Ash is sodium, copper, sulfur, silicon, and potassium. Good wood burned in a good fire yields little ash. A quarter cord of cedar weighs seven hundred pounds as wood but only four pounds as ash. The lesson: if you have to haul firewood, burn it first.

In my woodstove, I have created a firestorm. If I crack open the door, air rushes in. The fire flares. Flames move sideways and to the back of the firebox and up. But flames move downward too, extending three inches beneath a burning stick of birch before curling and heading upward, toward the chimney. The fire in the woodstove creates its own weather. That weather is not pleasant. In miniature, the wind coming through the cracked woodstove door is a Santa Ana, a sundowner, a wind ripping into an accumulation of fuel.

My stove is of the type that is sometimes called a Franklin stove. Ben Franklin would not recognize it as such. In a self-published pamphlet, he described his stove in 1744. He was motivated by heat rather than profit, by his sense of duty to society, by frugality. The fire, in the standard fireplace of Franklin’s time, sucked warm air from the room, heated it, and sent it up the chimney. “The upright heat,” Franklin wrote of a standard fireplace, “flies directly up the Chimny. Thus Five Sixths at least of the Heat (and consequently of the Fewel) is wasted, and contributes nothing towards warming the Room.”

The warm air from the room was replaced by cold air from outside that leaked in through every door and window and crack and crevice. The cold drafts, Franklin believed, caused illness. “Women particularly,” he wrote, “from this Cause, (as they sit much in the House) get Colds in the Head.” He could not abide wasted wood and sick women, so he built a better stove. His stove looked in some ways like the modern woodstove, a metal box in which wood burns, but Franklin’s stove was open on the front and contained baffles that circulated heat and smoke before sending it up the chimney. Franklin’s stove, by modern standards, was clumsy and less efficient than the modern woodstove, but it offered twice the heat of a fireplace and used less wood.

Franklin’s detractors claimed that iron stoves smelled. Franklin blamed the smell on spitting. “To spit upon them to try how hot they are,” he wrote, “is an inconsiderate, filthy unmannerly Custom; for the slimy Matter of Spittle drying on, burns and fumes when the stove is hot.”