Fire Feast Day

We originally planned a Fire Feast Day for Bella and Gavin’s birthday back in February, but… that day didn’t go exactly as planned. I’ll save that story for another time. A month later, we still wanted to smash that piñata Terran made, and try again to bake a cake on the fire.

After morning science tasks and sit-spots, I gave a short lecture on fire. The fire triangle, impact of moisture and humidity, importance of dry and various sizes of fuel, use of fatwood, cattail duff, and cedar bark, etc. Then we headed to the village with a wheelbarrow load and then some to make fire.

I surveyed the BCEs a while back on what they most wanted to learn, wilderness skills wise, and fire scored high with everyone. One barrier to the development of this skill that I’ve recognized is that, on a day we’re having a fire (usually cold and wet), as soon as the first person gets a featherstick lit, everyone else stops trying. This day was not cold or wet, and the main activity of the day was for everyone to put in the work to get their own fire going. Given many chances to do it their way, I asked them all to do it my way this time.

One clear problem in the process is that no one wants to put in the work to gather enough kindling to sustain the early phases of fire development. I created demo bundles in four sizes: fines, smaller than a pencil, larger than a pencil, and big thumb. The task was to gather these quantities of each of these from dead branches NOT lying on the forest floor. They each got a piece of fatwood to featherstick, and some cattail and cedar if they wanted it.

Ru finished his firewood stash quickly and, unsurprisingly, had a small fire going first. After that, he was in charge of transferring to the fire pit and feeding the big fire until we had coals to cook on. Everyone else was expected to keep working. I appreciated that once his hands were free, he started helping those who were struggling. For a time, I wasn’t able to keep up with the requests for assistance.

Bella had set up a fire zone for herself away from everyone else, and put her full focus into the task. Not long after Ru, she got a fire going, too! This was very exciting because it was her first success with a ferrorod using wet-forest gathered wood. Not an easy thing to do!

Amazingly, while many were beginning to fade under the effort of fire-making, she went back and did the entire task, from start to finish, a second time. I’ve never seen a student do that before! What a great way to help cement a new skill: practice again while it’s still fresh.

Rheah got a fire going next. Not her first fire, but she worked for it.

By then, the cooking fire was well established, so she opted to transfer her little fire to the in-ground fire ring. Carrying fire is a skill in itself.

Everyone put in a good effort at fire-making, and I think (hope) that even those who didn’t succeed learned a few things and got one step closer.

By then, we were all hungry, and it was time to cook lunch. I made vegetable foil packs, Gavin brought sausages, and Simon made his famous bread dough that we cook on the back of a shovel and coat in honey butter.

Next was assembling the pineapple upside-down cake provided by Terran and Bella.

And making our best guess at the right amount and location of coals. Last time we covered the whole dutch oven. This time, we didn’t.

Ru was cooking one last dough ball. Did he put cheese inside it? Maybe a piece of broccoli? What’s inside that dough ball?

Ah! Of course. It was a gummy bear. Better call Metropol and let them know we invented a new type of bread.

It wasn’t easy to find a branch to hang the piñata from. Rheah climbed up the best available option.

It takes teamwork…

… to celebrate properly.

Although the hardiness and appearance of Terran’s famous piñata did not disappoint, there was a bit of an issue with the contents. Mostiure got inside and made the candy sticky. Still, there were lots of tasty treats that were collected and divided up evenly by a justice-minded committee.