Campfire Girl

Well, here we are on day four after the big, Seattle windstorm and parts of the city, including my neighborhood, are still without power. It has been an inconvenience, but not a hardship. My husband and I are fortunate to have a fireplace and a gas-powered water heater. Although there have been invitations from friends to stay with them in heated and lit homes with operative stoves, refrigerators, stereos and DVD players, we have declined. We keep believing that it just CAN’T go on much more than a few hours. We live in the city, for heaven’s sake. But… what do we know? (There are also the pets to consider, and the cat does not cotton to slumber parties away from home.)

Nonetheless, we keep waking up to yet another cold morning. And with flashbacks to episodes of “Little House on the Prairie,” we stoke the fire, pop an enameled coffee pot in the flames, and make our morning coffee by hand. It’s amazing how much energy it takes to keep a room warm with a fireplace in cold weather: gathering and hauling wood, setting/starting the fire, keeping it stoked, gathering and hauling more wood. In some ways the cold temperatures that followed the storm (below freezing at night and not above 40 during the day) are a blessing as all our food is in coolers outside. A lot would have been wasted otherwise. However, keeping ourselves and the animals above freezing has been a continuous task in the mornings and evenings.

Performing this daily ritual has me thinking back to my days as a Campfire Girl. Growing up in Cascadia at the time I did, Campfire seemed a much more relevant girls’ club than Girl Scouts. Campfire was largely focused on outdoor and survival skills. Being outside and in nature as much as I was as a kid, it was truly useful to understand how to use a compass and read a map, to identify plants (what to not touch or nibble), what to pack even if you were going out for a little day hike (whistle, 1st aid kit, jackknife, extra food and water, matches, etc), and how to build a fire, particularly in wet and cold conditions. Terms such as “tinder” and “kindling” have come floating back, as have recollections of how to set a fire the right way so it will start easily without over-fueling it (which is wasteful as well as potentially dangerous in the woods), and how to improvise a cook stove over and around the flames.

Granted, given that I AM a city-girl now and that most of Seattle is back on the grid, we have used our outage as a likely excuse to dine out each night. Another bright-shiny silver lining to our predicament. I am hoping, however, that we won’t be out again tonight. And, with all due respect to my old camp counselors and Laura Ingalls-Wilder, we won’t forgo dining out to bake chicken in tin foil in the embers. I would like my lights back please. I prefer my camping in small doses.