Campfire in the Basement (eBook)

CAMPFIRE IN THE BASEMENT

What could possibly be wrong with my cousins and I building a campfire on our basement floor? I knew what I was doing. I was eight and had started many previous fires, just not inside the house. The snap. The crackle. Dancing red, orange, and yellow tongues of flame. The sweet smell of burning wood would be beautiful. So fun.

My father, Charly Pedersen, did eventually express serious reservations about my idea. My fire conflicted with the two big dreams Charly had for his life. He longed to have a family that he could adequately take care of. And he longed to have a home alongside some sort of body of water. Dad was busy working at his dreams when I, his youngest child, tried to burn one of them down.

I like fire. Fire has been a pivotal part of human hopes and dreams for a long, long time. I thought that a campfire in the basement would be a wonderful idea and everyone else agreed. It was Christmas Day, 1960. The house upstairs was packed with all of my aunts and uncles, the older cousins and Mom and Dad. The younger cousins and I had been shooed down into the basement so that the precious space on our house’s tiny main floor could be reserved for the grown-ups. That was okay; we kids could have a good time in the basement. First, we broke into small groups and played Sorry, Parcheesi, and Scrabble—new Christmas games. I’m sure that we played pretty nicely for quite a long time. No doubt we were called back upstairs to fill plates with some of the marvelous dinner that all of the aunts had contributed their favorite dishes towards. Then, back downstairs we went, while the adults and older kids played cards or visited upstairs. Younger kids need to get a little active sometimes, though, so at some point, we decided that it would be good to play camping. Many of us had been a part of roasting marshmallows in our respective backyards, a part of camping out under the stars in those leaky, old canvas tents. This sounded like some pretty good fun! It didn’t take very long for me to come up with the campfire idea. We had a big wood-burning furnace in our basement, and I had watched my mother and father start fires in it many times. I knew where the match holder hung nailed to a support post, and I didn’t even have to stretch that much in order to reach it. The holder was filled with those big, wooden farmer matches that everyone used in those days. The old newspapers were close at hand, and then there was a nice big wood room just full of campfire wood. All of my cousins thought it was a fine idea and gathered around to watch me work. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

I liked fire. It was my job as the youngest in our family to haul the burnable garbage down the hill to the burning barrel next to the swamp by the lake. We burned the dead grass in that swamp right after the snow melted, so that it would green up and not present a fire hazard when things dried out later in the spring. Our whole family would be out there circled around the burning area, rakes, shovels and buckets of water close at hand as we kept the fire from burning into the bordering woods. It was a great adventure. So, it turned out, was garbage burning. I would not only bring the paper bags of garbage down to the burning barrel, but I would also bring my plastic army guys, tanks and trucks. Into the burning barrel would go all of the paper and stuff like that, but I would cull out all of the cardboard milk cartons, Velveeta Cheese boxes and such other valuable items capable of being used to construct a village around the base of the burning barrel. Of course, this village needed to be protected by some of my good soldiers. And without a doubt, the enemy soldiers would soon show up and lay siege to the town. When an enemy army lays siege to a place, you know that some buildings are bound to be burned. I never discussed this with my parents. They didn’t need to be bothered. This garbage burning chore was one that I didn’t mind at all. I liked fire. I thought everyone liked fire. Smokey the Bear taught us to be careful with fire, and I always was.

That is the reason why it came as such a surprise to me when things went awry concerning our Christmas Day, camping trip. As I’ve noted, all of the other kids stood circled around the site that I’d chosen for building our special campfire. I had been particularly careful to select a spot on the concrete floor that was at least three feet from any of the flammable objects which filled our basement. Things seemed to be right to me. There was definitely, shall we say, anticipation in the air amongst all of my very impressed cousins. There was also smoke in the air. I had just gotten the newspaper sheets wadded up, stacked in a little pile and lift. Things were going well, but I hadn’t had time, yet, to start adding the kindling wood. The next thing I knew, the multitude of onlookers parted as my mother, horrified look on her face, burst through the crowd. In a flash, a bucket of water had been filled from the nearby laundry tub and my soon-to-have-been masterpiece was transformed into a sloppy pile of charred papers scattered across the floor.

My father was the next to arrive on the scene, the cousins now slinking backward more and more into the shadowed corners of the basement, seemingly having had nothing to do with the whole thing and bewildered that I would have come up with such an idea. That’s about the time that the second fire was lit in that little basement space. I well remember having my hide tanned right there on the spot. I don’t remember which was more painful, the rapid and repeated swats to my butt, or the fact that all of my cousins stood as witnesses. I do remember, though, making the personal decision to spend the rest of that Christmas Day under my bed, alone.

Fires are nice. Some sixty plus years after my Christmas Day fire, I keep a box of farmer matches in the kitchen cupboard of my own home—for starting campfires. I keep another box in my underwear drawer for times when my wife and I want to share some intimate, candlelit time together. There are matches tucked safely into my deer-hunting backpack for the campfire at the base of my deer stand. We keep matches in our car glove compartment in case we become trapped in a northern Minnesota blizzard. There were candle-lighters all over the church where I used to work. The eternal light burns all of the time. You never know when you might need a fire.

My son, John, age six, and his little friend, Gregory, started a campfire in one of the baseball dugouts at the city park. This took place in the tiny Northern Minnesota border town of Littlefork. It was a little embarrassing that the city police officer’s son was involved. What could I say? It was safe; the ground in the dugout was all dirt. What was my son thinking about as he started that fire and sat gazing into its flames? What were our cave dwelling ancestors thinking as they huddled around their prehistoric campfires? How about our Viking ancestors as they stoked their fire for the mid-summer festival? What was my own grandfather thinking as he sat gazing into the hearth of his parents’ house in Sweden on the eve of his departure to start a new life with his young family in America? What was my mother thinking as she checked to be sure that the flame was doing its work beneath the pot of boiling potatoes that she was preparing for our Christmas day feast? What was she thinking when she spotted my basement campfire?

I suppose I could mention the fact I almost burned down the first home my wife and I lived in after I finished graduate school. I was just trying to be environmentally conscious and frugal as I acted to recycle some used barbecue briquettes. After my wife finished grilling our burgers, I used tongs to pick the half-burned coals out of the grill. I conscientiously dropped each piece into a coffee can full of water to douse them. Then I used tongs to take them back out again, setting them on a piece of cardboard that rested on our second-floor wooden deck. There they would be able to dry out before our next use. I guess that I hurried too much while thinking about eating a warm burger. Somehow the deck on that rental house caught on fire. It didn’t burn very long before we smelled smoke and easily extinguished the flames. My dad visited us the following week and was able to easily replace the deck boards with some weathered wood purchased from the local lumber yard. Nobody else even knew that it happened. I later joined the volunteer fire department in that same town.

There were a few chimney fires over the years too. And my son did start another small fire in one of the window wells in the home where we presently live. However, most of these events, as I see it now, were of no real consequence in the larger scope of things.

I’ve never built another fire on a basement floor. I no longer build and burn cardboard villages. But I do have a very beautiful, steel fire ring, centered on a burning pad constructed of patio blocks. That fire ring sits just on the edge of the little lake where my wife and I now make our home. The ring has moose and spruce punched out in an alternating fashion around its circumference. When the sky is dark, when the moon slips above the horizon, when you can see the flames rise and fall behind those moose and spruce, then you can literally be transported back to a far distant time when people hunted those moose with wood and stone weapons. With the stars dancing above and the fire crackling before you, it is almost possible, as you gaze into those flames, to see clearly all the way back to the time when God first brought order out of the creation’s...