You may have difficulty in lighting your fire in the damp, but it can be got going even in the wettest weather, granted, of course, that there is suitable fuel. The secret is to possess plenty of paper. You prepare a number of balls of paper and put them in a dry place until you have collected fuel. Your fuel will be first of all withered stems of weeds and bits of perfectly dead wood. If there are trees about look for dead branches in them. A dead branch in a tree is always drier and more combustible than a dead branch in the grass. The wet on it will prove to be surface damp, easily dried off. Be careful to avoid a very wet base for your fire. A rocky ledge or heap of stones is better. Having that, then even in drenching rain you may start your fire, carefully sheltering it with waterproof cape or blanket, while with the burning paper balls you dry and inflame the withered weeds and dead wood. Very soon you will have a flaming fire which has the heat in itself to dry its own fuel, even if it be both substantial and very wet. Get a big fire going, and you can defy the elements. Should you be traveling in the vicinity of a railway line you will often find many bits of coal scattered from locomotives. These are not to be disdained on a rainy day, as they greatly add to the heat at the bottom of your furnace. You fight the wet with heat rather than with flame. It is a pleasant triumph on a rainy day to watch your pot boil on a gay fire, and to feel the clothes on your back a-drying all the while.
The fire in the rain is a triumph; the night fire in darkness under the stars is the happiest, but it disputes happiness with the dawn fire. Remember that on the black patch of your evening fire you will rebuild the bonfire next morning after your night à la belle étoile. It is commonly more easy to light the fire in the morning. There may be dew, but you have a dry patch to build on. If you have had forethought you have covered both the place and some dry fuel to make easy your morning task. You are less tired, less excited, in the morning, and you know just where to look for the auxiliary fuel, the stuff that makes the first little fire burn up well.
I love to see the blue smokes crawling upward in the dawn, while, with bare legs, one struts about doing the domestic work of morning out of doors. It is part of the very poetry of the tramping life. You give a proper affirmative then to Browning’s
Morning’s at seven
All’s right with the world.
Only morning is apt to be at five, and then the world is even more all right than at the bourgeois hour of seven.
The good tramp does not spend too long, however, by his morning fire. It is his best time for being on the move. All Nature’s loveliness awaits him as, with gossamer in his hair, and light burden on heart and shoulder, he fares forth for the day. He makes his coffee, and then carefully puts out the fire, so as to be sure not to start some conflagration on the waste or in the forest. And he goes onward toward midday, and that other fire which is midday between the other two. Then he seeks a shady place, a happy resting spot, viewing the mountains, or beside a stream for preference. And once more, God’s open-air kitchen is smoking.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BED