Waiting for the Whoosh

Forty degrees Fahrenheit isn’t that cold. I grew up where forty below—with a wind chill—was a regularly expected event, with boundless potential for six foot snowdrifts whenever the plows drive by. Forty degrees for northern Florida, though, after becoming accustomed to three hundred days a year of warmth and sunlight, shocked my mind into a nervous panic for survival.

We were at the park, in the dark, on a full moon New Year’s night, with temperatures scheduled to go down into the thirties, visiting my wife’s friends E and K at their campsite.

The girls didn’t bring any kindling. They were trying to start a fire by lighting balled-up advertising circulars they wedged under four-inch diameter logs of store-bought firewood.

The full moon’s beams shone through the trees, creating thousands of bright shafts of smoke. The not so beautiful part was that the smoke was coming from dozens of burning Pennysaver advertising circulars that K had copped from Publix. Surely the combustion of hundreds of pages of colored ink drastically upped everyone’s inhalable carcinogen level.

“Move away from the smoke,” my wife told me, as she frantically flapped at the dying Pennysaver embers with a torn cardboard box lid. “You don’t need to breathe this stuff.” Fine. I moved away from the smoking crater, tossing proclamations of doom over my shoulder.

“You need kindling. It’s not going to work. I don’t know why you bother.” I’ve seen people make fires. You start with pine needles or newspaper, then a whole lot of tiny, tiny dry twigs, and then thicker and thicker sticks and THEN you put larger logs on. These girls were essentially holding a lighter to their logs and wondering why they wouldn’t just ignite. Meanwhile the entire acreage of the campground was choking on the cheerful aroma of carbon monoxide-rich toxic burning full-color newspapers.

“I don’t know why you’re getting so cranky,” she flapped.

“I’m not cranky. I just know how people start fires and this isn’t it.” As quickly as a scrunched up sales circular would blossom into flame, it expired into a ball of dimming ashes, having no incendiary effect whatsoever on the cold chunks of hickory above. Meanwhile, E and K left us to go use the bathroom.

I am not going to get cranky. I am not going to get cranky, I told myself. I didn’t come here to fight with my wife about how to start someone else’s fire. I moved off in the direction of the smoky moonlight cathedral. So beautiful. So deadly. Just like everything in this world.

We had come to St. Augustine more or less on a whim, at the invitation of E. and K., my wife’s friends from UF, who wanted to go camping at a state park to celebrate New Year’s. the plan was that we would bring Bhagavad-gitas to sell and instruments to play while chanting Hare Krishna on the Plaza de la Constitution in the center of town for all the tourists.

“I’ve seen genuine Boy Scouts start fires, and they always have kindling. There’s no starting a fire without kindling.” I was cold, shivering, hungry, ready to go back to the warm, well-lit room I had booked us at the Super 8 Patel No-Tell Motel. Meanwhile, my wife was flapping away with all her strength, determined to agitate our flimsy pile of newspaper ashes into a steady, furious blaze that would incite those logs into a raging conflagration with a terrific whoosh.

“I’m waiting for the ‘whoosh’,” she kept saying. “When it finally catches, there’s a ‘whoosh.’” Our fire never gave off so much as the equivalent of the heat from a lit cigarette. We were all freezing, except for my dear, persistent better half, who was perspiring heavily from the effort of running around the smoke column with her quickly crumpling cardboard fan.

“I’m not going to get involved,” I said, and moved away again. We could be watching Cartoon Network by now.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” said my wife.

Just then, K. suddenly exclaimed “Happy New Year, neighbors!” in the direction of the adjoining campsite, where not only did they have a very happening campfire but they had decorated their area with Christmas lights and brought several varieties of outdoor furniture and lamps. They sat around their fire happily chatting, as we cursed and performed our dance of smoke inhalation and frustration in the dark.

“Happy New Year!” they shouted back.

“Um, we’re trying to start a fire and wondered if you might have any lighter fluid!”

“No lighter fluid, but do you want a couple of fire starters?” they shouted back. “No charge.”

“Thank you SO much!” said K, a genuine candidate for the Miss Neighborly title of 2010.

I had made a couple of attempts previously to sing some fireside kirtan with my mrdanga, but just as the newspapers couldn’t catch the logs on fire, my chanting didn’t seem to take off. I was too cold to be jolly. But when we lit up our New Year’s present from the happy campers, my wife started singing her Hare Krishna Round—a Christmas-y tune involving three parts. We sang that a cappella for a while, sitting around our Barbie-sized bonfire, until the firestarters brought one of the logs to the point of whoosh.