From Flicker to Flame

In the early 1980s, I was camping in the bluffs of southeastern Minnesota with a group of boys and our fathers. I was an early riser, and when I got outside, it was cold. A few other boys were up, and we could see our breath. We could also see wisps of smoke coming from last night’s fire pit. 

We immediately got to work, putting twigs, then branches, then logs on the coals. We blew and watched the fire catch. As it grew, it felt like magic. We, in turn, felt like grown men who had found some hidden power. Which, of course, we had, because fire is not like magic. It is magic. It’s a change in the state of matter. To watch a fire is to watch something solid become heat and light and smoke. To watch a fire is to watch a once-living thing vanish into the air.

When I think of camping, I think of campfires. Stoves are great and fire bans are sometimes necessary. But there is something essential about fire. In The Singing Wilderness Sigurd Olson wrote: “Something happens to a man when he sits before a fire. Strange stirrings take place within him, and a light comes into his eyes which was not there before. An open flame suddenly changes his environment to one of adventure and romance.”

That’s exactly what happened to us boys. And that’s what happens to me with every campfire, whether it’s on an island in the Mississippi River, next to a still lake deep in the Boundary Waters, or even at the summer camp where I worked in college, where we sat listening to our camp director recite Robert Service’s poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

As much as I love watching the flames dance, the real joy for me is to stare into the shimmering coals, watching the orange, yellow, and red move through the wood like a living being. As I watch, I feel a kinship with all the humans over the millennia who have done the same. It’s one of the few activities that has not changed at all since our ancestors roamed the savanna, since we crossed the Red Sea and set out into every corner of the world.

How long have we made campfires? It’s impossible to say, but the most recent find of a “controlled fire” in South Africa dates back a million years. There archaeologists found “charred animal bones and ashed plant remains.” That means we’ve been sitting around campfires for at least 50,000 generations.

The campfire extended the day. It gave us protection from predators. It gave us cooked food, better nutrition, and bigger brains (which we may or may not use). But according to the late scientist E.O. Wilson, control of fire also gave us something else: our social life. Campfires meant the establishment of campsites, which he argues are the human equivalent of “nests.” Group members would leave the nest to find food and bring it back to share. From such humble beginnings came kindness, empathy, and society itself.

It’s likely the campfire also gave us something else, as anthropologist Polly Wiessner discovered when she spent six months living with members of the Indigenous Ju/’hoansi tribe (the !Kung Bushmen) in Namibia and Botswana.

Every night, they would sit around and talk. And when Wiessner compared what they talked about at night with what they talked about during the day, she found a key difference.

During daytime people talked about “economic matters and gossip to regulate social relations,” she wrote.

But at night, by firelight, they sang and danced. Most importantly, they told stories about travel, about people far away, about other members of their “imagined community.” They told stories about supernatural beings and “myths and legends” that explained how the universe worked.

“The capacity for expanding the imagination by night may have deep roots,” she surmised, “extending back to the regular use of fire in encampments some 200,000–300,000 years ago.” Or possibly even a million.

Across Minnesota, remnants of fires have helped us piece together the past. “Fire-altered” rocks at Glendalough and Lake Shetek state parks have been dated to 700 years ago. At the Petaga Point archaeological site in Mille Lacs Kathio State Park, a 3,000-year-old fire hearth was found. And not far from there, at the Bradbury Brook site south of Onamia, the remains of a firepit were found to be 10,000 years old.

It’s hard to imagine what stories those people told, but it’s not hard to imagine them staring into the fire, with the dark of the woods at their backs and the soft light cast on the other faces around them.

For all these reasons, sitting around a campfire makes me feel connected to this longer past. It feels like a homecoming. Because even though we don’t use fire like we once did, it doesn’t mean we don’t need it. The campfire, as Olson wrote, is still a “primal and psychological necessity.”

I wonder if someday the archaeologists of a future civilization will stumble on the remains of that bluffland campfire we stoked as children.

Digging through the ashes, they won’t find any evidence of our reasons for building it. Because aside from a bit of heat, all we really wanted was to feel the magic of fire.