Naomi

 She tore the paper plate into three inch sections and handed me the lighter. 

 “Alright, darlin’.  It’s your turn. Start slow.”

Naomi stood just around five feet short, wearing a wet swimsuit and a patterned tapestry as a sarong.  She had the skin of a 20 year old, but all the wisdom of her 52 years.  She smoked the yellow pack of American Spirits and I guessed that she’d graced the back of more than one motorcycle.

“How do you know how to do this?” I begged.

She smirked and crouched into a low squat, gathering twigs for kindling.

“Well, I lived in a house with no running water for 5 years. I was dating this guy who was all about primitive living. I had to light a woodstove every day.  We had a newborn. That, and I grew up on a commune. It’s just what you do.”

She had watched me struggle with my campfire for fifteen minutes.  She waited for me to approach her before she asked,

“You need something, Sweetie?”

“Kerosene, if you’ve got it.”

Naomi and her sweetheart were set up at the neighboring campsite. We’d exchanged a few nods earlier in the day, but kept to ourselves. Her guy stood up and mumbled something about lighter fluid and hot coals.  But Naomi saw a real teaching opportunity in this moment and shut him down. She rose from her camp chair with all the conviction in the world.

“No, Sweetie. We don’t need kerosene. All we need is a match and a paper plate. You’re gonna learn how to build a fire.”

This was my second solo camping outing. Earlier that summer, I finally invested in some decent camping gear of my own.  I’d been daydreaming about idyllic camping weekends with my two young sons, but I needed to know I could hack it in the woods on my own first. The first trip out was magical and easy.  My lakefront campsite was a short walk to the good bathrooms with flushing toilets and clean showers.  A camp host named Trish rode around on a bicycle and offered to get my fire started. When I thanked her, she pedaled off and jogged back with a blowtorch and lighter fluid.  Was this a thing? A camp host? Or was Trish some sort of camp angel who’d miraculously come to enhance my stay like room service at the W Hotel? I read my book by the raging fire and delighted in my good fortune. Surely, Naomi came from the same fleet of camp angels. 

Patiently she demonstrated the mechanics of building a fire without fuel. I watched and asked her about her story to distract from the fact that I had no clue what I was doing.

The most notable experience from my previous camping trip was that for the first time, maybe in my life, I wasn’t self-conscious. I could be a complete beginner at something and unphazed by how clumsy or slow or unshowered I appeared to someone watching.  Now, under Naomi’s watchful eye, I felt the embarrassment of never having learned how to do this very basic, simple life skill, building a fire.  Many men had demonstrated this exact process of making a tiny teepee of twigs. Some even used dryer lint or pine needles.  Each had his own take on the best way to start and maintain a fire. Many had shown me. None had invited me to participate. 

I crafted a tiny teepee of twigs before Naomi knocked it down. 

“We’ve got to start smaller, Hun.” She laid the smallest bits of kindling down in a log cabin formation with strips of the paper plate at the center. As the small bits caught fire, she ripped long deliberate drags of a cigarette and fanned the flame in quick flicks of her wrist, pushing oxygen into the flame.  I watched it grow and stacked limbs of greater and greater size around the perimeter.  When I’d added too much and the flame died down, I was sunk. And validated.

“See! That’s it, right? I killed it.”

Naomi shook her head with a knowing smirk. She bent closer and fanned again. Harder. Quicker. The lit fire resurrected.

She gave me a speech about patience and I admitted I wasn’t born with any. It was a curse I’d come to accept.  She had nothing but time and wasn’t about to let me stop believing in this fire. My first and her one millionth. 

“Don’t feel bad, Sweetie. How would you know how to do this yourself? I bet your mother never built a fire and showed you.”

I agreed and made a silent promise to myself to teach some younger woman something with as much value someday.  I likened it to learning how to change a flat tire and that really got her going. 

“I can’t stand it when I’m broke down on the side of the road and here comes some man who knows less about cars than me telling me how I should do it. I think it’s just so much more empowering when women teach these sorts of things to each other, don’t you?”

Me, that fire, James River State Park