Man I fuck wit fire. Well, used to; my old, crippled ass can’t fuck wit much any more.
Point is that being the fire tender isn’t exactly a no skill job, and it comes with some serious benefits.
You gotta have at least a basic understanding of how fire works if you want to keep it going, and learn how to keep it controlled. That’s why fucks-wit-fire is such a coveted, but demanding, position. See, you gotta keep an eyeball on it. Stacking in fresh fuel in the right way. Keeping adequate air flow. Moving unburned fuel into the center. It’s a dance.
And for that effort, you not only get the delightful scent of wood smoke in your beard, and the glow of warmth across your flesh, you get to see the ever shifting beauty of the fire and the embers. A constant flux of colors and lights that seems alive. I’d hypnotic, meditative, and can be a spiritual experience if one leans that way.
Ash, drifting on breeze settles into your hair as sleep looms and you bank the fire, setting things up for the chilly morning to come, you look down at your friend glowing beneath ashes that only reluctantly settle in for the night.
You go to your rest warm, fulfilled, and at peace.
Mate i like your romantic narration and all but I have to break it to you, that delightful scent of wood smoke in your beard is actually a stink. That campfire smell gets everywhere and sometimes you have to wash your clothes twice just to get that stank out. Its still fun though.
Do you write?
Here and there, yeah.
Not me. I’m the guy trying to convince everyone camping is more fun without a fire
Alright. Now I’m curious. Sell me on it. Cold food?
Not a guy. Fire, good. Burn everything.
That’s me. Just not white? Is being white a mandate for this role?
No. Hearth fire tenders are needed where they are needed.
What’s with the trend of mentioning that people are white and connecting it with things they do? I also see live streamers do this a lot (including in reference to themselves) and it’s strange to me
Always some white guy in the comments going on about how white people doing white people things is not something worth mentioning.
Damn, I was about to comment the same, didn’t know doing so would turn my skin white.
I don’t think it’s outrage bait because again, often the context is someone talking about themselves, and no arguments are started. But this didn’t used to be a thing, so what changed?
@andrewrgross@slrpnk.net It’s definitely an American thing. Whites in America are called whites because we’ve disgustingly erased our previous cultural heritages throughout the generations. Colonial governments prefer homogeneity so they tell everyone “you’re not who you were before. You’re American.” Non-whites in the US have noticed this about us as well and in a shitty way they get punished for retaining their cultural heritages.
So in the internet age we joke about this lack of defined cultural tradition and make observational humor about filling that missing part of ourselves with odd things. Like being averse to spicy food (we’re not) or owning dogs with human names instead of having children (a thing poor couples of any race do).
This one was obviously a stretch, anyone can get fixated on the fire. I couldn’t tell you factually but I think camping is a more stereotypically white thing in the US so when you see a white guy take a particular interest in something unremarkable you can make a joke like “that’s his culture. Man is in touch with his history”
At least they haven’t taken garlic bread and sitting in chairs weird away from bisexuals!
People desperately want to associate aesthetic acts and preferences with demographics. I assume it has something to do with cultural desires to place people in neatly ordered boxes.
By acknowledging your privilege you don’t have to do anything to change it.
Your privilege to poke a fire with a stick?
Sometimes I don’t even vaguely get the drive-by downvoters. Like… what? Did I upset the Lemmy white supremacists this time?
To be fair, I didn’t down vote.
You didn’t really campfire if you don’t smell like campfire
Last time I went out on a trip with the extended family (we’re roughly 20 people, give or take), it was in a rented big structure with a sleeping area, a dining area, and a kitchen, and a yard outside with a place to make a fire. We started a fire, but come dinner time they all wanted to leave the fire going and eat at the table.
I absolutely refused. No way in the world in leaving a fire unattended like that. I said we either stop the fire altogether (and restart it later), or I’ll stay watching it until someone comes to replace me.
In the end I took a plate of food and ate it by the fire alone, until someone indeed came to replace me and I went to finish the meal at the table. It turned out fine, but it really annoyed me how no one in my family saw sense. They kept trying to convince me to just come and eat dinner… as if the social togetherness somehow makes the risk of starting a forest fire unimportant?! There’s some smart people in my family, but some days I don’t understand how they can all be so blind to the obvious reality.
Why would anyone make a fire, and then make food that can’t be eaten at the fire?
Personally it sounds like bliss eating a good meal alone by the fire.
I generally try to avoid “this” style comments but, almost word for word, this is what I was here to say.
Sure, it was alright, but I do love my family too ❤️
Lucky you.
Boy Scouts taught me the rule that if you are leaving and you had a fire, that it needs to be put out to the extent that you’d willingly stick your hand into the middle.
Scared it might be hot? Put it out more.
What if you put it out using all the left over hot water you made over the fire? Its going to be hot even though it is currently underwater!
I don’t want to stick my hand in the lukewarm piss-mud. How long do I keep going?
That’s just making sure you did it right the first time
Every time I go camping I think about all the knowledge we have lost now that this is further and further from our every day experiences and even just being a less common recreational activity.
I recently learned that the outdoor recreation curriculum was being cut from the school board I attended 30 years ago and that’s a big loss. I lived in a big city with > 50% of the population being born elsewhere and programs like these are sometimes the first opportunities these kids get to learn outdoor skills relevant to their new home.
It’s an opportunity to play with fire and do something positive. Why wouldn’t I be that guy?
spoiler
I don’t feel called out at all
Don’t worry guy, we appreciate you
Thanks
I’m not that guy but I’m the other that guy
You that onion tho
I too, am of the order of fire watchers. May the flame keep you warm.
and protect the campsite LMBO
I am that white guy. You’re welcome.
It makes me feel weird about people that barely start a fire, and don’t tend to it. Like I’m holding someone else’s baby. Then feeding it. Then sending it to school. It’s my baby now, but it still has your name. Ugh.
Its our fire now
You’re the dad who stepped up.
It makes me feel weird about people that barely see babies as property, the name attached is the value not the person who didn’t ask to be born and needs help.
(To be clear I’m not saying you do this specifically, it’s more a cultural thing where people will see other people as unworthy unless their name is on it)
Look in to my eyes. I am the baby captain now.
No, I mean… Captain of the baby. Not a tiny captain the poops in a diaper.
…why would I thank you for fucking with the fire going? I’d want someone who helps it keep going instead of fucking with it.
Because the post uses “fuck with” in the sense of “man I fuck with peanut butter cookies, they’re the best” vs. “I would love some but peanut butter cookies fuck with my stomach”
My sister and I are both the girl version of that guy
What’s skin colour got to do with it?
Americans…
Idk it’s probably cultural. Most non white people in the US have very little experience with stuff like camping and bonfires(there will of course always be exceptions). So usually if you are at a fire and there’s a mixed race group hanging out, 90% of the time the guy fiddling with the fire will be white.
Couldn’t you light a fire in a garden, park or beach? Even those shitty disposable BBQs are a form of fire, though I would recommend using almost anything else if possible.
You’re right. It’s a known issue. It’s predominantly white people going out and enjoying nature, for multiple reasons.
Public forests offer a variety of outdoor recreation activities that enhance participants’ well-being, yet participation remains low among ethnic minorities in the United States. These groups face multiple barriers, including limited information, transportation and financial constraints, safety concerns, fear of discrimination, and wildlife-related anxieties, which are often shaped by broader structural and cultural contexts.
I think the Americans who know most about campfires should be Native Americans. It’s not fair that white people are getting to spend more time with the land they stole.
Use of campfires should be solely informed by personal interest and cultural ties to use of fire. If there were no systemic barriers, it would be down to cultural factors.
It should be like with tacos. Tacos are cheap and easy to make, so nearly everyone can enjoy tacos. With the barriers removed, tacos are most eaten by Mexican people, because tacos are Mexican culture. That’s fair.
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s funny that anecdotes of my lived experience as a brown person gets downvotes, but you sharing an academic paper supporting my lived experience gets up votes.
Your comment didn’t read like own experience fyi, it reads like some random claim
Not that comments explicit about experiences don’t get downvoted still
I wonder if we’re primed to be less likely to interpret statements about people of colour to be personal experiences, because most of the voices we hear are white.
That’s a good idea for a psychology experiment…
n a t i v e a m e r i c a n s … o. O
Nothing.
The black men who do this know they are the white guys of their family.
What’s skin colour got to do with it?
Americans make everything racially charged.
I think this post is just observing stereotypes about camping overall that are really just a reflection of the historical cultural imagination about who camping is for. It’s not really as true as we think it is, because this tendency has been present among black folks and hispanic folks, and asian folks and women and everyone else who have been camping all along, they’re just not featured in film and TV often.
We northern ethnics relied on fire probably a bit more due to colder climate, shorter days in winter.
Nothing in the modern context, but 10000 years ago. If you were a black African and your fire went out, your food might not het cooked or that predator might take a chance to grab one of the kids.
If you were a white person in northern europe, your fire going out meant that everyone froze solid overnight.
Fire was just more essential in climates that developed white skins. Socially and genetically, that has an impact on behaviour.
That shit is way too niche to have evolved at a stronger pressure than random genetic drift. If you could isolate cultural factors and analyse the genetic correlation, I bet your R^2 would be miniscule
Genetic behavioural changes is a fascinating topic and the more studies that come out on it, the faster it seems to be able to act to have an effect
Just look at how quickly agriculture changes human societies living in the right conditions to practice it.
We are talking thousands of years, not even tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands.
Given any factor that is core to survival, there seems to be a genetic impact much more quickly than previously thought. It does have its limits of course, we are not talking something with a measurable effect over 3 or 4 generations, but 30-40 generations seems to be possible in some cases.
Maybe the village fire keeper was a lot more reproductively popular that we previously thought.
That’s me.
But I’m really just kind of mesmerized and considering how cleansed my soul would be if I dove in. Gotta burn the sin out.
The fire cleanses all
Gotta keep the air flowing up through the logs, and put fuel on the hot spots…
The person doing it is often the person who started the fire, or the one who most wants it to keep going. It is the way.
o/
Goes camping, sits around campfire, phone in her face.
*facepalm
I think that’s fine and normal.
I once hiked to a secluded area for a nice scenic overlook and the best spot was taken by two people who were playing on their phones for the entire hour that I was there.
I know they’re just as entitled to sit there as I am and I have no right to tell them how to spend their time, but it still infuriated me. Then again, if they were reading a book or drawing a sketch I probably would have been OK with that. I think I just hate everyone.
