Fire Pit

Completed and commissioned into service 18 April 2009.

If you couldn't tell already by the Christmas Tree pictures, I'll tell you now that my family is interested in fire. For some of us fire is a life-long obsession. Others in the family learn to appreciate it as they mature. A.J. and I are two of the life-long fire lovers in the family.

So, we built a fire pit.

It's not terribly pretty, but I'm fond of it. We stacked stones which my dad and I gathered together as the builders were digging the foundation for the house into a ring about four feet in diameter. A.J. and I rolled the stones downhill in a wheel barrow. (We thought we heard sniggers from the squirrels who were watching us.) For having no "dry stacking" experience, I think we did fairly well putting it together. And it's not made from prefab "cultured" stone you buy at the hardware store; we put it together with rocks that came out of the ground where my basement now sits. Quite literally, sweat and blood went into this project. (The blood was A.J.'s; he smashed his finger with a rock.)

The commissioning was a beautiful sight. Ten feet of fuse into a pack containing cordite (commonly used as propellant in shotgun shells) and 500 "strike anywhere" match heads inserted into a fireplace starter log served as our igniter, and we used four relatively small tree stumps for fuel. As I lit the fuse with A.J.'s torch lighter, he said to me, "You know, I'm not really sure what this is going to do." After waiting a good five minutes or so for the fuse to burn down, the cordite and matches ignited with a spectacular whoooosh! and the stumps caught fire instantaneously.

The fire burned from around 9pm until 2am which is the latest I have stayed up on purpose in a really long time. Following are the pictures we made to commemorate the event and to secure the love of fire to ourselves and our posterity.

Angie and A.J. by the fire with foreground sparks.