Around a campfire, a small window opens to an ancient story, a glimpse of the communal lives of Homo sapiens through much of unplugged history.CSA-Printstock/Getty Images
Charlotte Gill is the author of Eating Dirt, a book about trees and tree planting, and Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir.
One morning in 2017, at my home on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, I woke up to thick, smoky skies. A billowing plume filled the air. It looked burnt at the edges, as if a colossal dragon had streaked across our atmosphere. Later in the day, this cloud descended. The sun dimmed, and a snow of fine ash drifted down, settling on windowsills and car windshields. It felt like summer had ended suddenly, replaced by a strange kind of winter in mid-July. The air smelled like a campfire, which was ironic as starting a campfire, or doing any kind of open burning, was forbidden because of fire risk across most of the province.
I didn’t realize it then, but that morning was the beginning of a new and terrible standard that would see countless wildfires surge across the province with increasing ferocity – in fact, all over the country – each and every summer, leading to devastation, disruption and regular bans on one of humans’ most ancient of rituals: lighting a fire.
In the past several years, thousands of Canadians have been evacuated because of wildfires. Many have known the heartbreak of destroyed property and livestock, and the loss of livelihood. We’ve witnessed the obliteration of habitat and wildlife. The front lines are crewed by armies of firefighters. In 2021, the entire village of Lytton, B.C., was incinerated. This year, a record-breaking 100,000 square kilometres have burned across Canada, an area roughly the size of Iceland.
It feels trivial to ponder the humble campfire, the smallest of sacrifices, now that burning restrictions are commonplace. Yet the prohibition of this relatively cheap, time-worn social ritual has perhaps meant more than just the absence of singalongs and s’mores. In B.C., we’ve grown used to these bans, spread as they are now across most of the peak outdoor season. They’ve merged with a pattern of cataclysm. They signal our adaptation to the new abnormal and have prompted many of us to rethink summer and the “pristine” wilderness behind our “Super, Natural” provincial branding.
Campfire bans aren’t new. But they’ve been starting earlier, extending later and spreading more expansively over B.C.’s six fire jurisdictions for years. In the Metro Vancouver area, campfire-restricted days nearly doubled between 2010 and 2015. Our current ban across most of the province started in early July. It forbids nearly every kind of naked flame, including tiki torches, sky lanterns, fireworks, and First Nations’ use of ceremonial fire. Penalties for non-compliance start at about $1,000 and run as high as $1-million plus prison time. In Ontario, a nearly provincewide fire ban was recently lifted. Fires are currently banned in parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and other jurisdictions have various restrictions. At the very least, the rules nudge deniers of all kinds into the thick of cognitive dissonance. They suggest the irony of kindling a fire while ensconced in smoke from a larger blaze – the one burning literally and figuratively all around us.
Even knowing the greater issues facing us, I can’t help but feel the loss of the campfires when I’m setting up my tent in B.C.’s backwoods. I’ve always loved a good campfire, and I don’t mind the smell of woodsmoke in my clothes. From the scritch of a match across the box to the collapse of spent embers at the end, everything about a campfire tugs at my memory, tracing all the way back to the childhood camping trips where I first learned to love sleeping outside.
I worked as a professional tree planter for many years, and fire was central to that working life. Tree-planting camps are temporary communities nestled in the backcountry, mainly without access to the grid or cell service. After the generator wound down for the day, there were only candles and headlamps to read by. The only heat came from fire, which was one of few social events in the middle of nowhere. We sat with the glow on our faces, the chill at our backs, our dogs lying in the darkness just beyond the circle with their noses pointed out to the flickering shadows. With the campfire came storytelling and laughter, and often singing and playing of instruments of all kinds.
Around a campfire, a small window opens to an ancient story, a glimpse of the communal lives of Homo sapiens through much of unplugged history. It’s not so difficult to see this aura of safety as the genesis of human civilization, or community as a natural outgrowth of its circular shape. Humans transitioned from raw to cooked food thanks to open flame, and this shift is thought to have played a role in our evolution as big-brained primates. We might reject fire as an everyday tool in our temperature-controlled, fossil-fuelled society, yet many populations around the world still rely on it for heat, light and sustenance. And if you’re alone in the wilderness, a little fire can be a solace, a lifeline.
Fire building is a survival skill and a delicate art form. It requires patience and attention. From the tiniest twigs and the spark of a lighter, a wisp of smoke arises. You can’t rush a fire without risk of smothering it. Each occasion is different depending on the type of wood, the temperature, the ambient humidity. Everyone has a fire-starter hack. Mine is tortilla chips instead of paper. You can watch a how-to YouTube video, but that’s no substitute for the full, sensory experience.
Fire is nostalgic and elemental, but these days, if I go car camping, chances are I’m packing a CSA-approved facsimile, equipped with pumice stones and gas jets, that I acquired, like many others, as a stand-in for the real thing. A propane firepit, which is allowed under B.C. rules, is convenient, lighting with the flick of a wrist. It doesn’t require me to split logs or to carry water for its dousing at the end of the night. A propane fire requires little exertion at all, but maybe effort was all part of the deal, as anyone knows who’s ever worked out their troubles with an axe and a backyard cord of wood.
Campgrounds are increasingly smokeless venues, inviting users to envision a future in which fires are a no-go for all but the deep winter months, and empty steel fire rings are dormant artifacts from less careful times. This summer, millions of North Americans have been living with air-quality advisories thanks to Canadian wildfires, and so the way we think about superfluous smoke might be changing, too. Campfires release carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; that footprint expands if the wood has travelled long distances to its destination. Woodsmoke contains volatile organic compounds such as benzene and formaldehyde, plus fine particulates, including black carbon, which like CO2 plays a role in planetary warming, not to mention its negative health effects. There’s a fine line between a sentimental woodsy aroma and yet another pollution threat to our breathable, shared air.
The woods aren’t the same, either. Climate change has meant warmer temperatures, drier conditions and more lightning. These are just a few risk factors among many. Modern forest-management practices have emphasized the preservation of timber resources through aggressive firefighting, along with the suppression of Indigenous fire-keeping and burning practices that for thousands of years reduced the buildup of fuels across the landscape and, therefore, the danger of scorched-earth conflagrations.
It’s a little sad to imagine a reality in which kids spend no time at all with swollen marshmallow char at the end of their blackened sticks. Campfires are fascinatingly absorptive in their many entertainments. They’re a gateway to outdoor life, and if we neglect to engage with the natural world beyond our suburbs and expressways, how will we know what lives there, or what’s gained or lost over time? Yet as an adult, I’m forced to concede that my fire-poking childhood looks obliviously idyllic next to our incendiary present moment, not to mention the future, when tomorrow’s kids will inherit the Earth as we leave it.
For those of us who’ve enjoyed the soul-warming pleasures of recreational fire, who’ve thawed our hands or dried our boots near the glowing coals, we might have to revisit our attachments, if we haven’t already. We might need to find alternative connections to the great outdoors in a world that’s no longer fireproof, if it ever was. At the very least, we may come to see campfires not as a right but as a privilege and a rarity, a reminder, in our combustible times, that a flame is a promethean technology, both a gift and a force well beyond our control.