Primitive Skills

The spindle of my fire bow goes spinning off in a random direction. The cord pops off the end of the bow. I lean too far one way or another and my hand slips, or the board under my foot wiggles too much and everything falls apart. My knee hurts. My back hurts. My shoulder hurts. My wrist hurts.

I'm sweating. I've stripped down to my last layer, barefoot in wool long-underwear, sleeves pushed up to my elbows, kneeling in the shade under a cedar tree. I want to snap this fire bow in half, throw it into the woods. Burn it--oh wait, I can't. I can't get a coal going. I can't even get smoke. I've been at this for forty minutes and I still spend the majority of my time chasing down a flying spindle or adjusting the tension on my bow string. I want to blame the equipment, but I know if I handed it to Grey he'd produce a coal in less than five minutes. The problems are all with me, my technique, my inexperience. To add to my frustration, another student manages to create two coals in the time it takes me to chase down my flying spindle a dozen times. I'm thrilled he's done it--he's shown it is possible--but wish I could somehow absorb the trick of it from him without all this frustration and sweat and pain.

There are umpteen dozen ways I could start a fire. It'd be easier to use a lighter.  It'd be easier still to go get some gasoline, throw it on a pile of wood, and light a match. Or use a road flare--I've seen those melt pavement. They'll burn anything, even in the Pacific Northwest. 

Learning how to create fire from friction is an unnecessary skill in the modern age. I have in my possession a lighter and even a flint fire starter. It's unlikely that I'd ever find myself in a situation, even a survival situation, where I didn't have at least a lighter on me and still had the time, energy, and need to build a friction fire.

Nevertheless, I persist. I can't remember the last time I struggled this much with a skill and continued to try. It isn't a typical adult experience, I don't think. Usually, I focus only on what I'm good at--leaving those things I don't enjoy or don't master easily to others more suited to them. I don't expect to produce fire today--but I'm getting better. Tom shows me to put the arch of my right foot on the board and that helps stabilize my arm movement. The spindle moves more freely. I even produce some smoke before we call it quits for the day and start cleaning up.

To produce fire from friction is not an easy thing. It's a wonder that this skill is considered primitive--the amount of brain power, muscle memory, and time that goes into selecting fire bow materials, crafting them, and producing a coal using this method is like earning a PhD in fire making in comparison to the kindergarten-level simplicity and ease of flicking a Bic. 

While bow drill frustrates me, challenges me, it simultaneously calls to me. Off in the distant past, my past, long before any written record of my own genetic line existed, long before any known religion or country came to be a part of my history, an ancestor of mine crouched in a dense Eastern European forest, huddled against the blowing snow, back bent over a bow drill. She smoothly drew that bow across her body, expertly coaxing fire from pieces of wood. That skill came down through the ages, passed along from teacher to pupil even as the world changed, as obsidian, flint, gunpowder, and gas morphed the art of fire making. To kneel in the forest now, sweating over a bow drill, thousands of years from that time and place, is to connect a lost link to my past. In a modern world so disconnected from the past, perhaps this skill is not so unnecessary. My ancestors kneel with me.