Sitka or Bust: Commute The World

First off, let me say that I am apparently not a very good fire starter. For someone who loves playing with matches as much as I do that realization pretty much dampens my thoughts about being a survivalist.

Today, for example, I watched a few minutes of the X Games in Spain and instantly made up this whole storyline involving me being a bad ass skateboarder. It was eerily similar to that brief phase I went through in middle school when I bought a pair of skate shoes and a janky skateboard and went to town on my sensitive butt meat. Sure, there’s the off-chance that, given the opportunity to skate in a trick bowl, I’d miraculously develop lightning reflexes and a penchant for maneuvers that threaten my physical safety, but considering how bad I am on even ground, I find that to be a long shot.

Anyways, back to the camping.

I packed all the necessities for making a fire that my emergency kit suggests: a lighter and a crumpled up Dunkin Donuts bag from a pit stop on my drive to Rhode Island. We bought a bundle of firewood at Walmart, oh how rustic, and pretty much an entire shopping cart of burgers and hotdogs and s’mores. For three college aged women I thought that was a little much—especially for only one night of camping.

Holy shit was I wrong. Apparently camping brings out the caveman in us all because that first day we each ate all the perishable meats, namely eight hotdogs and six burgers, not to mention an entire bag of chips and a good portion of our s’mores rations.

But it barely made it into existence because my fire starting skills are sub par at best. First off, we had way too few easy to light items like paper or cardboard, over which to lean the sturdier tinder. Don’t ask me where it all went. That, and the fact that the wind was gusting at precisely the moments that little flickering flames would even attempt to catch onto the larger sticks. But hey, we worked our collective ladies-only magic and got that thing cooking enough to explode our cheddar wursts on their roasting sticks.

Maybe it was the fact that I was slightly frustrated with our cooking methods, but I think I definitely took it out on the hotdogs. I found an optimum cooking position by placing that weenie in the tiny gap between two smoldering logs and that thing turned black and kept getting blowing ash stuck to it, but I devoured it faster than Sandra Oh in that early episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

With the last hotdog I slowed down enough to skewer it, bun and all, on my marshmallow roasting stick and carefully toast my bun to a beautifully crisp golden brown. Ingenuity runs a long way when you are surrounded by troglodytes. Haha. JK ladies. JK.