A cooking casualty. A fire fatality. A crucible crisis. A shame of the flame. A bad turn of the burn. We've been using the fire ring near the cabin a bit more lately. I'm fretful about fires in forests, so I'm always reluctant to light one myself, even well contained in the ring, but visitors and weather have encouraged me lately, and we've had more in the last two months than we probably had in the last two years. When my friend Todd built an addition on the back of his garage, he had a lot of material he wanted to get rid of. (Some of it is now at the bottom of my lake.) Among Todd's castoffs were many of these manufactured paving blocks. You can see how we assembled them into our fire ring below. You'll also see if you look closely that we've put some of the blocks into the fire (rather, we've built the fire on and around bricks within the ring). There's a reason for this. If you look at about 1 o'clock on the ring, you can see a stack of the blocks higher than the rest of the ring. and beside that is our grill. The grill rests on that stack, stretches over the flames (of a smaller fire), and rests its other end on a corresponding stack of blocks near the center of the ring. When we have these larger fires, we either leave the inner blocks where they are, or we use the shovel to push them aside. And so they get heated and mishandled, and sometimes they break. Most of the blocks we use in and around the ring are thicker than the broken one you see above. Only the top layer of the ring uses the thinner blocks. None of these thicker blocks has broken yet. Our intent is to remove the fire ring the next time we go out (we keep saying that, but we never do it) because I'm going to have a load of gravel delivered that will be spread over the area to make it more flat. (One way to ruin an otherwise fine weekend in the woods would be to stumble on the rough Ozark ground and fall into the fire.) So we'll remove the ring, and when the gravel is all smoothed and lovely, we'll put it back in place. But not the same place. I plan to move it a foot or two closer to the road and a foot or two farther from the tall trees to the north of it. That way I'll be able to rest more easily when we have a fire because it will be surrounded by more gravel. I'm always thinking. Missouri calendar:

• Great horned owls begin nesting this week.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 1:01 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.