I recently spent a weekend night at an event that the host introduced as a “recession barbecue”. People camped in the garden to save on babysitter and taxi costs. We all brought food and took turns at the grill to cook it. At midnight I made a campfire. As the guests came and went around it, I realised that, in times of austerity, the campfire should replace the dinner party as the default social event.
Teddy Roosevelt, the United States camping president, relished his campfire chats with naturalist John Muir. Over two fat steaks grilled on the fire Muir persuaded Roosevelt to protect the sequoia trees of Yosemite Park. Inventor Thomas Edison and industrialist Henry Ford regularly sat together around the campfire discussing the matters of the day.
The campfire belongs to everyone. Each of us takes our turn to stoke it, kick some life into it, or, when it produces choking gusts that seem to follow us everywhere, fan it until the fire erupts again.
Children enjoy the spectral thrill of the campfire. If their bed is a nearby tent there is no worry about getting home on time for the babysitter. The campfire brings families together; the dinner party drives them apart.
The late musician, Joe Strummer, was a campfire laureate. At the Glastonbury festival he would keep a fire burning for the full five days. Everyone was welcome and, in its flickering light, all were equal. Julien Temple, who made a documentary commemorating Strummer, said: “He once said to me that he thought the campfire was a better idea than any of the music he had ever made.”
Around the fire there is greater possibility — and risk. From out of the gloom strangers emerge and take their seats, whereas the dinner party is fixed, the seating planned. The campfire, said Temple, was “a hard place to be. You have to be strong enough to get out of it and lose your worldly bullshit.”
Campfire society is intense and Strummer’s version came with a punishing regime of intoxication. The atmosphere could get leery as the campfire stumbled on towards dawn. Although I dispute that any useful conversation has ever taken place at four in the morning, Strummer was right that, around the fire, the classes and social types mix.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham, in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, explains how campfires coaxed us out of the trees and on to the ground, to sleep together rather than apart.
We are descended from the people who could sit quietly around the fire and share cooked food, what Wrangham called “the coalition of the calm”. I find the image reassuring; a considered gathering of wisdom rather than the braying competitive debate of the dinner party.
At the recession barbecue the gathering grew silent. Contemplation of the fire filled us. The hairs on my calves swayed and curled in the heat like the tendrils of an anemone. I was content. —