Jack London's "To Build A Fire"

I remember reading this in...Junior high? Great story!

Then there’s HP Lovecraft. Who wrote a story about a man who wants to stay cool in the... Cool Air.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air

My favorite is “A Hyperborean Brew”.

Extremely funny, yet applicable to today.

Here in Alaska, alongside Jack London’s Yukon, our engine seized up east of Fairbanks at 60 below. If you can’t “start a fire” soon, and very soon, or somebody comes by to rescue you, you’ll be dead.

It doesn’t help matters, when the firewood you need is buried under several feet of snow.

Readable and printable copy courtesy of the US Department of State (of all things!):

To Build a Fire

Me too. The scene where his last match has been used and his fire was smothered by snow....

I have a lot of fire starting material in my bugout bags.

Thanks, I’ll check it out.

First story I ever regretted reading. :(

Thanks that was neat to watch. Hard to relate, it is 82 degrees.

I thought he cut the wolf open and crawled inside.

My favorite Jack London story is “Lost Face”.

My favorite Jack London story is “The Day The Bears Ate The Packers.”

if you enjoy these films, Dersu Uzala is a good one.

That was a Tauntaun, on Hoth.

Nice post. I’d read the story many times. Jack London is a favorite.

Never saw a film version of this. I watched it and it was worthwhile. Maybe I’ll explore other versions too, such as cartoons.

Jack London was a flaming liberal. He never got his head straight about the big picture. But he was one heck of a writer.

Another favorite of his I recommend is Chun Ah Chun a story based in Hawaii. Excellent.

You can read it from this Gutenberg collection:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2416

Not London, but definitely cold

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sax1JekPQMg

I remember some FReeper telling me he was boycotting the recent Call of the Wild adaptation because he loathed actor Harrison Ford’s left-wing political views. I quipped back, “if you think that’s bad, you should read up on the political views of the author, Jack London. He was so far left he makes Harrison Ford seem like a Reaganite in comparison!”

Don’t build a fire under a tree.

I remember reading this story 45 years ago.

I believe the fire scene was also recreated in the Robert Redford movie Jeremiah Johnson.

I love Jack London stories.

Watched it on big screen earlier this evening. Great link. Thanks.,

I apologize this is so long, but...the movie set off memories! When I get them now, I write them down...:)

Just finished watching the movie you linked to. I saw this back in Grade School or maybe Jr. High, and it had a lifelong impression on me. This was the first time I watched it since then, but it made me realize how much I have thought about this movie over the course of my life.

I have been pretty cold before, beyond the feet and hands being numb. When I was in the Boy Scouts on the military base we lived on, we were camping one February down in Maryland only a short distance from home. It had snowed, and there was probably a foot of snow when we set up camp, and we made a cool snow shelter, dug it out, put tarps over the top, and had about twelve guys in that setup.

While we slept, it changed from snow to rain, and the shelter melted, filled with water, and the tarp came down on all of us in pitch black.

As everyone flailed about in the pitch black, we became completely soaked, and everything we had got soaked.

This was probably 0200 when that happened, so we set up the tarp and began to plan. As we stumbled around, orienting ourselves in the dark and setting up the tarp, the temperature plummeted.

It had been snowing, and as we slept the temp rose above freezing, then dropped precipitously.

We found ourselves shivering, and determined we better get a fire started. But we couldn’t. Everything was soaked, there wasn’t any dry wood, kindling, or tinder about.

And if you haven’t gathered by now, we weren’t really very good Scouts. We just liked going camping, lighting fires, playing with fire, playing games in the woods, and cooking meals. Our troop got kicked out of a jamboree once because, instead of cooking our eggs for breakfast, we began tossing them like hand grenades

Anyway, you get the idea. If we were really squared away, we would never have even built that snow-based shelter anyway.

And we weren’t really classick Scout material. Average age was probably fourteen, and maybe one guy may have been 15 or sixteen.

To top it off, there was no Scoutmaster there. Our Scoutmaster was a Petty Officer First Class on the base, and he didn’t camp with us. He would meet us there, stay for about a half hour, then leave us until the next day, when he would come in again. Story was that he was having an affair with some woman, and could get away for a whole weekend like that.

I think it was true. Nobody seemed to care. His light blue and white Ford pickup with the big cap on the back was the first car I ever drove by myself...he let me drive it to my house on the base because I was going to wash and wax that whole thing for maybe five dollars. (This was around 1972, I think) Heh, for him, it was a steal. I was young and conscientious, and hoped to make a lot of money washing and waxing cars. He was my first customer, so I bought some car wash and Turtle Wax!

I had no idea how much work was involved in washing and waxing ANY car, never mind a truck with a cap.

But...my Scoutmaster just handed me the keys, no instructions, no warnings, just expected me to drive it to my house, wash and wax it, then drive it back. Heh, that was great. It all felt, so...new. Everything about sitting there, figuring out how much gas to give, the whole nine yards.

But I digress. Back to the story. We were wet, cold, and had no Scoutmaster.

And we tried everything for hours to get a fire going. We had some Coleman fuel, and we used it all up in short order. It was a long cold night. I would guess it dropped into the teens and those hours between 0200 and 0600 were grim.

There was a tractor trailer parked in the woods where the Scouts stored all kinds of equipment such as big canvas tents that had hardwood poles three inches in diameter, and who knows what else. Apparently it was never opened, and the thing had a rusted Master lock on it. We were desperate now, and resolved to break in and see what was in there. I don’t recall how we got that lock off, but when we went inside, it was thick with that distinctive smell of old canvas that would never be unrolled again, except to inspect it before throwing it out. They had those poles that would have burned great, but we had no way to light them.

The Scoutmaster showed up around 0830, and we were all frozen. I have been cold and frozen in my life, but...that was worse than any of them. The Scoutmaster sized it up and told us we all had to go home. We all jammed ourselves into the cab and back of the pickup, and going up a hill that had turned to mud, we had to get out and push, which slathered all of us with mud.

They dropped me off just up the street from my house, and I was sodden, frozen, and pathetic. Now, last time I had approached my house after being dropped off from a weekend of camping, when I approached the house, it emptied out. I was still about 30 yards away, and the entire family (Except my Dad) spilled out of the house en masse, jumped into the family station wagon, and sped away up the street. I gaped at them in irritation. Nobody had even waved to me or acknowledged me in any way.

When I entered the empty house, there was blood all over the floor leading into the kitchen. When I looked in, the sink was filled with blood.

I walked back down the hallway, a trail of blood on the floor, when I came to an area where there was blood on the ground, the doors, and the ceiling! It was everywhere!

Well. It turns out my two younger sisters has been arguing, one seated in their bedroom, the other outside the door in the hallway. Apparently, the older girl inside slammed the door to the bedroom as young girls are wont to do, and the younger sister had the tip of her index finger in the hinge area of the imminently slamming door.

When the door slammed, it neatly lopped off the tip of her finger, maybe between half and a quarter inch of it. She had pulled her hand back in surprise, thinking perhaps the door had just impacted her finger and banged it. She was screaming angrily back a the closed door when she looked down and saw blood going everywhere, and did a panicked “AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!” and commenced to flailing her hand with the mangled digit in blurry up and down motions.

Her decoration of that wall with her blood would have done the painter Jackson Pollock proud.

I was dumbstruck looking at it, because I had no idea it came from a finger! Hell, it could have been a murder for all I knew!

But that had been the previous Fall.

Now, I came home, there was no rushed flight, and when I walked inside, I couldn’t feel my feet, hands, back, and buttocks. I don’t remember who was there, but I have a memory of my mother looking at me in alarm. The bath was only lukewarm, but as I began to thaw out, my entire body (expecially the areas mentioned above) felt as if they were being stabbed with ice picks. It was agonizing. I seem to recall it took about a half hour, but it may have only been ten minutes. It was awful.

So, it was around that time, perhaps a year later, that I saw this movie you linked to. We watched it in class, probably English class. And I really felt as if I understood what that guy was going through as he froze. And that is why it had stuck in my 14 year old brain all these years. That wasn’t the most brutal cold, we were just cold and wet in the teens and low twenties.

But I did experience one long weekend of brutally cold weather, and that left a mark on me too.

I remember going up to the Winter Carnival in Quebec City in 1987, the NHL All Stars were playing the Soviet National Team, and they had the traveling NHL Hall of Fame there. (We had to get scalped tickets, but we got in)

Four of us rented a camper to drive up, and it was one of the coldest snaps up there ever. It was brutal. The bathroom in the camper froze solid, the one thing the guy told us not to let happen, but it did, even though we put the antifreeze in it just like he told us.

But it froze.

My neck was killing me by the time we got home. Three out of four of us were named “Bob” and every time someone said “Bob” you turned your head!

Our heater didn’t work right, and I woke up with my sleeping back and hair frozen into an inch of ice on one of the windows.

Anyway, the day we went to the NHL Hall of Fame, it was bitter, BITTER cold. We were dressed appropriately, but it did no good, it was that cold. I had a knee length down filled coat, big boots and a russian fur hat, and it wasn’t enough. As we stood in line, it was so cold that you had to move. It wasn’t optional. You had to almost dance around in place, jumping up and down, flapping your arms.

As I was doing this, I became aware that EVERY person in this huge line was doing the same thing-it was unreal, and I remember thinking that if some alien came to Earth and saw this behavior, they would assume it was some kind of primitive ritual dance.

Everyone, bulked out in clothes and hats, jumping and moving ponderously while the plumes of frozen vapor issuing from our mouths and noses made us all look like odd prehistoric beasts!

When we got inside, the first table we came to had Gump Worsley at it, signing autographs...being a goalie, I was a big fan of his.

He regarded us, and said “Did you people stand in line outside in that cold to get in here?” Shaking his head, he said “You guys are crazy.”

That sounded completely incredible and funny, coming from a man who played hockey as he did, with no mask for so many years.