All lit up

Today’s commercial TV has trained us to believe travelers checks are something we should never leave home without.

Of course, other things to have at all times are keys, credit cards and cell phone.
But if you were born here 500-plus years ago, you’d never leave home without some sort of knife and fire-starter.

In most of North America — and in all of Southern California — the fire starter was the hand drill, which consists of two pieces of wood: an approximately 18-inch, pencil-thick stick which is spun onto a flat piece of wood, like a fence slat. A triangular notch is carved onto one edge of the flat piece (the hearth) and the drill is spun onto the hearth at the tip of that notch. As you spin, wood dust flows into the notch as heat develops. If you don’t faint first, an ember develops, which you then place into some ideal tinder and gently blow on until you get a flame.

If you have never done this before, outdoor survival teacher Larry Dean Olsen suggests you start at about noon if you want a fire by midnight — and Olsen is being optimistic.

First you need the right type of wood, then you need the right body posture, and then you need lots of guided practice.

Don’t feel bad if at first it doesn’t work. My first attempts at doing this were humbling failures, as I lay on my patio with blistered palm, sapped of energy. But in time, with practice, I could do it in less than 30 minutes, and today I can fairly reliably produce a coal in just less than 10 minutes. With all that in mind, it should come as no surprise that only a few hundred people worldwide are believed to be proficient at this method of fire-starting.

One of those people is Alan Halcon of Altadena.

Some folks are not content at taking 10 minutes to get a fire started by this most primitive of methods. Halcon, in fact, has done it in just TWO SECONDS! How did he achieve such a feat?

“I think there has always been this mystique surrounding fire, not just for me, but for everyone,”

Halcon says. “You almost enter into this mystical realm when you are doing this. And this ability to make fire with two pieces of wood and your hands is not only exhilarating, but that fire can then provide you with so many things,” such as warmth, purifying water and the ability to signal, to name a few.

Halcon had read about primitive fire-making for years, but finally took a class and learned about it firsthand. He said that it really paid off having someone show him what to do and not do, the nuances not written about in books.

“The first time I tried this,” says Halcon, “I felt that there was this innate connection between me and the wood, like a symbiotic relationship. That was about 10 years ago. In the beginning, I was completely obsessed with making fire with the hand drill, and for the first few months I practiced this about two to three hours a day. I was fascinated with it.”

Halcon points out that this was far more practice than someone would need in order to simply learn how to make fire. But he was focused on mastering this skill, not just a minimal competence.
After about three years of practice, Halcon was able to get a coal with a hand drill in only 6.5 seconds. As far as I know, that was a world record. Then, in 2006, Halcon decided to beat his own record and was able to get a coal in four seconds. Shortly thereafter, someone on the internet told Halcon that a Canadian had done it in 3.5 seconds.

The race was on. For Halcon, it has always been a personal challenge to do this and to learn which woods work best under various conditions. He used to use a mule-fat drill with a willow hearth, but has since changed to an ash hearth, which he finds works more quickly.

Is speed really all that important? After all, I am happy to just to be able to do it. And if I can do it under 10 minutes, I am happy indeed.

“I feel that getting a coal as quickly as possible is important for at least two reasons,” explains Halcon. “First, you are losing less energy if you can get it right away. And second, the quicker you get that coal the less likely it is you will get blisters on the palms of your hands, which can lead to infection in a wilderness situation.”

At Pasadena’s Hahamongna Watershed Park, Halcon challenged himself again last month and with seven expectant witnesses (one with a stopwatch), Halcon managed to get that coal in two seconds. (OK, so there was one witness who thinks it was 2.4 seconds, but he was probably just a naysayer.) Then he repeated the feat a second time, with Halcon exploding into the same ritualistic, screaming wild dance that we saw Tom Hanks perform after he created fire in the film “Castaway.”

Halcon has also written a booklet describing how to master the hand drill, with such details as wood types, preparation of the drill and hearth, and body posture.

For more details, visit TheHandDrill.com.

Christopher Nyerges is the editor of Wilderness Way magazine and the author of “How to Survive Anywhere” and other books. His Web site is ChristopherNyerges.com.