Every kid looks forward to school holidays but the best ones were Teacher’s Work Days. Not only did you get the day off of school to do whatever you wanted, but you also had the satisfaction of knowing that while you were tooling around, riding bikes, and watching cartoons, the teachers were still stuck inside the classroom to suffer. Most every kid that is. My father had different ideas about what we should be doing on these holidays. If it wasn’t stacking firewood at the house it usually meant we would go on one of our famous Walter family camping trips.
My brothers and I were always a bit leery of these excursions. It could be fun. It could be a miserable exercise of survival skills and psychological torture. Flip a coin. Either way, there was always going to be a lesson.
On one such trip, things started off pretty normal. We got to our camping site. Set up our tent. Set up our mission control center which always included 2 camping stoves and a topographical map, I believe was stealthily swiped from the local library. Come to think of it I don’t even know why we had camping stoves because we always cooked over the fire, but I digress. Things were fine and dandy until we were faced with the boredom that always comes on a camping trip after the excitement of the setup. That initial realization that if you want fun, you have to make it yourself.
Tired of hearing us complain my dad took us down a trail to practice some random survival skill when out of nowhere he stops in his tracks and starts whistling at something ahead like a dirty sailor to a woman on docks. “You see that?” he asks us. Honestly, it could have been anything from a storm cloud to a grizzly bear. “Look at that!” He was pointing at a big stump in the ground. “You know what that is? That’s tree gold!. Fat lighter! We hit the jackpot!”
Fat lighter, fat pine, heart pine is usually formed when a pine tree dies and all of the sap runs into the wood grain and solidifies. It’s used to make all kinds of stuff from glue to turpentine but he wanted it for one reason. Fire. Fat lighter is a premium fire starter and this man had a thing for fire starters and wood in general since he was a carpenter. He went as far as making us memorize what every local species of wood was by smell so that we could identify them blindfolded by the time we were 5 years old. Fat lighter, though, was always his celebrity crush. There were times I remember him taking me to a job site just to show me old heart pine floors or wall studs. He’d run a finger across the sap veins and then debate how long it would take the entire house to catch on fire and how fantastic that fire it would be.
Crouching at the stump, he reached for his hatchet and began hacking away. He pulled out a few shards of wood and held them in the sun. “Would you look at that!?!” he said to us. “Look at it glow. That’s pure tree gold right there!” The next half an hour or so he spent hacking away and holding up the shards, which he called “matches”, and whistling in an almost sexual way.
“Let’s get the buckets boys!”
In his big red utility van, amongst any tool and weapon one could imagine was a vast array of five gallon buckets that we used for anything from chairs to opossum cages. This time we were going to use them to haul out what I would guess was a metric ton of “matches”. For the rest of the day we stood by while the man went to town with his hatchet. When he’d take a break to smoke a cigarette and inspect various chunks we would gather up the pieces and put them into the buckets.
That night we made a fire, started with, and fed by, fat lighter of course. If you have never had a hotdog roasted over a pure pine fire, I would not recommend it. Don’t even try roasting marshmallows because it is easier to take super glue off your hands than a mixture of pine sap and marshmallow fluff.
The “matches” we hauled out that day started every fire in our house for the greater part of decade. For perspective we had a fire every night from September until April. And every single time the old man would take piece of fat lighter out to start the fire he’d hold it up to the light and whistle that sexy whistle and say, “next teacher’s work day we need to go hunting for some more tree gold!”. So while most kids have that twisted satisfaction knowing their teacher is off suffering on these special holidays, I always kind of hoped a teacher was also getting satisfaction knowing some kid out there was mining pine chunks from an old stump, in a humid Georgia forest.
