Fire, fire burning bright

It doesn't happen very often, but this morning I beat Martha up. (That sentence strikes me as having a meaning I definitely do not intend. I'm talking about getting up earlier than her.) Having had a good night's sleep, I felt an irresistible urge to perform a virtuous deed, so I took her coffee. After the perfunctory exchange of a few wake-up-time niceties she asked, "Is the fire going?", by which she meant, "Is it burning strongly enough to make it safe to venture out?". She knew full well that a thick frost was blanketing the ground outside. Without our trusty fire springing quickly to life when we open the damper these bitter winter mornings we would have difficulty motivating ourselves to get up. How we love that fire.

Fire, as we all know, has a rogue side to it. When the conditions are right (or wrong), fire can wreak awful havoc. Australians are still coming to terms with the devastating bushfires (wildfires) that savaged Victorian country towns this past February. I was very saddened to learn that one of my good grade school friends, Libby Trott, had perished in the inferno along with over 170 other people. I hadn't seen her in about forty years, but I remember her clearly to this day. She had told her mother earlier that day that she was very concerned about the situation. That was the last time they spoke. In spite of the long history Australia has of summer fires, the fires that day, Black Saturday, were unprecedented. (See "The day a spot of bushfire fun turned to terror".) They blasted almost without warning across the townships of Marysville, Kinglake and others at incredible speed; survivors spoke of seeing huge balls of fire roiling and rolling along the streets. The prolonged drought in southern Australia had turned a normally flammable bush into a ticking time bomb. No doubt about it, when fire strikes when and where we don't want them the results can be disastrous. The Good Book tells us that fire has an insatiable appetite (Prov. 30:16). On the other hand.

Back to Martha. The look of pleasure on her face as she sits reading in front of the fire before heading off to work warms me within. Everybody I know just loves the cozy atmosphere a warm hearth brings on a dark, cold winter's night. Apart from a few who are glad to be rid of the chore of splitting and stacking wood, most people I know who have traded their wood fire in for an electric heat pump rue the day they did so. As usual, we ingrates tend to take this glorious gift, like most others, for granted. But where would our ancestors have been without fire to roast their meat, to boil their oats, and to bake their bread? Who today can resist the overpoweringly alluring fragrance of bread straight out of a wood-fired oven? What would a camp be without a campfire? Life as we know it would not be possible without fire.

And what a marvel fire is! Consider the wonder of burning wood. After all, that's the form of fire that has been most commonly harnessed for man's benefit. Technically speaking, when wood burns, an exothermic chemical reaction is taking place. An exothermic reaction is one which releases energy in

the form of heat, as distinct from an endothermic reaction which requires energy to drive the reaction. All the nourishing organic molecules that make up the solid chemical soup that is wood combine with oxygen from the atmosphere to produce carbon dioxide and water, releasing "excess" energy in the form of heat in the process. Non-gaseous residues make up the smoke and ash. For years I wondered why the authorities told us that fires burn faster on a hot day than a cool day; after all, doesn't fire produce its own heat? Then I learned that all chemical reactions progress twice as fast for every ten degrees Centigrade increase in ambient temperature. At a fire's edge, an increase in air temperature from 15º to 25º will double the speed at which it progresses. On Black Saturday, when the temperature approached 45º, it burned eight times faster than it would have on a 15º day.

Stop and think. Much of a wood fire's benefit to mankind is a result of the rate at which this wonderful chemical reaction occurs. It's just right! Can you imagine what would happen if the "standard" rate was double what it is? Wildfires would progress at double the current rate at any given temperature. Disaster! Think of how hard it would be to control fire during the multitude of applications man has traditionally used it for. On the other side of the coin, imagine how much more wood one would have to pile onto the campfire to get the same result if the standard rate was half its current value. Life as we know it would be radically different - for the worse - if this amazing chemical reaction proceeded at a rate much different from what it does. Just another one of those lucky breaks for mankind? No way.

The chemistry of wood is as crucial to the value of fire as the reaction itself. Indeed, the nature of the reaction is largely a function of wood chemistry. I stand in awe contemplating how much energy from the sun has been trapped and locked up in a tree. We can heat our whole house for an entire winter from the wood of one large tree. If the chemical energy contained in wood was only half what it actually is, imagine how much more time human beings would have spent over the centuries collecting, splitting and stacking wood!

We tend to view wildfires in the same light as snakes and spiders - we see only their dark side. Truth is, normal forest fires are crucial to the proper functioning of many ecosystems. As just one example, take this quote from "The Economist" magazine:

The pine beetle is a well-known pest. but no effective means has been found to stop it. The beetles swarm up trees in large numbers, killing them by boring through the bark, sapping their nutrients and emitting a damaging blue fungus. Cold winters and forest fires normally keep the beetle population in check (July 5th , 2008).

Yes, our heavenly Father worked out the precise details of this supremely important chemical reaction. It may cause some damage, but the benefits it brings far outweighs its negatives, the contribution it makes to the common weal being truly incalculable. God truly did think of everything.