When I’m teaching a natural building workshop, folks sometimes ask me, “What’s the best way to build?”
It’s a good question, but a big one, and one that often opens more questions than it provides answers. Are we building for warmth in a cold climate? For protection against bears (or worse, nosy neighbors)? For congregating, with acoustics and dance surfaces considered? For play (even a sandbox benefits from a container)? But perhaps the biggest question: for whom are we building? Natural building excels at customization, and my house will look different than your house.
If we are to build a good home, let us first consider the creature we seek to foster. I’m leading a natural building workshop this August, but we will not build a home for me, nor for you, nor for any of the membership of Dancing Rabbit. It will be for a special friend of mine, someone present at Dancing Rabbit frequently, although not exactly my neighbor. We will build a home for a fiercely wild creature–fire.
Fire is magic. I love sleeping up on my living roof under the stars. I love seeing the waning rays of the sunset stretch past the layers of tree canopy until they land on the rye and vetch at my side. I love watching the glow of the fireflies as they emerge from the draw in the early summer haze. But these lights are surpassed by another light for me. I strike a match and hold it to my tinder of oak splinters, and the flames lick up inside their home of stacked bricks. This light floats from my rooftop garden to the stars above. This light contains the chaos of the universe. It is destruction, warmth, transformation, and power. And it is confined to a space I could hold in my hands.
Fire is resilience. Capitalism tries to sell us things, but sometimes the technology most appropriate for our lives isn’t purchased. Fire is effective, and it is within reach. I like traveling in my 1989 van. My aunt has a Winnebago. Her electric system went on the fritz, and she told me the lengths that she went to get it fixed, the thousands of dollars it cost her. “What was I going to do? I needed lights,” she said. My response: “Sounds like you need a candle.”
When traveling, I have a little propane single burner stove, and it’s wonderfully convenient. Unless I’m out of propane. So if I had to choose one cooking method, I’d leave the stove at home and pack the hatchet. I can’t think of many places where you can buy propane that you can’t find firewood, and all it takes is a couple of small branches to fry some potatoes. Many folks at Dancing Rabbit cook with gas (and electric), but I eat with the Critter Kitchen. We cook exclusively with fire (well, and sun). We can feed 10-15 mouths on two square meals a day on offcuts from construction projects, complemented by free scrap wood from the local furniture shop. It takes longer to cook (at least until you’re good with it), but it’s a great way to feed yourself. So long as you don’t mind the soot on your clothes–but hey, it’s a great way to hide the dirt.
Fire is community. When I burn wood in my kitchen on my cookfire, I am often connecting. Perhaps I am talking with my neighbor as I stir the pot and they cut the carrots. Or perhaps I am connecting with the wood I’m about to burn. I split it from an offcut of a rafter I screwed into place after debarking it with a drawknife, once I hauled it from the timber following my felling it as a tree. If there was a bird singing from that tree, I heard it. Fire brings out our vulnerabilities; consider all the stories you hear from friends and strangers around a campfire, and now consider those same stories being told under the hum of a fluorescent light. Or more likely, don’t consider that, because I’m not quite sure how you could.
Fire is the synthesis of fuel and heat and oxygen. It relies on all three, and without any of these things, it can’t happen. With all three, it transforms molecules into heat, light, and new molecules (and magic). It is death, and it is birth. It is analogous to community. We cannot be fire if we do not come together.
Fire is danger. Several years ago, the Critter Kitchen burned down. Every winter, we close the kitchen down and disperse to our homes, and on the last night of the season some folks were batch canning all the bounty from the garden. It was a good harvest, yielding dozens of jars of grub. One last fire. It was a long fire, and a hot one. They went home, but a smolder remained deep in the belly of the handcrafted stove. Four hours later, the kitchen was engulfed in flames. If you ever watch a building of yours burn, it will shake you. The blazing light burns your eyes while the heat melts your skin, and there is no drink of water that will quench your raw soul as you bear witness to the loss. No homes were affected, but the danger was not a thing of facts but a creature of emotion, wild and palpable and rampant. It is a curious thing to watch a building you constructed with sweat, blood, and love be utterly destroyed, and know that the stove you built was ultimately the source of that destruction. Sometimes, we forget that fire is not always confined to a space we can hold in our hands. Let us not forget this.
Despite the speed and strength of the local fire department, the building was destroyed. All of it was destroyed, anyway, except for one thing. The cob oven. Built from clay and sand, it remained stalwart and unaffected by the forces that rent the wood to ash and the metal to crumpled waves. Massive and unyielding, it was like an elephant after a rain.
But we have rebuilt the kitchen (and what a kitchen it is!). Between the damage from the firefighters’ hose blasts and incompatibility with the new kitchen’s design, we decided to dismantle the cob oven (it was a painful decision). And so now we need a new one. We need an oven to rise from the ashes and serve as testament to the resilience of community. I invite you to come and help us build it. Help us build a home for fire.
Alis Yoder has lived and built at Dancing Rabbit for 16 years. He enjoys building with many materials, but particularly enjoys clay for its versatility and companionship to fire. The cob oven workshop he is leading August 21-23* will examine fire appliances of all kinds, from rocket stoves to batch box heaters to the creation of the cob oven in the majestic rough and tumble Critter Kitchen. A deep examination of thermal properties of insulation and mass will attune students to one of the most misunderstood elements of natural building–heat transfer. Expect technical learning alongside applied technique. And fun. Expect fun.
*These are the correct dates for the 2026 Cob Oven Workshop. The last publication included the previous year’s dates by mistake. Find more up to date information here.