September
Chapter 3
Hearts of Flame

“I am so grateful for our shoe storage,” Rob heard Ginny comment as she did every September during the lead-up to Labor Day weekend and the annual Mountain Man Rendezvous at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. The Coopers had been making the annual pilgrimage to Fort Bridger for many years, and every year the children needed to move up in shoe size.

“You know the organizers of the rendezvous are particularly picky about the importance of wearing authentic shoes,” Ginny reminded Rob as he helped her pull out the boxes of stored shoes to search through for their grandchildren. She sacrificed her children’s old Sunday dress shoes, so the grandkids could look more like they stepped out of the Days of ’47. The dress shoes weren’t much more authentic than tennis shoes, but at least they appeared closer to the real thing, and they demonstrated a good-faith effort. The family’s collection of pioneer dresses, shirts, and pants were likewise passed down among siblings, grandchildren, and cousins until everyone was outfitted for the coming weekend. For many decades, Ginny had hated the process of packing away children’s clothing for passing down to siblings, but she was committed to clothing storage and happy to see it put to use for the rendezvous.

“Comic Con’s got nothing on us!” Rob laughed as he lounged on the couch and watched a fashion show of grandkids prancing around in getups from another time.

The various family vehicles arrived at Fort Bridger as they usually did within an hour of each other and right before the camp closed for the night. The “Tin Teepees,” or travel trailers, were assigned to a harvested hay field where it was difficult to see the contours and ruts of the ground in the dark. Rob and Ginny’s tall, dark-haired daughter, Sophie, was the first to arrive, so she marked out an area for the family using camp chairs and yarn. She walked with a flashlight to the entrance every time family members arrived and guided them to the gathering spot. The family’s favorite parking configuration was in a circle like a wagon train. It created a central gathering area that contributed to the camaraderie and helped to corral the little children and dogs.

Rob woke to the sound of cannon fire the next morning. The cannon was positioned on a mesa overlooking Fort Bridger, and it woke the camp every morning at 7:00 to announce their stepping into another time and place. Rob noticed Ginny staring at the dust motes drifting in the sunrays coming through their trailer skylight, but he left her in peace. He didn’t want to talk about their rebellious children on a day so full of happy possibilities. He climbed out of the trailer’s queen-size bed—always grateful to not be sleeping on the ground in a tent—and pulled up the window blinds. Grandchildren were beginning to emerge from tents and trailers, and they looked cold in the frosty September morning. Ginny put her favorite Bridger copper tea pot on to boil and opened the door. “Who wants hot chocolate?”

Breakfast was a quick affair. Unlike other campouts, the family tried to keep the focus at Fort Bridger on the activities, not the food. Eventually, everyone managed to get into their 1840s period clothing, and the girls finished primping and braiding each other’s hair. Ginny was especially fond of the pioneer dress that Rose had sewn for her. Everyone made sure to wear hats because the dry heat and Wyoming wind would quickly sunburn their faces and lips.

The mothers pulled out the wagons for the little ones and their baskets for shopping. Friday was always the day that everyone shopped the many traders’ booths set up inside canvas tents.

“Which girls still need to find an antique copper tea kettle?” Ginny asked the group of kids. She loved to have something to search for like hunting for treasure. This year, she wanted to search for a leatherbound journal for herself.

The cool morning quickly gave way to high desert heat, but that didn’t deter the shoppers. The children eagerly examined the old-fashioned toys, magnifying glasses, and wooden versions of tomahawks and archery bows while carefully calculating how much was left of the money their parents had given them to spend. The women picked out a pottery piece every year and wrestled with their desire for a new pioneer dress. The dresses were so colorful and feminine.

“But really, how can you justify spending so much for a dress you wear just once a year?” Ginny commented to Sophie.

Rob reminded Ginny, “Hey, this is the Coopers’ version of Disneyland, and it certainly costs a lot less! How’s that for rationalizing?”

“Sophie, look at this!” Ginny picked out a blue and gold bag with a long strap that would lie from shoulder to hip. Sophie smiled with girlish pleasure and chose a beautiful blue cotton dress with a lace-up bodice over a muslin shift.

Rob patiently waited as the women felt compelled to examine every dress. He entertained himself by looking for another mountain man shirt and occasionally pointing out to Ginny any leatherbound journals he noticed.

“I love this one.” She chose one with hand-crafted paper and Celtic designs embossed in the leather cover.

“What are you going to use it for?” Rob asked, happy that he had found something to put a sparkle in her eyes.

“I have no idea,” Ginny responded, but she clutched the book to her chest for a while before tucking it into her market basket.

Many of the tradesmen in the booths were fascinating to talk to, and Rob peppered them with questions. They happily told their life stories and how they came to specialize in making barrels and brooms or pottery or old-fashioned bonnets. Occasionally they gave demonstrations of long-forgotten skills like spinning wool or using flint and steel to strike a spark.

Rob found himself entranced by a life-long goal from his bucket list. He found a true mountain man wearing leather breeches and dirt under his cracked fingernails who was teaching the art of bow and drill—rubbing sticks together to start a fire. In real life, the mountain man was a history professor, but you would never know it to look at him. A gentle giant, the gruff old man patiently helped Rob shape cedar bark into a nest that fit into his cupped hands. He showed him how to cut a notch into a cottonwood board and slip a small piece of copper plating under the notch to catch an ember. Then he twisted the bow’s strip of leather around a dowel so that the dowel rotated as the bow was drawn back and forth. Rob worked that bow back and forth until the rotation dug a hole into the board and began to produce smoke. Little bits of hot sawdust began to fall through the notch onto the copper plate until a glowing ember appeared.

“Look! Look! You got an ember!” Ginny and Sophie were excited to see some progress in this enterprise.
Rob quickly dropped the bow and gently moved the copper plate with its precious ember over the cedar nest.

Once the ember dropped inside, he picked up the nest, folded it together, and brought it to his lips to blow into it. He huffed and puffed until he was winded, but to no avail as the ember went out. Then he started the process all over again.

“Oh no! He’s starting all over!” Sophie complained, and Ginny rolled her eyes. They had been patiently observing the lengthy exercise, but at this point, they groaned.

“Robbie, we need to get back to our campsite and get dinner started,” Ginny reminded him. Finally, the huffing and puffing produced a tendril of smoke followed by a flicker that burst into a roaring flame.

Rob turned a big grin toward his girls and said, “Did you see that?!” All the way back to camp, he was giddy like a little boy who had just learned to ride a bike. Ginny laughed at him. Ever since his Scouting days, he had taken the art of fire starting very seriously. Their kids had all taken his challenge of trying to start the family campfires using just one match. Starting a fire was serious business in the Cooper family, and Rob had just taken it up a level.

By Saturday morning, all the family that was coming had arrived.

“Be grateful for the ones who have come,” Rob reminded Ginny in her ear. Ginny just rolled her eyes. How did he always know when she was mourning for the wayward ones? Maybe because she was mourning for them all the time.

The Coopers’ happy children had come with the grandchildren who could manage a couple nights in a tent. Richard bravely brought the older children by himself while Chloe stayed home with the younger ones. Richard was the Coopers’ academic achiever with a gift for marketing and all things computer related. He and Chloe and all their children were unusually tall like giraffes, and Rob liked to tease them about their big tent.

“It even has a vestibule!” he teased. The kids grabbed his hands and pulled him inside to show it off.

Rose and Brett had two tents to accommodate their younger children and their teenagers. Rose was the shortest of Ginny’s children, but she was also a spitfire. She loved gardening and everything old-fashioned, so the rendezvous was a constant delight to her.

Paul and Kelsie had also come, but they set up their tent in the nearest state park. Their little rascals tended to have rowdy nights, and Paul worried about waking up everyone around them. Paul was a gifted computer programmer with glorious, curly black hair and a woolly beard. What he and Kelsie really wanted was to be hippy farmers, so the rendezvous suited them perfectly.

Sophie brought her little travel trailer and never failed to impress Rob with her courage and independent spirit. She wasn’t about to let being single keep her from experiencing adventures with her family. The two of them always worked together to park each other’s trailers, level them, and set up the stabilizers. Trevor, the Coopers’ youngest son, often helped with this project, but he was a senior this year and had stayed home for various social events that were kicking off the school year.

Then there were aunts, uncles, and cousins. Ginny’s siblings all lived in the same county and were kindred spirits when it came to camping. Matt brought three of his sons and his new windmill that he wanted to set up on his big trailer. Matt tended to do everything in a big way. He was tall, dark, loud, and boisterous, and he was fond of taking big risks. His wife, Jenna, would be coming later with their daughter.

Peggy and Dean pulled in on Saturday morning with their two youngest kids. Their older children were overwhelmed by having babies and weren’t about to try sleeping in tents. Peggy was game though. She had always been Ginny’s dearest friend and partner through all kinds of craziness. She was born Margaret, but like Ginny, had quickly embraced her nickname. Peggy was thin and graceful, but just as loud and rowdy as Matt. Although Ginny was a brunette, Peggy was a blonde. Ginny always said that people couldn’t tell they were sisters until they opened their mouths. Once people heard the opinions flowing forth, they would say, “Oh yeah, we can tell they’re sisters!”

All these family groups pored over the Saturday event calendar and picked out their activities for the day. Rob and Ginny left early for the archery competition, feeling grateful it was now their children’s turn to help the grandchildren participate in the kid games. The kids ran off to sack races, corn cob tossing, and tug-of-war, followed by the scramble to gather up candy from the candy cannon. The morning flew by, and everyone hurried back to camp for lunch before it was time to leave for the father-and-child fire-starting contest.

This event was Robbie’s specialty, and he would never forget the year when he and Trevor had won. The contest required the kids to use a primitive method to start a fire, such as flint and steel or magnifying glass and “slow match,” which was a piece of highly flammable cotton rope. Once their fire was started, they had to boil an egg in a cup of water for a specified period, and then the father had to eat the egg.

Ginny turned to Matt to tell him about their most memorable year. “See that beautiful beard Robbie grows every year just for Bridger? Well, when our kids were little, the required cooking time for the egg wasn’t nearly long enough, and Robbie had to gulp it down nearly raw. For Trevor’s sake, he bravely chugged that thing with strands of egg white dripping down his wooly beard. I told him he was surely going to heaven just for that selfless act. Now they’ve changed the rules to permit frying the egg.”

“Well, hey, it sure would have been nice to have that rule when it was my turn!” Robbie complained. “This is going to be a piece of cake for you guys,” he directed to his kids.

“And you walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways, right?” Richard teased him right back.

Richard, Brett, and Matt each had kids who were eager to give it a try, so Ginny took them over to the bush where she had always gathered dry tinder for her children to use in the contest. Rob ran around to each father and child team to help shore up their little wood piles and to help huff and puff yet again that day to get the flames to catch. He continued to hover over each of his proteges and their fathers until the winner had been declared, the bystanders had drifted away, and the last child had finally witnessed the first tendrils of smoke and the satisfying burst of flame.

The family slowed down as the afternoon wore on, and toddlers and a few dads needed naps. Most of the teens headed down to the tomahawk and knife-throwing range to get in some practice after the official competitions had finished. They had figured out in years past that the practice time was more fun than the competition. The same thing was true for archery. Rob and Ginny gathered up the remaining kids and the family collection of bows and arrows and shepherded their group over to the archery range.

“See that dummy on the hay bale over there?” Ginny directed the gaze of the children. “Trevor won first place one year by shooting an arrow right through an apple on the dummy’s head!”

Rob pondered again, as he did every year, the confidence he could see growing in the children as they gradually improved their skills. What a gift it was for them to feel capable in something. What a gift it was for him! He became more committed every year to learning and teaching life skills. They were good for the soul, and sometimes they were surprisingly valuable.

Rob and Ginny were tired by the time dinner was eaten and cleaned up, and everyone gathered around the fire. After all the exertions of the day, Rob didn’t particularly want to walk across the entire camp to join in the Saturday night square dance. Ginny didn’t seem interested in dancing anymore, so he expected to spend the evening relaxing by the fire, until he saw his granddaughters begin to wheedle Ginny into going.

“Mom needs to put the kids to bed, and nobody wants to go with us. You and Grandpa are the only ones left!”

Rob groaned and pulled himself out of his lawn chair. “Ok, ok, maybe I can scrounge up a little more energy to do-si-do.” The girls squealed and jumped up to kiss him on the cheek.

The next morning, Rob and Ginny felt some nostalgia for years past when a testimony meeting would have been held outdoors next to the old fort’s walls. Some people had come on horseback, while most had walked to church in their period costumes and felt like they were reenacting a pioneer sabbath. Rob had always half-expected to see Brigham Young come striding in. The meeting must have grown too large and burdensome for the local stake to manage, and it was changed to a devotional.

Finally, it was time for one last activity: the family cook-off. Ginny, Peggy, Matt, and several of their grown children each owned a rocket stove that they loved, and they looked forward to impressing each other with their cooking skills. This year, the challenge was to cook a roast and then bake a pan of rolls and see who could finish first. They loved the competition, and they loved practicing their preparedness skills. Rob got started with building a little fire under the charcoal briquets in the central chimney of their rocket stove.

As Ginny watched and waited for the coals to glow and turn white with the heat, Rob stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her. “You know, Gin, I had a funny thought today. All the huffing and puffing I’ve been doing this weekend made me realize how much fire is not only at the center of our preparedness skills, but also our family activities.”

“Huh,” she said. “There’s a title for a romance novel in there somewhere,” she grinned up at him.

“Hearts of Flame?” he suggested.

“Ha! Exactly,” she laughed.

“Homestead Fire?” he continued. “Family Fire and Fury?”

“Ok, ok, stop!”