Mi Contra Fa

Camp cookery

A while back, I bought a folding firepit.  I took it to Pennsic the year I camped solo and never used it - it seemed like it would be too much trouble to build and tend a fire just for myself.  I've been wanting to get more practice in with campfire cooking, because at the site is not the best time to realize you don't know what you are doing and will be eating cold cereal for dinner.  So I took the thing out to the back concrete patio, put some kindling in it, and lit it up.  I had on-hand a sturdy pottery bowl with broth, oatmeal, cooked chicken, and vegetables.  I covered it with an aluminum dish from my mess kit.  I've cooked with this bowl before on Coleman stove and on charcoal, but not wood coals.  I also put my lightweight cooking grate up, over the firebowl.

Lesson One: Wind is a thing.  My kindling was kiln-dried, and it wasn't raining, so I thought getting fire would be simple.  And it wasn't hard, but the heat was going everywhere but up to the bowl! 

Lesson Two: Coals are hot.  I burned about 12 sticks or so of 1" kindling to coals, then got rid of the cooking grate and put the bowl and its cover right onto the coals.  I was worried the coals would go cold before the soup heated and the oatmeal cooked.  NOT A PROBLEM. When I peeked under the cover after a few minutes, it was at a rapid boil.   Clearly, this is why a tripod with adjustable chain is helpful to have.

Lesson Three: Get two BBQ gloves.  The bowl was hard to handle with just one - to get leverage, I just about put the dirty glove-thumb in the soup a few times.

Lesson Four: Keep stirring!  I stirred almost constantly once I saw how high the boil was, and I still got a layer of toasted/burned oatmeal on the bottom.  On the other hand, the toasted oatmeal was delicious, so...?

Lesson Five: Use a bigger bowl. I could have fit in more greens, and the bowl would have been easier to handle, if I'd used a slightly bigger one.  As it was, the cooking bowl was the serving bowl, and so it was pretty much topped up.

Lesson Six: Evidently, wood fire puts out way more soot than charcoal. The bowl was red and black before; it's all black now!

Eilmer of Malmesbury - first presentable draft

The millennium had just gone by
And Eilmer of Malmesbury wanted to fly
He studied the sky and the stars and the birds
See, Eilmer the monk was kind of a nerd.
He got him some wool, and some wax and some rope
A whole bunch of feathers, two handfuls of hope
He made him some wings. They really were neat!
He tied them both on to his hands and his feet

Then Eilmer climbed up to the top of of the church.
He gave a great leap, and took off from his perch
At first he was fallin’, then spread his wings wide
And Eilmer of Malmesbury started to glide
O joy! It worked! He soared through the air
With the sun in his face and the wind in his hair
Young Eilmer flew off o’er the roofs of the town
Then he made a mistake - you see, Eilmer looked down

When Eilmer looked down, he knew terrible fear -
The ground was down there, but he was up here!
When he lost control, he was near the earth,
But all the same, this was going to hurt
“O Lord, please save Eilmer!” the old abbot begs,
And Eilmer survived (though he broke both his legs)
Poor Eilmer cried out, “I was doomed to fail!
I'd made the wings well, but forgotten the tail!”

-----------------------

True story, bro!

So this one - I ran across some notes I made about Eilmer a long time ago.  I thought this little historical snippet was interesting and wanted to turn it into a story.  Alas, I could not figure out a framing that was actually compelling.  "And then he crashed. The End."  There was not an uplifting (ha) ending, nor an obvious moral.  There was a small punchline, but it wasn't up to carrying the story's purpose.

Then all of a sudden, Charlie Daniels is drawling, "The millennium had just gone by, and Eilmer of Malmesbury wanted to fly," in my head, as if it were taken out of "Uneasy Rider."  I started composing the thing as I was driving, and I couldn't quite remember "Uneasy Rider"s structure, and by the time I got to "two handfuls of hope" we were firmly in Shel Silverstein-esque territory. The meter has definite bobbles in places, but I actually rather like them.  Particularly "Oh joy! It worked!" - going from... what are they, anapests? to iambs... sort of opens up the metrical space, just like Eilmer is flying high and free.  It's the definite climax of the poem.  Some of the other places, it's less intentional, but it still serves to keep it from being too tumpitty-tumpitty-tump.  I think.

I don't know if I like the "See" at line 4 - I put it in to regularize the line's meter, but it really isn't necessary.  Also not sure about "nerd" - I mean, I think it works and it's funny, but it's a very very modern slang term, so it's a little jarring.  This miiiight be a 'kill your darlings' line.

I was trying to make it a song - because who doesn't like songs? - but it really seems to want to be a spoken-word poem.  So here it is.

 

Sources:

Archive.org's copy of William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England, where Eilmer's flight is first recorded.

USAF memorializes Eilmer incorrectly as the first manned flight.  There are earlier Chinese and Arabic sources claiming gliding flight from towers.

Another short article.

There are several articles and maybe a book by Lynn White Jr that get into the technical details of how Eilmer could plausibly have actually done what William says he did.  This is an early version of the work - I think the latest is from 1978 and might contain more info.  I cannot recommend anyone re-creating Eilmer's flight as part of an A&S project, though!

Malmesbury, in England, has a small website for Eilmer.  The spot where he is said to have crash landed is now an alley called Oliver's Way.  (French chroniclers miscopied his Saxon name as Oliver at some point, and it stuck.)  The abbey bookstore doesn't seem to have an online presence, but you can buy their pamphlet secondhand.