Pitchmarks #77 - "Like the provisional"

“How would you like to light a fire perfectly and have it burn for 3-7 hours without touching it or putting on more wood? It can be done, every time, but it requires forgetting everything you’ve learned about starting fires…”
Tim Ferriss, from “How to build an upside-down fire”

It is late December, and the slopes of the high Alps are covered with a foot of fresh snow, glistening in the moonlight. What golfing terrain there is up here is hidden until the spring, old divots replaced by the smooth tracks of the recreational skier.

In these quiet villages, the locals live a traditional life. Chopped wood is stacked for the long winters, and we rise and fall more or less with the natural light as it struggles to peer over the pine ridges of this north-facing glacial bank. But when those delicate rays desert us, the cold night sets in fast, and each day ends with the ancient human tradition of a fire. There is something in us hard-wired for this ritual; a primal memory from our evolution on the plains of Africa, perhaps.

We’ve been coming to this remote spot for a decade now, about as long as I have been immersed in another, far more contemporary routine, the consumption of podcasts as a learning tool. Among the few I devour, The Tim Ferriss Podcast is king, and as that decade rumbled past, I’ve lost track of the inspirations and revelations I’ve gleaned from the host and his extraordinary cast of guests.

In the same way as I can’t imagine a winter passing without this precious glimpse of a peaceful, mountain existence, I can’t fathom life without Ferriss and his chums. I’m not sure where I would be, what I’d be doing. So many of the triggers that have brought me to where I am now arrived suddenly, courtesy of the myriad strands of this source, and as the temperature hits two below and I gaze into the embers as they pulse a deep orange in the dark night, one of the earlier lessons seems particularly relevant.

Tired of making mediocre fires, the eternally curious Ferriss attacked the issue with the sort of refreshing energy that would make him an insatiable golfer, though I fear the maddening game would take him over and stymie all his other endeavours. The blog post that sets out a solution is here, in case you came here looking for a way to escape the frustrations of the “tipi” method, as he calls it. Instead of building a conical structure that looks like every other fire you’ve ever seen but which then requires a constant, nervous maintenance to avoid failure, Ferriss discovers an alternative method that is at once so simple and completely antithetical to what you think should work.

“Don’t let fire tending turn into another full-time job. Enjoy the warmth and reap the rewards of a better method, as counter-intuitive as it might be.”
Tim again, from the other end of this marvellous gift

The upside-down fire takes a little careful preparation, followed by several hours of smug delight, and as I sit in this deckchair, gently toasting chestnuts from the pit of molten lava in front of me, my thoughts drift back to golf, for that is surely the best example I know of a craft where what you thought should work reliably doesn’t. Golf and “counter-intuitive” go hand in hand. Or glove.

The harder you try, the worse you play, and most times the harder you swing, the poorer the result. You and your body have a thousand things to navigate in the split second of this epileptic lunge, but focus on more than one of those at a time and you are doomed; paralysis by analysis.

In contrast to most other sports, you can’t even blame the ball’s passage towards you, for we have the dubious blessing of not needing to hit a moving ball (Phil aside). Instead, it just stares back at you, daring you to not feel intimidated though it measures only 1.68 inches.

But the strangeness of golf is well illustrated by this apparent advantage for, in tennis, or football, or hockey, the moving ball reduces thinking time and this helps, not hinders. We are - though we will never believe it, particularly if we ever watch a video of our “swing” - smart enough to excel at this game without the conscious mind, but we just can’t help ourselves, and therein lies the great secret of golf and maybe life. Maybe we all try too hard, but - like the upside-down fire - logic is not always helpful.

If you stroll up to a short putt without even looking and manage to hit it as if you don’t care, right in the centre it rolls, but when it matters - when we take all available precautions to check the line and the breeze, and four effortlessly graceful practice swings, and a deep breath and hear an inner voice that pleads with you to not fail again? Well then the hole might as well be 1.62 inches, and the ball Size 5 or square, for it ain’t going to work. Maybe this game “requires forgetting everything you’ve learned about starting fires…”

So Ferriss solves for himself and for us the secret of a vigorous, satisfying, soul-enriching fire but he is too busy or too wise to try the drug we call golf, so that must remain our lifelong puzzle, our everyman’s koan. It’s an un-crackable nut, but those of us who are nutty enough to engage are surely cracking up, swing by swing, hole by hole. It simply isn’t fair, nor is it rational, but we got ourselves into this mess, so I’ll see you in the spike bar and we’ll go and try again, the deluded fools we are. As if there might be an upside-down fire-type cure out there hidden under the leaves, or in the whisper of the icy breeze. Just don’t hold your breath. Or try too hard.

And one more nugget from Tim, before we go. A favourite and brilliant question of his is “what would this look like if it were easy?” and I believe that our game has the ideal answer, one that encapsulates all golf’s absurdity in half a dozen syllables.

If golf were easy, it would look, every single time, “like the provisional”. I rest my case.