On the day I bought the stove, I used up every pack of matches in the house. The stoop was littered with their charred and twisted remains. Some had only the tiniest tab of unburned paper where I'd let the flame go too far, pinched between fingertips, then fingernails. After a few hours, the tip of my index finger was hot and puffy, my nails a little scorched.

I'd developed a rhythm. Pump stove. Turn knob on and let fuel fill small reservoir, soaking wick. Turn knob off. (A safety precaution, the directions said.) Light match, light fuel in reservoir, let burn. Turn knob on. Watch stove sputter and flame go out with a small pop. Say FUCK.

I lost track of time. I tinkered, I fiddled. A rock held down the instructions, and tiny stove tools and spare parts lay scattered on the sidewalk. My girlfriend showed up and laughed at me when she saw all the matches. I said "fuck" a few more times, and she kept a safe distance while I pumped up the stove again.

"Why do you keep turning the fuel knob off?" she asked.

"It's supposed to keep the stove from flaring up," I said, my nose inches from the fuel reservoir as I watched the flame die again.

I was the only thing likely to explode, she told me.

"This thing burns everything, jet fuel even," I said. Excitement cut some of my frustration like a finger wiping off fogged glasses. This was new gear, this was part of the adventure.

I pumped the stove, lit the match. "Fuck!"

Two weeks later, she drove me and all my gear to Chicago and spent a few days at Tony's parents' house before we left on what we expected to be a summer-long bicycle trip to Alaska. She told Tony about the stove. I assured him I would figure it out, and he bought in to my confidence, mostly. This was part of the adventure, a loose end that would add interest.

Tony's mom would have nothing to do with loose ends. She had the eye of a customs agent checking passengers arriving from South America. She questioned us, listening for tone, conflicting nuance, hesitation, passive verbs. She asked about food, water, rain, sleep, sun, cars, wild animals, maps. We answered "Yes", "No problem", "Sure", "Look at this." We lied.

She asked about the stove.

It was brand new and whisper light, its brand name suggested. It ran on white gas, kerosene, gasoline, jet fuel, anything that somebody would use to heat a house, run a car or fire up a plane. And though I tried and tried, I couldn't light it.

She maybe sensed my doubt and tried to get us to take a spare stove, one that looked army issue. Tony fiddled with its mechanisms. We eyed it dubiously. A spare stove would be a lot of extra space and weight, Tony said. Needing a spare stove would be like saying something was wrong with the one we already had, I thought.

Believable fiction is in the details, so I produced the stove at Tony's mom's request. It folded into a black nylon stuff sack barely larger than my fist. I unpacked the device and displayed its various parts. The plastic pump, the skinny wire legs, the heat reflectors of heavy foil looked insubstantial to her eye. But when I rubbed a little carbon off on my hand, which the directions said was a sign of inefficient burning, her suspicion eased a little. It had burned something. It might even cook something, but her look was hard to shake. It said, "If I count more than three ribs on my boy when he gets back, I'll have your butt--after a nice dinner of Polish sausage, of course."

"This burns anything, jet fuel even," I said.

"Where are you going to get jet fuel where you're going?" She asked.

So the negotiations went. She didn't want to see us light the stove or set up the tent. Maybe she didn't want to see how we would be living for the next three months, but she wanted to make sure we knew what we were doing. And after a time, she was cautiously satisfied.

We didn't know what we were doing, of course. But we hoped our resourcefulness would carry us through. We needed to lie to her, lie to ourselves, really, if we were ever going to leave.

On our first night out under the stars, it rained. I sat huddled under a poncho strung between two trees, pumping the stove and watching it flare and wane and go out. Pop. "Fuck!"

Our cooking pot and the dinner we thought we would cook were spread out in anticipation of our first hot meal outdoors. This wasn't wilderness, though. We were in a campground with a deep clear lake that scuba divers used for practice. It cost $18 a night, and we were still in Illinois. It had a bar. After another hour of frustration with the stove, Tony proposed that we go to the bar to get more matches. That sounded like a fine idea.

We ate French fries and drank Old Style beer and went back out to the tent to sleep. Big day tomorrow, we said. Wisconsin. I left the cooking gear out overnight covered by the poncho.

On the next night the stove still wouldn't light, so we cooked over a fire. The next day it rained and the next and the next. It didn't stop. Fires were difficult to light with the wet wood we could scrounge, but we got by.

At Wyalusing State Park on the Wisconsin-Iowa border, we camped on a high bluff over the Mississippi. The campsites had fire rings made of steel with a rim about 18 inches above the ground. We gathered wet wood for the fire and made it into a teepee. We used paper trash for tinder and I tried a few times to light it, but the wood wouldn't catch. Even the paper was reluctant to burn. Now I was cursing at the wood, and Tony left to go to the bathroom.

The RV campers next to us, two retirees eating stew from a Dutch oven, looked on with curiosity. Our bikes were a novelty in most campgrounds, and we were starting to feel like spandex celebrities when we rolled in. Everyone seemed to watch us.
When I grabbed the bottle of white gas and sprinkled it over the wet wood, their curiosity was piqued. I stepped away to hunt for the lighter. In the moments I took to find it, the fire ring filled with white gas vapor. I bent over the wet wood and flicked the lighter. The fire ball swallowed my head, singeing my hair and my eyebrows. I felt a warm glow, like a sun lamp on my face. I staggered back and put the lighter on the picnic table. I wondered if anyone had seen me and couldn't bear to look over at the RV site. Tony came striding up, and finding me wide eyed and smelling of burned hair, he asked what happened.

"Fireball," I said. "The white gas exploded when I tried to light it."

This was straight out of Tony's mom's nightmares about the trip. Good thing we weren't using jet fuel.

The two RV campers came over a few minutes later with their cast iron Dutch oven filled with a stew of ground beef, corn and red peppers.

"Where you guys headed?" They asked.

"Alaska," Tony answered. I was still in shock.

"We thought you might want some of this. We've got plenty, and I'm sure you're hungry after that...er...ride. Just bring the pot back when you're done."

We joked about carrying it away on our bikes and thanked them and ate. Tony lit the fires after that.

The stove was like a novelty store puzzle, and at times I seemed maddeningly close to success. When we arrived at camp in the evenings, we would gather wood for a fire, and while Tony set about building it, I would assemble the stove.

Pump. Turn knob on. Fill reservoir. Turn knob off. Light fuel. Let stove heat up and turn knob on again. Watch fire flicker and die. Pop. I wasn't even cursing any more.
We crossed Wisconsin and Minnesota and most of South Dakota. Our first real climb came in the Black Hills. In our minds, it was where we finally crossed into the West. We camped in deep forest that night at a place called Deerfield Lake, and after 23 days, I got the stove to light, its burner making a small, but authoritative, roar.

Apparently, the leather ring that sealed the pump had dried out and wouldn't pressurize the fuel bottle until the rain we'd ridden through soaked the leather, swelling the ring. Instead of sliding easily in the pump body, the slide grew harder to push with each stroke. The pump worked. We ate stew that didn't have campfire ashes in it and celebrated by drinking a bottle of brandy and sitting around a fire that we didn't need for cooking.

Hungover the next day, we rode out of the Black Hills into eastern Wyoming. We called our parents from a pay phone at a boarded-up convenience store.

"Everything is working fine," we said.

MARK BLAINE, a 2000 graduate of the University of Oregon graduate program in literary nonfiction, is editor of Forest magazine.