The Morning the Firewood Wouldn't Light

It had rained for most of the night before, not hard, just steady, the kind of rain that soaks into everything without you noticing until you go looking for dry wood the next morning and realize there isn't any. We were at a campground about two and a half hours from home, one of our regular spots, and I'd told Dana the night before that I'd get a fire going early so we'd have something warm in the kids before we broke camp. That was the plan. The plan did not survive contact with a wet firepit.

I'm not proud of how long I stood there with a lighter and a fistful of damp kindling trying to convince myself the fire was about to catch. It wasn't. Every piece of wood we'd stacked the night before, even the stuff I'd covered with a tarp, had picked up enough moisture off the ground that it just smoked and hissed at me. The whole time, the Coleman Triton was sitting in the back of the 4Runner, still boxed, and I hadn't given it a thought. Nolan wandered up in his sleeping bag like a little burrito and asked when breakfast was going to be ready, and I gave him the kind of answer that's really just a stall tactic. Ivy wasn't far behind, and Ivy at eight years old does not do well with a delayed breakfast.

This is the part where I'll admit something. For years I resisted bringing a propane stove on trips like this. I told myself real camping meant cooking over a fire, and there was some stubborn pride wrapped up in that. But standing over a firepit full of smoke with two hungry kids and a wife giving me a look that said we both knew better, I finally understood why half the campground had a two-burner stove sitting on their picnic table and I didn't.

I wasn't thinking about pride anymore. I was thinking about how fast I could get eggs into a pan before Ivy hit full meltdown.

We'd bought the Coleman Triton the spring before, mostly as a backup, mostly because a guy at the outfitter store in Tulsa told me every family camper eventually caves and gets one. It had lived in the back of the 4Runner since then, still in its box half the time, more of an insurance policy than a tool I actually used. That morning I pulled it out, set it on the picnic table, hooked up the propane canister, and pressed the InstaStart button on the first burner not really expecting much.

It lit on the first press. No matches, no lighter fluid, no cupping my hand around a spark hoping the wind wouldn't kill it. Just a click and a clean blue flame, right there on a picnic table that was still wet from the rain. I had a skillet down and bacon going within maybe ninety seconds of deciding to give up on the fire entirely. The second burner had the kettle on for coffee and Dana's oatmeal water at the same time, both flames adjustable enough that the bacon wasn't scorching while the water came up to a boil.

What got me wasn't just that the Coleman lit. Plenty of things work fine in your driveway. It was that it worked exactly the same on a damp picnic table in the middle of a campground with wind coming off the lake as it would have on my own stove at home. The wind guards on the sides of the burners actually did something, which I hadn't expected. I'd assumed those were more of a marketing detail than a real feature, but with a breeze picking up off the water, the flame on the left burner barely wavered.

Nolan came over holding his plate before the bacon was even done, which is about as honest a review as an eleven year old gives anything. Ivy stopped complaining the second she smelled eggs cooking, and by the time we sat down at the table together, the whole firewood disaster from twenty minutes earlier felt like it had happened to someone else. Dana didn't say I told you so, but she didn't have to. She'd been telling me to actually use the Coleman for two trips running.

We ended up cooking every meal on that stove for the rest of the trip, even after the sun came out and the wood dried enough to burn. Not because the fire wouldn't have worked by then, but because I'd stopped seeing the Coleman as a backup plan. Two adjustable burners meant Dana and I weren't taking turns waiting for one pan to free up, and the whole process of breaking down camp went faster because breakfast wasn't a forty-minute production anymore.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me straight out whether the Coleman Triton is worth carrying alongside a firepit you already like using, I'd tell you yes, and I'd tell you it's not really about the stove being fancy. It isn't. It's two burners and an ignition button. What it is, though, is dependable in exactly the moment when you need dependable and don't have a backup plan, when the wood's wet and the kids are hungry and you've got maybe five minutes of patience left in the tank. I still build fires when I can. I still like cooking over coals when the wood's dry and there's no rush. But the Coleman rides in that 4Runner on every trip now, and after that morning, it's not coming out.