Strike for Freedom

Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock

Got a crazy idea the other day: I need matches. The Shady Hill manse is running out, and we had few to begin with. We’re not ones to collect matchbooks at restaurants and bars with regularity so, now that essentially no business hands them out, we don’t have the means to light incense or candles when we’re so moved.

Like any household we have one disposable butane lighter, the long kind for lighting the fireplace, but it lacks the romance of striking a match. It seems wasteful, though it probably only has a thimble of petroleum distillate, because you waste some in maneuvering the child-safety latch. It’s not a protection against terrorist arson, as you don’t need an ID for lighters, sacks of fertilizer or even a gallon of gasoline for your mower or improvised explosive device. (My last combustion mower — back in high school — might as well have been an IED-in-training; I’ve since relied on push-reel or electric mowers for the two small yards I’ve owned.)

In rummaging through desk and kitchen drawers for matchbooks I found a box of wooden safety matches from the Tinderbox chain of tobacco stores. It’s been ages since they rented a spot in nearly every mall. Since I quit smoking a pipe 21 years ago — well, that little box must be a good deal older than that because I tried to avoid the Tinderbox. I preferred hand-blended tobacco (ahh, Taylor’s Pipe Shop in Fort Smith) and never liked the quality of Tinderbox leaf.

Those twigs didn’t light. Maybe phosphorus or sulfur has an expiration date. Stubbornly, I since have lit them with the fireplace lighter. Not the same.

If I didn’t want to buy merely a Bic or its equivalent nor, for a stick of incense, find a smelly Zippo somewhere, I needed matches. Specifically, strike-anywhere wood matches for the sake of memory. (Zippos use lingering lighter fluid not butane, fine for cigarettes but only in a pinch on a pipe.)

When I smoked a pipe in college and for a few years after, I kept a dozen such sticks in the silver match case of my father’s father. It had a ridge on the bottom, for the strike-anywhere kitchen match, and was inscribed, “You shall find your match in me.” Really.

When I studied in my dorm room — how can the University of Arkansas waste bureaucratic and police hours in outlawing smoking even outdoors? — I kept a jigger full of matches by the ashtray. Next to it was a piece of white-and-gray granite I found around 1979 on the shore of the American River near Sacramento. The cobblestone-like rock was the striker.

Apparently no store in Fayetteville stocks strike-anywhere kitchen wood matches. I tried discount stores and supermarkets. The label on the Diamond strike-on-box wood matches found at Wal-Mart said other products include the strike-anywheres. When I asked store personnel, though, I got shrugs. Last stop yesterday was Fayetteville’s clubby The Tobacco Shop. There the proprietor said she guessed that 9/11 put an end to such matches. She said the store for quite a few months afterward was unable to buy wholesale any sort of match or lighter. Then only paper matches, strike-on-box wooden matches, refillable and disposable lighters returned. Right then, though, two customers squeezed in, and our conversation ended.

Why worry? There’s the Internet, surely Amazon.com. I still have that rock.

Darn. Nothing online to light off a stone or the sole of a broken-in boot or a metal zipper, not to mention a careful flick of a thumbnail. (Every time I tried the last I burned my hand.)

No shopping site listed strike-anywheres, including Cabela’s (lighting a camp fire?) and Home Depot (handy at construction sites?) and others. A couple of personal Web sites noted their disappearance, one saying 1999 and the other 1992, muting the Sept. 11, 2001, theory. Of course the reliability of little sites is low. If you Google with such key words as “strike anywhere wood matches” you can read them yourself. That’s also how you can find the site of Jarden Corp.’s Diamond Match division, which I will not link here because of its cutesy audio on a few pages, using brief dialogue and sound effects about lighting birthday candles and grilling hot dogs. It does list strike-anywhere inventory but doesn’t sell retail.

Apparently, we’re forced to rely on fossil fuels, not renewable wood, to light my meditative patchouli sticks or My Beloved’s cloying Yankee Candle scents. It’s a stick-up.

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