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It's a cold winter night. Yet my friend Todd and I sit outside. We haven't seen each other for a while, so we can think of no better location for a warm reunion than here in my cold backyard, under the moonless and star-filled night sky, sitting around a fire.

So that's what we do. We sit on lawn chairs and drink cold beers and watch the flames rise and spin and snap out of the incandescent pool of coals that we occasionally feed, when one of us feels the urge or need, with sticks or splits of logs. Sometimes we talk. But as much as we chat we also just sit and sip and silently share our staring at the fire and looking around at the street-lit neighborhood and the dark foothills around town and those ice-crystal stars whispering above us.

Nothing could be better.

We've passed a lot of time together around fires, Todd and I, in a number of places - my yard, his yard, on the river, out and about. And it's not only with Todd. In fact, twice this week already I've found myself around a backyard campfire, talking with friends, or toasting marshmallows for smores with the kids, or playing guitar with some buddies, or . . . just sitting and contemplating the red heart of the flames. In our tribe, campfires aren't only for the backcountry.

I can't speak for my neighborhood accomplices in regard to this ongoing fire affection, but in my case I can safely say that this pyrophilia is a congenital condition. It might seem like one of those "You know you're a redneck if . . ." jokes, but the fact is that my warmest and happiest memories of childhood revolve around evenings with my parents and their friends and kids encircling an altar-like concrete hearth my father had constructed in our backyard. While the grown-ups would sit around the fireplace and do . . . well, do whatever grown-ups do sitting around a fire (which, from my present adult standpoint, seems to be blessedly little), we kids would hang and join in the fire-lit conversation for a while, until we either sprinted away on forays to play games or moved down to the pier to cast into the dark lake for catfish, which we would then bring back to fry over the open flames in a skillet my folks kept nearby for just such needs.

To a kid, nothing could have been better.

Why is that? Kids, of course, cannot help but like the times they are physically surrounded by friends and family. But what about the actual fire itself?

In my office, I have a picture of my son at 2 years old. It's not one of those posed family-portrait images, but a candid shot that I like to think captures not so much what he looked like at 2, but who he really was. The picture was taken while we were camping in Utah, and in the photo Webb sits in a lawn chair that he himself had carried down to where we'd had a fire the night before. And that's it: He just sits there at a somewhat uncertain distance, staring at the site of the dead coals.

Looking at this image, I can't help but see him sitting there probing the space for whatever it was that had called us all to gather around that spot the night before. Or, perhaps, I sometimes think, he is also stalking whatever it was inside himself that impelled him to drag a chair down and sit quietly there that morning.

What is it about the campfire? Whatever it is, when I myself search for those callings, I find they arise from a past deeper than just my family. For at least a million-and-a-half years, humans have used the campfire as the nexus of the family, the band, the tribe, of kin and community, of reflection and interaction. In fact, I would argue that around the campfire is where we actually became human - as the culture-makers we are, that one trait that truly separates us from other critters.

Because of that, the presence of a fire, I argue, triggers, like a spell, like an incantation, like a ritual, like some kind of ancestral Pavlovian response, both quiet introspection and convivial extraspection - those skills both conducive and essential to forging, negotiating, and reforming the understandings and relationships with ourselves and those around us that are our cultures. And the things that that don't come from the TV - the box in our living room, in all our lonely, isolated, individual living rooms, that substitutes for the campfire as the gravitational center of our modern family and social lives. That is our new wellspring of culture.

And I can't help but notice that when I see my now-teenaged son watching TV that he still looks a lot like that 2-year-old in the picture - staring, processing, searching for ideas and understandings. But this replacement campfire burns in places that aren't real, surrounded by people who aren't really there, but who nonetheless have lots of things to say to him . . .

So, when we recently reclaimed our backyard from our kids - now that they're teens it's time to toss the swingset, piece by dismantled piece, over the fence and downstream to the neighbors, for recycling and reuse by their two young kids - we went out and got a nice, big, steel firepan for our newfound space. This represents a small but significant evolution of culture in the Wright family, I think: I chose a moveable fireplace rather than building a nice stone one like my dad did so it, like the swingset, can become tribal property, moving around the backyards of our neighborhood.

Which it has a lot lately. Seems the tribe gets it.

Tonight, though, the firepan is home, where Todd and I share its joy and comfort on this chilly winter night.

After a while, Webb shows up, back from some high school activity, hanging with his own new and growing tribe. Like any teen, he quickly greets Todd and me as he trots by and heads inside. Probably off to watch TV or skateboard videos on the Internet, I think.  

Soon, though, he is back. He pulls up a lawn chair with us and casually starts poking the fire. And then tells us about his night.

Nothing could be better.

Ken Wright toasts his marshmallows in his backyard in Durango. He is the author of A Wilder Life: Essays from Home and Why I'm Against It All (Raven's Eye Press). You can email him at monkeywrenchdad@gmail.com.