Fire!

     “Fire fighters work to control a grassfire that gave Atwood a smoke-scented Sunday afternoon Oct. 5, [2003].” 

     So reads the item from “Looking Back 15 years ago” in the local paper.  I remember it as if it were yesterday. 

      The house was permanently under construction in those days.  There were quite a few small scraps of wood, especially OSB board.  Some of the bigger pieces I had used to pave the way to the trash-burning barrel and the compost pile.  (We had no garbage disposal and sometimes it could be muddy getting to compost pile or trash cans .)

    So I spent a couple of hours Sunday morning burning trash.  The wind was just a breeze out of the southwest, a pretty good day for burning. 

     I had elected to do that rather than trek down to the neighbor’s pasture to cut a load of firewood in the Dodge pickup.  There was lots of good firewood down in the bottoms, but some rather rough ground to get there.  It had been a dry Fall.  I feared I might set the pasture on fire with the pickup’s exhaust system.

      So I burned trash instead.  I had exercised due diligence, covering the burn barrel with a screen to supress the flying sparks.  All went well and the big flames were done, only the coals to simmer and go out.  Or at least so I thought.

      I took a bike ride down the county road, it was such a beautiful day.  When I came back, I rode past the burn barrel.  It was still smoldering and smoking, but nothing unusual.

     I went inside to fix a lunch and maybe catch part of the football game.  Sometime later, not more than 20 or 30 minutes later, I looked out the east windows to see flames encroaching on my woodpile some 30 or 40 feet east of the trash burner.

      My woodpile going up in flames?  That pile represented a lot of work.  I grabbed the fire extinguisher and rushed outside to save the woodpile.  Then I saw the real disaster.  The smoke and flames were headed northeast over a sizable area.

     I yelled at the Goodwife to call the fire department.  The fire had already burned through the north yard where I had several ponderosa pines.  They all were singed.  Two would die and have to be replaced.

      Worse yet, the fire was into the cedars north of the house that provided wind and snow protection during the winters.  It was burning into the neighbor’s pasture, the very pasture I was afraid I would set on fire by venturing into it with my pickup truck.

       There wasn’t much time to think.  My neighbor across the draw, some two miles as the crow flies, but five or six miles by road, was already pulling into the yard.  He saw the smoke and flames long before I did.  What to do? 

      I don’t know.  Get the gates open so the fire trucks can get in.  The two of us were no match for the task at hand.

      The fire extinguisher quickly ran out of water and I had not succeeded in getting the woodpile extinguished.  I abandoned both, extinguisher and woodpile.  I was reduced to the garden sprayer, all three gallons of its capacity.  The fire extinguisher required an air compressor, which I did not have.

      I tried to control the southwest edge of the flames to keep them from getting around to the southwest where the housed would be endangered.  The Goodwife took the garden hose to the woodpile and succeeded in getting it extinguished.  I helped her string the hose out toward the windbreak, but we lacked quite a few feet of reaching it. 

      More neighbors arrived.  One lady came from church.  She was in black skirt, hose, and black dress shoes.  The skirt may have survived the afternoon, but the shoes didn’t.  She and the Goodwife spent the afternoon in the cedars keeping the blaze from destroying the trees.

      Another neighbor saw the lack of garden hose.  I told her to go buy hose, but no stores were open Sunday afternoon, so she recruited a few hundred feet from her neighbors in town.  Even with water, it took the ladies all afternoon to control the smoldering flames that worked under the compilation of dead grass and needles that covered the ground beneath the cedars.

     The fire fighters and several volunteers, including local Future Farmers of America boys who showed up, fought the grass fire in the pasture.  The battle was complicate by rough terrain unsuitable for motorized vehicles.  The boys relied on shovels to stop the flames advance.

     I was still worried about the south edge of the fire front.  I left the girls in the tree row and headed out into the pasture with my weed sprayer.  I managed to extinguish everything up to the highway running north into Atwood.  The flames on the south had to back up into the wind, so they were much more docile than the flames consuming fuel to the north.

       My three gallons were just about gone as I approached the highway.  A man in a pickup driving down the highway saw me, stopped, and hauled two jugs of water over the fence and helped me replenish my sprayer.

      The south edge safely suppressed, I started north.  The fire departments had stopped that and were working on the north and east edges.  I made my way back to the house where the girls were winning the battle in the cedars, finally.  I started checking hot spots that were smoking.  I feared it might reignite, but there was nothing left to burn, really.

       The hot spots were cow droppings.  I remember Dad talking about picking up cow chips for cooking fuel when he was a kid growing up on the prairie.  I now had a good idea of just how good a fuel cow chips are:  they burned hot, and they burned for a long time.

       There wasn’t much left for me to do.  Begin surveying the damage:  the worst was the trees we lost.  There is now a permanent hole in the northwest corner of the yard where the cedars died from the fire.  I tried for as long as we lived there to get other trees to fill in, but I was not very successful.  The roots from the neighboring survivors spread over to the blank space where I was trying to get new saplings to grow.  The bigger trees hog all the water and nutrients, leaving the little fellers to languish and eventually die.

     There were some fence posts that had burned.  Two or three power poles had to be replaced.  I thought I would get a bill for that, but I never did, perhaps because other fires in that pasture were started by electric lines arcing.  (There is a substation in the pasture, too.)

     The immediate job was to thank the many who helped fight the fire.  How do you do that?  Then there was all the garden hose to return.  I don’t remember exactly how that was done, but some folks didn’t get the right hose back.  I offered to buy new for them, but they all declined.

      How had the fire started?  Obviously, it was the trash-burning barrel.  The charred area looked like an old-fashioned megaphone like the one the cheerleaders used in days of yore.  The mouthpiece was the trash barrel, the huge bell spread out in a V-shape to the northeast, the direction of the breeze.

      How did the fire get out of the barrel?  It didn’t come over the top.  The particleboard walk I had constructed to get to the compost pile in muddy weather was to blame.  The fire worked its way out underneath the barrel, igniting the OSB stuff.

      Complicating the matter was the compost pile.  I had tried to use hog wire to keep the animals out of the compost.  I thought I was dealing with coons or other vermin, until one morning I found the dog’s collar stuck in a hole in the hog wire.  Iko was the vermin.

     I had wood pallets lying around doing nothing, so I constructed a fence out of four of them, using screws and some 1 X 2’s to connect the pallets and hold them together in place so the dog couldn’t get to the scraps.

      The fire worked its way via the “boardwalk” to the pallets.  When one of the 1 x 2’s burned in two, one of the flaming pallets flopped over into the dry grass, and away it went.

     For the next few days, I had to suffer the good-natured ribbing about being a pyromaniac.  A small price to pay for all the help we got from the community.

      For the next few months, the “burn scar” served as a reminder of the incident.  However, come April and some moisture, the burned area turned a beautiful green.  A few of the yucca plants had perished in the blaze. 

     A local preacher stopped me one day that spring.  “Congratulations,” he said.  “You have the greenest pasture in the country!”  Some small comfort for the trouble I had caused.

     Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time the trash barrel ignited the neighbor’s pasture.  The next time, it wasn’t my fault.  Honestly!