fire! fire! hehe hehe hehe.
Vman is asking for tales of the hot, and boy do I ever have one. Shit, I have a story for just about everything, because idiot that I am, I have managed to get myself in some remarkable situations.
I was around seventeen and the neighbors had enlisted my help in raking leaves. They had a large yard, some four or five acres, and we raked into piles and burned and raked and burned for several days. Big pin oaks and Osage Orange, leaves the size of magazine pages. Near the edge of the property they also had a pretty substantial brushpile, and I raked the last of the leaves there to finish off the job. In the beginning of the last day we lit the brushpile and the last pile of leaves, and settled back with our garden hose and rakes to watch it burn down. We’d thrown quite a lot of cuttings into the brushpile, and as they caught and burned the sparks really flew, a nice scene- until the lit the leaves across the property line.
We rushed over to stamp out that bit of fire, but it was a bit too late. We hopped over the barbedwire fence and tried to rake the leaves into a pile we could control but the brushfire had already spread to two adjoining fields. The three of us couldn’t get moving quickly enough to cut firebreaks so we ended up just calling the fire department. Who arrived and said “what the hell are WE supposed to do?”
So they used their fire truck to hose down a couple homes to keep them from going up, and the fire burned on. Forty acres of standing corn, waiting to be harvested. Fencrows all along. Twenty five acres of thick woods. Several acres of canebrake. Old man Sugden’s still and still house. The old monastery’s hermitage. Several deer and flocks of pheseant. Not a pretty sight. At the end of the day, there were lots of people hollering and pointing fingers. A lot of burned, blackened land.
The folks who started the fire (thankfully, they chose not to incriminate ME, and it WAS their idea) ended up paying for the standing corn and some of the outbuildings.
The following year the burned area was the most lush and pretty in the area. I was just old enough to maybe be financially liable somehow, I thought, I was scared shitless I’d spend the next twenty years paying this shit off. I breatheed a huge sigh of relief when the locals claimed it was the best thing ever happened.
“The following year the burned area was the most lush and pretty in the area.”
Fire’ll do that.
I learned that the hard way when my cousin and I, dumb shits that we were (hell, he still is) decided that playing with the hot coals from the leaf- and branch- burning and raking them half across the yard was a great idea.
Took out the field next to our house (where I would later build my own home) and half the lawns in the neighborhood.
Next year, no one needed to fertilize, the grass grew so green and strong.
No good deed goes unpunished.
A friend and I once tried to put out a small grass fire that had been cause by a @#*&)+! idiot throwing a cigarette out the window of his car. We had it pretty much contained when the fire department showed up.
The nice Mr. Fireman decided we had set the fire “playing with matches.” He inflicted a big intimidation warning about how arson was a crime in an attempt to get us to confess. I explained how I had seen the idiot toss the cigarette. Nice Mr. Fireman had selective deafness to my statement, amplified with a “I smell feces” sneer.
About this time my mother showed up. She suggested that if Mr. Fireman had evidence then he should call the police, if he diden’t, to stop harassing childern. Mr. Fireman backed down in one hell of a hurry.
This was just the first of a long line of encounters that have earned firemen the utmost contempt in my eyes.
I hear that, Charles. Firemen and Cops are subject to the same thing: Everyone starts looking like a criminal. Hey, when you gonna start your own blog? Your comments make it clear you could easily write one.
I think it’s time for Contagion to chime in.
Four words: Welding gloves. Corn field.