Run With The Fishes

You know how you see people on TV doing the stupidest stuff? And they are always the stupidest redneck looking people ever? I have some compassion for those people.

A couple of points of interest:

- I haven’t had a haircut in maybe 3 months. Part of the reason for the beard is to draw attention away from the horribly mismanaged hair. Theory being that in about Two weeks, I’ll shave, and hit a barbershop.

- Said hair is at it’s best/worst. Home alone all day with no one to impress. It’s wild.

- All I’m doing is running out some trash to the trash can to burn. Don’t need socks for that. Don’t even have to tie the shoes. Heck, these two shoes don’t even match, but they will do.

- Once the fire was blazing merrily, that first container which used for water was actually a one-gallon gas container. It never held gas, but there you go.

So, when the volunteer fire department shows up, Here’s the scene: A gas container beside the fire. Wife and kids outside watching. A wild man with shoes that don’t even match, smoke stained from head to foot, hair wired, face red and sooty, slapping at the flames with a black (once blue) cloth. Totally exhausted. YEE-HAW!

We went to Wal-mart last night, and it was one of those things where it felt like everybody knew. They were just smirking behind my back. Someone would get onto me at any minute for leaving the house with the smoke still rising.

“Not so fast, Fireboy.”

I’m half-way afraid to type this for fear of a jinx. For the past several days Allison has been going to the potty chair (half of the time telling us, the other half us seeing the signs and taking her). She has on average 1 accident a day but it bothers her when it happens, where a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t have cared.

How did this happen? Bribery. Since we know what a chocolate candy fiend she is, each time she successfully uses the toilet, she gets a chocolate chip.

Last night she was so excited because Greg showed her a new trick.
“Mom, you come with me! Dad showed me step. I have step stool, I can do it all myself! I step up, pee in potty, get candy! TA-DAH!!”

Christmas shopping is done (except for 1 gift!) and packages are heading west. What a relief. Now to wrap all of the presents for this weekend.

So last weekend, I decided to mow some of the pasture with my riding lawn mower. I mow the tall grass, maybe 30 yards deep. I stop short of the burn barrel because there is some trash around the barrel I need to clean. Surprisingly, it worked. The grass is all about three inches tall. And my riding mower didn’t complain much. The thing is, there’s an additional 4 inches of long-stemmed clippings riding on top of that newly cut grass.

Flashforward to yesterday around four PM. I have trash. I have matches. I must burn the trash. I burn trash roughly every other day. I burn plastics. I burn aluminum. I burn paper. I burn it all. I’m sure Craig can appreciate my style of waste management. The fire starts and burns as normal, no problem.

Routinely, almost ritually, I drop one lit match into the grass to see if it will burn, and how badly. This is my guage to determine if I should stay out and monitor my burn. I drop the match. It doesn’t burn anything. Cool.

I get to the line where pasture meets yard. I drop another match to see what will happen in the clippings. It burns, of course. I watch, mesmerized. Okay, that is probably enough. I stamp on one side. It doesn’t go out right away like normal. I stamp on the other side. Four inches of clippings really does have a lot of airspace in it. My stamping is fueling the flame more than anything else.

I grab the grass around the fire and pile it on, hoping to make a ring of clear, 3 inch tall live grass around the flame. Yet it grows faster than I can clear. It’s time for the shovel. I’ve stamped out more than one fire with the flat of my shovel, which I keep by the burn barrel.

Alas, the shovel is missing. I carried it out into the yard to kill a snake days before Wendy and crew showed up. Boy, that fire is getting pretty big. Maybe a five foot diameter, with LOTS of easy fuel.

Maybe the hose will reach. I run around the house, grab the hose run it back trying to remember if there is a closer faucet. There’s not. The hose comes up maybe 20 yards short. I might be able to spray it down still. But there is a malfunction. The hose has a problem area between the faucet and the cart. There is zero pressure. I wonder what will happen if I were to let the fire go. Will it stop when it clears the clippings and reaches the tall grass? I wonder this as I’m running for a bucket to fill with water.

A bucket to fill with water does not have the same affect as it looks like it does when you watch cartoons. There was no hiss and rush of steam as the fire extinguishes. The fire didn’t even flinch. This is a really big ring now.

A quick dash into the house and a quickly written warning to Anna to come home (it was her time to come home anyways) is in order. Must be brief, yet convey my message, but not upset her. “come home now. There’s a fire. It’s not that bad.” Yeah, that should do it.

I have on a long-sleeve shirt, and one of my TRUSTY North American T-shirts on underneath. These shirts have served me very well. Off with the long sleeves, off with North American. Back on with the long sleeves. Soak North American in the sink really fast. Rush back out to the ever expanding ring of fire.

So I’m out there slapping out sections of the fire with a wet shirt. Anna pulls up. “NOT THAT BAD!?!” yells Anna in disbelief. “Hey, could you fill me up a bucket of water?” Back to slapping on the fire. It’s reached the tall grass. Live, tall grass poses no threat to this fire. Great. By this point, I have done a LOT of running. To the house, around the house to the fire, back and forth from the sink. The front of my thighs (quads) are starting to burn, like they might cramp up. This is nothing like sitting on the computer all day, like the last 2 years of my life.

I’m actually making progress on the flames now. Can I put it all out? how quickly is it growing? Will I cramp up? Will I inhale a lot of smoke? Will I some how catch fire? Can I catch the flames before they reach my boundries and get into other people’s property? Maybe we should call the volunteer fire department. “Maybe we should call the volunteer fire department, Anna.” “Yeah, I think so.” “So just tell them we have a grass fire in the field that is getting out of control.”

Anna had filled our indoor trash can with water. It stands about where the picture is taken from. While I was relatively level-headed about the whole thing, one thing that didn’t occur to me was to drag the water closer to where I was battling the fire. So more running. More tightness in the legs.

By the time the fire truck shows up, I have probably between 2/3 and 3/4 of the fire extinguished. There is maybe 20 yards of flame left? That’s obviously just at a guess. Now, this isn’t the bright red shiney fire truck. This is like the old fashioned ones you see in parades, if parades endorsed dirty fire trucks. The one man in the truck pulls out into our field and undoes the hose. Anna and the kids are all standing huddled together by my water bucket, watching. The kids are loving it, I’m sure.

I’m exhausted. And I don’t see how I can possibly help the man with the hose. I may have been fighting with this slowly, but steadily increasing fire for up to 40 min by this point. I stagger back to where Anna and the kids are. “Greg? Maybe you should go offer to help that man. He is a volunteer afterall.” Yeah, ok. I start to make my way back to him. Another pickup truck with a flashing light pulls up as I’m going back out. The fire is almost extinguised. I feel bad that this guy also came. I felt worse when the second truck pulled up. And then the third. And then the fourth. There’s a little boy sitting in one of the trucks waiting on his dad to finish up. These are people that could have been at work, or coming home from work.

It takes the man all of about five minutes to put out the rest of the flames. With pressure equal to that of what my garden hose could have supplied. When it is all said and done, I go to apologize for having to drag them all out there. They are cool about it. They don’t ask how it happened. Just say that accidents happen. They joke that they need to go get the ticket book out of the car to fine me. But one of the other guys doesn’t get the barb. “What can you fine him for? There’s no burn ban in affect.”

So They jot down my name and address and phone on a hand-sized spiral notebook. A “Thank You”, a handshake, and they are gone.

I feel ridiculous. How did I let that happen? We go inside, I look in the mirror. I look ridiculous. And very smoke-stained. And red-faced from the flames. The one lingering fear is how much shit I’m going to catch from people like Anna’s boss, and anyone else who knows me in town that hears about it.

“Well,” says Anna, “Look at it this way. At least you probably get to be on http://www.shelbycountytoday.com.”

Last night I took Nathan and Zoey to see a movie. All in all, the movie was pretty good. I didn’t miss the parts that were cut from the book. It’s been so long since I read the book that when things happened in the movie, I kept thinking, “Oh yeah! That’s what happened”.

This book was where the series started to get really dark. Until we got to this one, we had read the Potter series outloud for bedtime stories. Book 4 started right out of the gate with a nightmare enducing murder and it wasn’t something I wanted to subject their very young minds to.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years to a dark movie theater. At different points in the movie both of them would almost cover their eyes, sit up super straight, or pull their feet up under them in their seats. They laughed at some of the jokes, and both thought the movie was really good. Zoey may have still been a little young for it (many things went over her head). Because it was a movie, and not a book, where her imagination could run wild, the scary parts were just the right amount thrill for her. Nathan and Zoey are what made the movie worth watching for me.

We have already established that when we put Allison in bed she likes to talk until she realizes she doesn’t have a captive audience, then goes to sleep.

Last night while Greg was laying down with her, it was quiet for the longest time, so she was just thinking stuff out in her head.
When Greg got up, she jumped up and said she was going to “run like the fishes” and layed down and kicked her legs like wild.

Earlier in the day she was laying in my bed and was rolling all over it laughing like a madwoman. When I asked her what was going on, she said the pillow was tickling her.

5/12 4:31 PM Greg hey,can you come home? I need your help./
5/12 4:31 PM Greg like soon
5/12 4:31 PM Greg (fire)
5/12 4:31 PM Greg (not that bad)

I book it out of work. Drive home to see flames in our field and Greg beating at them with a black cloth. First thought is that something escaped from the burn bin. Then I noticed that at the beginning of the scorch-marked ground there is a tiny gas can. What has Greg been playing? Run out to see if I can help. “Uh can you get me some water?” After wrestling with the water hose I fill up our trash can with water. Not that they didn’t make perfect sense before, but bucket brigades with smaller buckets are such a smart thing. Water is HEAVY. As the water is filling up Greg and I come to the same decision – It’s time to call the fire department and report a field fire. It isn’t really that big, but: Greg is getting worn out from running back and forth from beating at the ground to getting his rag wet and we don’t want it to get to where it can’t be handled. One of our neighbors is a pine tree farm so it had potential to be disastrous.

Tanker firetruck pulls up and drives through the field to get to the other side of the fire. The fire truck is followed closely by a normal truck with flashing lights which parks in the driveway, thank you very much. The Fire Chief gets out and starts hosing down the fire. He has most of it out when 2 minutes later a 3rd truck arrives with lights in the dashboard flashing. By the time the 4th and final volunteer firefighter arrives, the fire is out and they are just hosing down the ashes to make sure no flare-ups occur.

For Greg’s take on things you can visit here.