First blasty winds of winter scoop down today, shovelling leaves from trees, flattening the blades of grass to a green ocean, scattering the cornflowers.
Shoulds crowd my head. I should make rosehip jam. I should paint the spare bedroom.
Oh yeah, and deadline for first readership lineup of book looms ever closer. I should be editing, should be fixing that last chapter.
But I worry. Next door they are burn-clearing a hill. Smoke hangs like a pall over everything and then gets scooped up by the wind and filters through windows and doors and lurks, gasping, over the bay until the wind snarls it up again and throws it against distant houses.
What if?
I run to the post office to send back some library books. So I don't have to look at the flames licking the vast hill about 500 metres from my house. But I smell it even 5 km away.
Yeah, they ran hoses across my property as a precaution. I gave them permission for this. But the fire starters/carers are about 12 years old. How would they know anything about flame-killing if the trees catch? Or maybe it will leap across the grass over the fence and on to my house?
Anxieties.
Now unfounded.
Day is done.
The winds are intense and noisy but warm.
I will take the dog for a walk along the shore. As is our wont at this time of day. I love watching the waves pound up the cliff on the other side of the bay and then fall back exhausted.
Much like me.
Worrying about nothing knocks me right out.
a day of fire may be better than the alternative: a patch of bush with twenty five years worth of dead dry bush, just waiting, day in and out, for the next spark when no one is watching.
ReplyDeleteExcellent point Fred. Thanks for this.
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When I was a child in California, vacant lots and parcels of pasture land and such got burned off. But clean air regulations put a stop to that. Don't know what the right thing to do is, really.
ReplyDeleteHow are you folks experiencing fires at this time of year, is there drought out there also?
ReplyDeleteBack-burning as it's called, is a proven tactic in fire fighting, but it takes experience to know how to do it. Hope they have supervision.
I hope all went well. It's probably built into our psyches to get antsy around fires, just as other animals do, but I'm not a good one to offer reassurances. Three years ago in early September, we saw fires along the low hills that surround us, moving fast. We started calling friends who lived in the path of the fires, and four families came to our house. We were evacuated, too, the next day, so we and all the other evacuees staying with us had to leave. By a week later, when the fires were finally contained, 1,700 homes were gone and a state park was deforested of its loblolly pines. Our house had survived, but our small community was devastated. However, as others have said, the fires moved so fast and took so many homes because so few had bothered to clear the brush and undergrowth in the forested land in the decades leading into the fire. Maybe if more underbrush had been cleared in a controlled way before the drought . . . Who knows.
ReplyDeleteHattie:
ReplyDeleteThey're clearing the brush for a building site.
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SFM:
ReplyDeleteLike I said to Hattie, deliberate clearing of brush. Thankfully finished today but I was a little wary last night in bed. Because sparks.
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Thanks for this GM but when fire threatens it's a nudder poem entirely.
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Linda
ReplyDeletethat must have been devastating. We had a horrid fish plant fire here a few short years ago and I was evacuated. I didn't write about it as I never felt distant enough from it. Sparks went everywhere and 4 fire departments had to be called in.
Also I had two bad house fires myself so I really, really know fire and all it can do....
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12 years old... The carers of the burn... No adults? Mmmm....
ReplyDeleteI popped in here. It is addicting. Read a few more posts. :-) Just wanted to tell you this.
Gentle hugs,
Tessa~
"Here there be musing" blog
Tessa:
ReplyDeleteI am so old doctors and police look 12 years old to me, figure of speech only.
Welcome and thanks for the kind words...
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I would have been worried about the fire as well. Glad it didn't get out of control.
ReplyDeleteI bet your rosehip jam is amazing!
Glad to check back and see that the burning has served its purpose. Hope you are breathing more easily now ~
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