Fire & Water

Last night at 11pm, I was here alone, and I stepped outside to toss the morning’s spent tea leaves into the yard and saw the woods to the west were glowing a shocking pink-orange. What looked like a wall of flame blazed behind the donkey pasture. Everything has been so dry that our township instituted a burning ban, so this was not good. Fire requires quick action, and the truth about this place is that there is only one way to get back here into the woods, and if the road is on fire, then my car would burn up.

So I drove out and parked beyond the woods in the neighbor’s driveway, and from there I could see the flames dancing thirty feet in the air. So I called the fire department and spouted gibberish. And then I trekked through the dark woods, across another neighbor’s property, unable to follow the path I knew was there. And I saw it was a great bonfire, bigger than our old tack barn. Our neighbor must’ve loved creating that monstrous blaze, and he was sitting beside it in a lawn chair, unworried, though there was no way he had a water source out there.

Meanwhile the fire department arrived with a pumper truck and no fewer than a dozen other vehicles, and I ran back to meet them. Sheepishly, I admitted I’d called them about my neighbor’s bonfire. I led three of them through the woods to his place, and they talked to him, while I stayed back. the upshot was that they were satisfied nobody was at risk because there was no wind. “What if the wind was stronger?” I asked. “We’d have to put the fire out,” he said.

Of the three fire fighters I led through the woods, only one seemed annoyed with me and told me it was none of my business whether my neighbor had a burn permit. A nicer guy assured me, “He says he won’t put any more wood on it tonight.” I asked, “What if he’s burning another time and the wind is picking up.” He said, “Call us again, I guess.”

This casual attitude seems contrary to the tone of the fire chief who is very keen on smoke detectors, who last fall had encouraged me, in the name of preventing fires, to unplug every single appliance every time I went out. (Turning off power strips was not enough.) He insisted that at night I had to close all the doors to rooms in the house to prevent a potential fire spreading.

Well, as a writer, fire is my business, and all night the possibility of the bonfire spreading haunted me. Too easily I could imagine myself burning in this old cedar family home, my donkeys burning while trapped inside their fence or barn, all these trees burning. The cat, who would hide, burning. If writers could shake things off, they probably wouldn’t write. The writer’s business is to take things to heart, to explore all possibilities.

Calling the authorities is not the way to be a good neighbor, I know. And my neighbor is a nice guy, who once helped me catch my donkeys when they got loose. Neighbors need to be tolerant of one another; we even need to love one another.

This morning, I trek through the woods to the fire, which is still burning. It’s starting to rain, so I’ve no worries about it spreading. Meanwhile, off and on all morning, I’ve heard bullhorn-loud raspy calls from the swamp, so before sitting at my writing desk, I stand in the rain on the overlook, where two cranes are negotiating intensely. As I watch, they come to a conclusion and then pick their way upstream on long legs, impossibly elegant, looking for a nesting site. I hope these new neighbors will stay; I am sure we will get along.