Fire

I would never describe my family with the word "pyromaniac."  (Maybe I should?)  None of us are obsessed with fire, and we all know "not to play" with it.

Or maybe not.

Our first "fire incident" as a family was a while ago, probably around 2013 or 2014.  It was springtime, and we had been cleaning out the back pasture - raking out all the old hay from the barn and making repairs, gathering downed branches and decaying baling wire.  We piled everything into the "new" pasture (a field we'd recently cleared for the animals to graze in), and despite the sprinkling rain, managed to get a small fire going.  Sister 1 and I sat around to watch the fire, but it really didn't do much damage, since everything was damp.

Dad eventually came home from work to make some barn repairs.  Sister 1 and I went back home to leave for music lessons with our brother.  And when we returned from lessons, our parents had the first fire story to tell us.

So Dad was back at the barn, hammering away at putting up new gutters.  Occasionally he would glance across to the new pasture to check on the burn pile, but the still-sprinkling rain seemed to be enough to keep it from getting high and dangerous.  He got occupied with the gutters, and when he finally looked over again, there was more smoke than before.  He goes over to check on it...and most of the pasture grass is on fire!

So he grabs his phone and calls Mom.  "Stay by your phone - I may need you to call the fire department."  Then he begins dousing the flames with water from the nearby water trough.  It works - but slowly.  He calls Mom to come back and help, and they are both able to put the fire out before it reaches the woods line.  They kept an eye on it for the rest of the day, but thanks to the (now harder) rain, the flames didn't flare up again.  (And, thankfully, the fire department was only a few miles down the road, so if things ever got out of hand, it wouldn't be so for long.)

~~*~~

Our second "fire incident" was not as exciting...the next spring we were preparing more sections for the beehives.  A few of the wood chambers were too old to use again, so we tossed them onto the little fire pit in the backyard.  Essentially, the flames from that little burning caught the grass on fire, and then some of the nearby stacked hay on fire...but again, God protected us and we had the spigot with a hose right there to quickly douse the flames.  Just had us excited for a minute or two.

~~*~~

The third fire also had to do with bees.  We were back by the barn, checking on the hives, and Dad was using his smoker - essentially a tea-pot looking thing, where you build a small fire inside.  The smoke comes out the tiny "spout" which the bees smell and think the hive is on fire...they quickly rush to the honey and eat it up to save it, which them makes them too fat and sugary to sting you as you check on the hives.  (Bees are kind of stupid sometimes.)

Daddy took off his shirt and tossed it in the back of the truck, leaving on his white undershirt (because the color white doesn't bother the bees...which again is stupid, because a bright white thing is kinda scary, honestly...)

Once finished with the bees, Daddy dumped out the little ashes from the smoker onto the tailgate of the truck.  (Not in the grass, we don't need another fire, lol.)  We drove around the pond for a fun drive, and then started to drive back around the road to the house.  My brother was riding in the back of the truck, and suddenly begins banging on the back window.  We look behind us, and see the ashes from the smoker fire are flying all over the bed of the truck.  Thinking he was just wanting to get out of all the ashes, we shout, "Hang in there, we're almost home!"

We come back to the house to find Grandpappy is just leaving, so we stop beside his truck and lean out the windows to say hello.  "We've just been checking on the bees," Dad says.

"I'm just dropping off my blackberry wine recipe."  Grandpappy is talking to us, but his eyes are looking ahead - at the sight of my brother dancing a hornpipe on a flaming shirt in the middle of the road.

~~*~~

Our fourth incident also has to do with bees (I'm sensing a pattern here??). 

This one was closer to winter time.  We had removed some of the sections from the beehives so each hive would be smaller and easier for the bees to keep warn over winter.  Before we stored the frames, we cleaned and dried them...except it was raining out.  So we started a fire in the garage in our little black wood stove, and put the frames on top for a few minutes each to dry them off (instead of air drying outside in the rain).  Brother was in charge of this...

I'm in my room, writing (surprise surprise, I know) when Sister 1 calls from downstairs "Hey, can you come down?"

I don't look up from my typing. "Okay, yeah, be down in a minute."

"Um, we need you NOW."

Then I smell smoke.

The garage is completely engulfed in smoke, and at the far end by the back door, where the stove is...red flames.  Brother heroically grabs the burning frame and tosses it out the back door and onto the concrete walkway, where it gets doused by the pouring rain.  We open the doors to let all the smoke out, and sort out our mistake - leaving the frame on the hot black metal of the stove for too long.

~~*~~

We were just trying to have a company grill-out.  Really.  We brought the old grill from the house, got hamburgers, hot dogs, chips...the whole lot.  One of our technicians started cooking the hamburgers out on the sidewalk of the main street.  We all chatted with the locals as they strolled past, walking their dogs.  Nice summer lunch.

Then the grill burst into flames.

Everyone: #panic

Basically, the grease in the drip pan caught fire.  But there we were, scrambling to put out this huge fire consuming our grill, while cars drive past and the ladies across the road in the bank are staring out the drive-through window at us.

So yeah, everyone in town knew about it.

~~*~~

I'd hoped we'd learned our lesson, and I think we did.  We went a while without any fire incidents.  (The local state park, however, had their own problems: a controlled burn jumped the fire line and burned about a thousand acres on the mountain.)

Then we had some fall storms and a HUGE tree fell down on the fence line in the middle pasture.  A family friend dropped in to help us chainsaw the tree to pieces and collect it all up for firewood.  And since we were outside, with a few containers of gas for the chainsaws, my Dad decides to go and burn down a few stumps from the old and dead fruit trees we had cut down earlier that year.  So he douses the stumps in gasoline, tosses a few matches, and lets them burn merrily away while we're chopping up the tree.

He goes back to inspect the stumps later, and finds that they're not burning as fast as he would like, so he starts at the top of the row of stumps and begins pouring more gasoline on.  Well, after the first stump, the flame travels right up the spout of gasoline and straight into the container.  Said plastic container goes up in flames.  My Dad, chill as ever, walks calmly down the line of stumps, pouring liquid fire left and right.  Then, in a grand finale, he tosses the burning and crumpled container of fire onto the last stump.

After some recent questioning, his response was, "Well, I figured that since it didn't explode right away, I'd be fine."

It's been some years since we've had a fire incident, so we are currently going under the assumption that our fire days are over.  At least for a while.

We tend go camping a lot once the weather gets warmer...