Little House in the Big (and burning) Woods

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Little House in the Big (and burning) Woods

Around 7:45 P.M. evening last week I was enjoying the dusk and giving the plants a drink when I noticed that the fields and woods to the northwest of the house were hidden in a thick white cloud, and with that quickness of mind which is a marvel to all who know me I deduced that we had a woods fire.

I did the 911 thing and then drove across the field to the tree line. I walked into the deepening-dusk woods and heard something moving -- arsonist? Deer? Wolf? Congressman Weiner? Hillary Clinton wearing a Richard Nixon mask?

"Hey!" I called. The moving stopped. I pushed my way perhaps thirty feet into that thickety, attack-briary mess and gave it up, bruised, scratched, and humbled, and returned to the open.

The first responder on the scene was a city police officer, and quick upon his tire-treads followed the Kirbyville VFD. Their sirens set the wolves – and my dachshund, Thunderbolt -- to howling mightily.

The firemen tried to walk into the brush, made it about thirty feet, and returned, scratched and sweating and gasping in the foul heat. This was a sub-theme of the evening -- everyone who responded to the fire, neighbors, firemen, and Forest Service, charged into the thicket against briars and vines, and all returned much exercised. A five-year growth of thicket in East Texas is as effective a barrier as all the barbed-wire in Viet-Nam bunched together.

An advance team from the Forest Service arrived, all kitted out in Darth Vadar helmets with recessed blue lights for forward visuals and blinking red lights on the rear. They charged into the woods and shortly reappeared, frustrated as the rest of us, their navigational lights still shining and blinking.

Two Forest Service bulldozers arrived and were quickly off-loaded, and just as quickly charged into the woods and disappeared, thundering unseen in the darkness toward the flames. These iron dragons surrounded the fire within an hour, isolating it to die, and within an hour or so were back on their trailers being transported to another fire.

The field was crowded with cars and trucks and four-wheelers and all sorts of people smoking cigarettes and talking on radios and cussing and enjoying themselves mightily in the hot night. And God bless 'em, for within a few hours they had the situation controlled. All the neighbors showed up, most of them with shovels, ready to get with it. Good folks, good folks.

The source of the fire is unknown; there was some speculation about lightning strikes from the cruel, teasing black clouds that sail above our year-long drought most afternoons.

Y’r ‘umble scrivener still has a house in which to live because of the quick response of the fire and forest services, but if they had been away on another fire -- the village idiots are loose, you know, loping along with their knuckles scraping the ground, playing with matches, their two or three brain cells misfiring at the synapses -- this narrative might not have ended happily.

Thanks, everyone.

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