GOOD GOD ALLMIGHTY, FIRE FIRE FIRE!

You KNOW I was excited to the MAX when I tell you I forgot to take a picture of one of the most picturesque opportunities I've had in a long time. The photo at the bottom of this post was taken by my nephew's lovely wife Corinne, who is home on maternity leave with Everett Phillips (born 7/11). They live maybe a mile away as the crow flies northeast of me. If this is what it looked like from a mile away, you can PERHAPS imagine what it looked like standing next to it--and if you can't, I'll help you with a few adjectives: horrific, heart-stopping, adrenaline-pumping, stinking, HOT, roaring, etc.

Had WAY TOO MUCH excitement Friday August 1 when, 10 minutes after 3 kids and I got home from town about 1 p.m., I happened to look down the road to the neighbor’s yard and to my horror saw a little puff of black smoke on the ground by our bordering fence where I knew there was a wad of dry cheat grass on their side of the fence growing under and around their rows & rows of discarded tires, old farm machinery, old tinder-box-dry wood buildings, and our 12-year-old windbreak built to block from our sight their mess.

I will point out that, had I not been the veteran of dozens of grass fires as a ranch raised kid and wife, I wouldn't even have given that first dab of black smoke a second look. I cannot bear to imagine what would have happened had I not been here to see it when I did.

What I did do is turn on my heel and race in the house to call my mother, who is our local Haley Bench fire department fire dispatch person. Turns out I was so GD excited that she mistook me for my sister Gwyn and sent the hired man’s wife hastily over the wrong hill to help Gwyn with what mom thought must be a kitchen fire or some such total mistake… which no doubt delayed by a few precious minutes the help I so desperately was looking for. NOT Mom's fault however.

I kept frantically calling – first my brother (and he couldn’t understand me either, altho he knew it was me and knew it was fire and knew I was scared—I had to run back in the house and call him on a different phone to make him understand and his voice was so calm and reassuring that I felt like he'd sent a hug through the phone). Then I remembered son-in-law Aaron has the closest fire truck so called over there and scared the shit out of 9 year old Chance who got GRAMMA and FIRE and couldn’t make anything else out, but when I got him to hand the phone to aaron (finally controlled myself enough to get him to do that), I managed to make myself clear to Aaron and he said I'M ON MY WAY. Then I called my nephew Clint and, although he told me later he couldn't understand me either, he knew it was me and he assured me in the kindest voice that YES AUNTY HE WAS ON HIS WAY.

By then I had the 3 kids in the pickup and parked in the neighbor’s yard where all hell had broke loose and nobody was there but me and 3 kids and a MONSTER FIRE – nobody was home, all doors were locked, & all vehicles keys gone so I had the TOTAL frustration of not being able to do anything but jump up and down and scream into the phone to a number of other people who without exception had a hell of a time making heads or tails out of my messages due to my extreme agitation. (If you know me, you know that disgusting behavior is totally out of character for me--no, not the yelling, but the loss of control in an emergency. Sigh.)

By then the sky was filled with rolling immense BLACK oily clouds of smoke which could be seen for miles and made finding the fire easy for all those neighbors who came flying. Aaron arrived first, and I was so glad to see him I nearly fainted. I yelled GAS TANKS and he yelled PROPANE TANKS, and he threw me a yellow fire coat to put on to cover my bare arms in case of God knows what, and I got in his fire truck (a modest old outfit with 300 gallons of water that thankfully I knew how to drive due to my ranch raising) and we took to spraying water on the gas tanks and propane tanks in a desperate attempt to keep them from blowing and burning – they were located between the HUGE fire and the neighbor’s home, big shop, and ripe wheat crop.

At that point, I could hear over the fire truck's two-way radio system some lady fire dispatcher somewhere as she calmly said, "There's a grass fire at Exit 469." I tried unsuccessfully to radio her back several times, although if she'd stuck her head out the door, she likely could have heard me screaming a number of colorful variations to this message: "This is NOT some GD grass fire!"

Then good neighbor Colleen Moullet (who managed after a bit of calm questioning to sort out my agitated message to please call June and Tom for me NOW because I couldn't find their numbers and their place was ON FIRE) located the neighbor’s son, who happened to be in his trailer house a quarter mile to the south of all the chaos on the phone and oblivious to the disaster happening at his mother's house. He must have been HORRIFIED when the phone caller said LOOK OUT YOUR NORTH WINDOW. He came tearing over, drove over/through the downed power line, and desperately started moving outfits out of harm’s way while Aaron kept spraying, trying to keep a lid on the disaster til reinforcements could arrive.

About that time, my darling brother roared in the yard in one of the huge old retired Army 6x6 fire trucks (our fire department has two of them as well as various other old retired vehicles from bigger, more prosperous local volunteer fire departments) and from the dust clouds boiling down all the roads headed for our place, it was obvious THE CAVALRY WAS COMING OVER THE HILL so Aaron and I went around on the other side of the fire – on our side of the fire and just in time as a line of fire was racing through our horse pasture towards our house – thank the very good Lord that we had severely over-grazed that pasture due to annual summer pasture shortage so the fire couldn’t go like it wanted to with the wind blowing behind it towards our house… we had to beat that back with LIFE SAVING WATER twice before 439 fire outfits and 3,000 neighbors boiled into the yard and started spraying hundreds of gallons of water on. There were sheriffs, the local REA, the local utility company, and the local news station on hand along with most of my family and lifelong neighbors and friends.

By then, June Equall (the neighbor lady whose husband Duane died earlier this year from colon cancer after a long battle – he grew up in my house as it and our property was owned by his parents) drove in the yard, having also been tracked down by someone not so hysterical as I. She burst into tears, but I told her it could have been one hell of a lot worse if I hadn’t been home and spotted it before it burned down their house, shop, and wheat crop… not to mention my house and all the homes immediately north of me (stepson Scott & family, nephew Clint & family, & niece Jami & family for starters).

They finally managed to put out (sort of) all the burning tires and by then the old buildings were nothing but blackened outlines over the top of melted contents. Sadly (by minor in comparison to what could have happened had I not spotted the fire at its outset) our shelter belt of pine trees and nanking cherry bushes planted on the property line between us by us about 10 years ago for the express purpose of hiding all the unsightly things stacked in their yard against the property line burned to a crisp...

My heart is still pounding… The deputy sheriff interviewed me when he found out I was the first person there and among other things told me he’d never seen such a marvelous quick & successful fire fighting effort by a local firefighting unit. I told him that that was one GD thing my family and neighbors were good at.