Wind, Fire and Surviving the Wilderness

The Windy City ain’t got nothin’ on us this month. I understand that Spring is marked by the winds here. While the early part of March was ‘lamb-like,’ this last of March is definitely blow-y. You know it’s blowing a small gale when the dog’s leash bows out before the gust.
Aside from the fact that I really don’t like the wind, especially coming out of the West as these winds are, the gusts bring with them a high fire danger.

Last week, there were two fires in the immediate area, both on the grass range lands that lie south-easterly of town. Fortunately, neither did significant damage, burning a couple of acres and being extinguished in less than a couple of hours. Both were started in part by high winds, either by taking down power lines or catching some other type of spark and lighting it up. A couple of interesting lines in the newspaper about the more recent of the two. First, the first fire company on the scene had to use its water conservatively until another fire company got there with their water tanker. That made me wonder – how else do you fight a grass fire except by dousing it with lots of water and what do you do if you don’t have enough water with which to douse? Oh, I know there’s fire retardant, but not for small grass-land fires like this.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t losses sustained, in this case a shed, a garage and a chicken house. Which brings me to the second story line of note, and I quote, "The chickens are believed to have escaped the fire."

The chickens escaped? How do they know the birds blew the fire? Was there a fowl fire-alarm where all the chickens went and stood around outside the chicken coop while the alarm sounded, just like you see outside of office buildings in the city? And while the chickens were hanging out, some went down the street to Cornbucks for a hominy-latte and others used the excuse to sneak out of the pen for the day? At least that could imply that chickens are smarter than turkeys. Domestic turkeys are known to stand in the rain, turn their beaks up to the sky, thereby drowning themselves. But chickens, without the help of fire marshals in orange vests, can organize themselves to escape a burning chicken house. And to think, the only hazard the chickens that lived next to us on Comus Rd had to face was to occasionally avoid the fox at night, and more often, defend themselves against the dog that was confined to the pen supposedly to protect them from the fox.

A slightly more serious side to the subject of fire, a couple of weeks ago we noticed, when walking Nutmeg around the long block, that there was a burned circle in the grass at the end of an arroyo that led directly up to the back of our house. We don’t know the history of this small black circle nor even how long it’s been there, but it gave us pause. Fire moves fast across these grasslands and up the dry arroyos. I’ve read the stories of the major fires and their destruction, power and threat. There’s a scary intimacy with fire when it can move quickly from a tiny spark to a fireline moving several miles an hour – and it’s in your neighborhood.

The topic of one of the classes Nick and I took at the Western Institute for Lifelong Learning was enjoying hiking in the wilderness. It actually turned out to be more about survival skills than just playing Thoreau, which was fine, since we don’t know this territory and, as I’ve mused before, hiking here has far different risks and challenges than walking the C&O Canal Towpath. We learned some very interesting things about putting together survival kits. We were encouraged to take a small survival kit in a fanny pack just to go on a day hike. I asked whether they would carry anything on a two-hour walk with the dog, and they assured me that even a two-hour walk with the dog can turn into a 48 hour ordeal. For example: a couple and their dog went up a short canyon with a clear trail that lay immediately off a main highway. The trap: they had to cross a stream in a couple of places on their walk up the canyon. The crisis: they didn’t know how to read the clouds and they got caught by a cloud-burst that drenched them and swelled the stream so that they couldn’t cross it. So they spent a night soaked and cold, with no supplies or resources except their dog – it probably wasn’t a Chihuahua because an 11 oz dog wouldn’t do much to help keep them warm. Anyway, the class was impressed to plan for the key concerns: 1— water; 2—body temperature; 3—fire, 4—first aid, 5—signal for help. So even a day kit should include water plus water purifiers (for the forest; wouldn’t do much good in the desert), 3 ways to keep warm, 3 ways to start a fire and 3 ways to signal for help. Many of the individuals in the class are already veterans of the wilderness experience: one plus the instructor are on the local Search and Rescue, several have taken some impressive hikes, and all have gotten lost!
This led to sharing tales and swapping tips. My favorite fire starter tip – take the cardboard core from a roll of toilet paper, stuff it with dryer lint and soak the lint with paraffin, and tuck it into a baggie – lights fast, lights hot, and stays lit for enough time to catch damp kindling.

Nick has been back in Maryland for a week and a half now, and was supposed to come home on Thursday this week. Now he’s had to extend his stay into next week. He’s taking care of some renovations and repair to my mother’s house so that it can be rented. We finally gave up on finding a builder willing to pay a reasonable price for the land, pushed by having a pipe burst in the house early in February and run water for a week, we figure. I miss him, and tend to go into a shell after a few days. But this weekend, I’m going out on the town!!! If you talk to Nick, though, tell him it’s perfectly harmless. Steph, Skee, Cheryl and I are going to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Fine Arts Theatre. It’s a production of the university’s fine arts department and tickets are priced at the way-way-alongway-off-Broadway cost of $10.