I'm Smokey the Bear

So.

I have been at my friend Sarah's in Salem all weekend. She's lots of fun and so is her husband Luke. She's a writer who is currently spearheading the writing group I helped start last Spring and he is a super smart guy that she's super lucky (and cool) to have and I love spending time with them and talking. He really makes me think. My friend Athena is here with me and we are ostensibly "writing" for group (we're surfing the net, reading webcomics and fanfiction and eating good food).

Sarah sprained her knee earlier in the week so she's been trying to stay off of it, but last night she decided that she wanted to go on her walk around Bush Park just like normal, so I volunteered to go with her (leaving Luke, Athena, and our friend Kristel who had come over for dinner last night back at the house). We got about halfway around the park before she had to sit for a second time, at the same bench she always does, and I realized that I smelled smoke.

Normally that wouldn't be an issue. You can do barbecues at this park so it's not a huge deal to smell something cooking (I suspect the upper park has those things you cook in and people cook down by the creek all the time). BUT. We're in a huge burn ban time right now because there have been brush fires (huge serious ones) all over the state for the past month or so. There's been a huge brush fire on the outskirts of Salem for a while (I'm not even sure if it's gone yet) so they're really cracking down on these things.

So while we were sitting there I was sniffing and asking Sarah where she thought it was coming from, the creek? The houses across the creek? Was it a barbecue or something burning?

And she looked down at my feet, kicked at the dirt, and said, "No, it's down there."

And I said, "No, not smokes," because there were a lot of cigarettes under my feet, "SMOKE."

And she said, "Yeah, there's smoke."

"What?"

I kick at it too and I realize that the bark mulch is actually smoking.

"Holy crap. That's not good. Here, lemme kick it out."


But the deeper I kicked it down the blacker it got and the more it smoked. "Really? Just, really? What idiot decided it would be a good idea to bury a cigarette in tinder during a burn ban?!"

I mean, seriously. So I stood up and kicked at it but nothing. All all the while I was explaining to Sarah how these underground things have no fire, but they could smolder for ages and spread from one place to the next.

She then leaned behind the bench and said, "You mean, to the dry brush right behind us?"

So I called 911.

The dispatch thought I was insane, I could tell. Sometimes when I'm trying to explain somethign I forget entirely what I'm talking about and sound like a complete retard. For instance, I said, "There's an underground fire."

And she said, "There's an...underground....fire..."

That's code for: "I'm going to hang up on you, now."

So I panicked and started talking a million miles an hour about it. "No, no, no, not a real fire. I mean, it's burning, yes, but no flames. The paths here are made of peat and mulch and bark dust and it's smoking. That's not a good sign, obviously, but it goes down deep and when I tried to kick it out I just found more and more and it's small right now, yeah, and that might not sound that serious, but these things get bigger and I know how there's lots of fires right now and there's a burn ban and I really don't know what to do with it since I can't kick it out and it should probably be taken care of."

"Hm. Yes. Where did you say you were?"

It was kinda complicated figuring out where I was exactly. Bush Park isn't Central Park or anything, but it is fairly good sized. It has like two baseball fields and a football field bunches of regular fields a creek and even a forest, pretty much. But she called the firemen out there and I met them across the park and we took care of it.

The interesting bit was that even though it wasn't that huge, it really was a good call. Three firemen (in their huge firetruck) showed up. One had dish soap (yes, really), the other had a canister of water, and the third had a huge fire axe hanging from his hand. So when we got there Sarah stood up from the bench and we watched, bemused, as the axe-man took his giant weapon (teehee) to the ground and hacked a goodly sized hole (I never saw an end to the blackness, to be honest) then dish soap guy began squirting into the whole and then water guy filled it with water. They way over-did it, but better safe than sorry, yes?

Then they thanked us for calling, said that yes, it could have spread and caught other things on fire. Then asked me how I learned about this sort of thing (I think I told him books and common sense, which certainly aren't things that usually go together) and they blinked at me bemusedly like I was completely nuts. To which I responded by saying "You DID just say that this was serious, so you can't think I'm crazy now."

Those things are relatively easy to put out near the beginning, but if Sarah and I hadn't have used our noses and our brains and checked it out thoroughly AND called the fire department, that little bit of smoldering? Could have caused an honest forest fire. Even with that axe digging into the ground a couple of feet, we didn't see an end to the burning. Eventually, yes, it would have hit ground that was dirt and unburnable, and too hard for it, but that's when it would have branched off, smoldered some more, and eventually caught the top of the ground (and the nice dry brush) on fire. The horrible thing about underground fires is that once they get big enough, you can't just hack at them with an axe, fill them with soapy water, and put them out. They become raging brush fires that keep coming back no matter how many times you throw water at them because they have roots underground, not above.

So we were heroes.

Nuff said :)

Regards from Purgatory,
 Monica

p.s. I meant to post this in September, I have no idea why it didn't actually happen