Welcome Home!

Few things startle me more than the smell of smoke. Dead asleep at 3 a.m., I’ll bolt upright in bed, sniffing the air like a prairie dog: Where’s the fire?

So I can be quite a wreck when fire season hits.

I grew up in a house with a thatched roof, surrounded by barley and rye fields. In late summer, most of the straw and stubble left after harvest was burned leaving the fields looking like uneven toast, streaked in black and gold. Burning was commonplace at the time, but it set the whole community on high alert.

Often you’d smell the smoke before you’d see the fire – so first priority was finding out where and what was burning.

Living in the middle of it all, I knew the neighbor’s fields and plantings by heart.

“Oh, it’s Jensen,” you’d say, scanning the flat horizon, “he’s burning the back barley.”

Then you went back to what you were doing, occasionally glancing at the smoke cloud, noticing the wind changes and the direction of the flames.

As kids we knew of a few deadly sins, the worst being to play with matches. We did stupid things, but we didn’t do anything that stupid.

Sometimes the adults were stupid.

One time, a neighbor set the stubble afire literally outside his backdoor. The fire took, but the wind changed sweeping in behind the flames, sending them down the hill, straight toward our house.

Between the headboard of my bed and the edge of the field was a 200-year-old wall, 10 yards of dirt, a row of sour cherry trees and a couple of yards of plowed up, fat clay soil, the latter meant to stop the fire.

The smoke was choking, the roar was deafening, and we ran for hoses and shovels.

Swiftly, fire crackled in the tops of the trees, but they were green and wet. It died out as fast as it got there, leaving the field burned solidly as black as tar.

I remember standing next to my dad, his arm around my shoulders, my knees still shaking, as the smoke cleared and the neighbor came down the dirt road on his tractor.

I was angry, scared and very close to crying. I wanted my dad to tell this pyromaniac nutcase a thing or two about field burning, but where I grew up the most important words went unsaid.

“Well,” said the neighbor, lifting his chin as a greeting, “now that’s done.”

“It’s done all right,” said my dad, his face streaked with soot, as he nodded toward the burned cherry trees.

“Yep,” said the neighbor, “that one went a little fast now, didn’t it? Guess one won’t need to worry about no pruning this fall.”

Just a reminder to be careful with the fire out there.