Fire

Burn piles are visible against the early November snow.

For anyone with a second home, the notion that bad stuff can happen when you're not around is a really scary thing.  We don't own a second home - at present, our future house is just an outline spray-painted on the ground.  But we back up to the woods, and in fact own 8 acres of commercial forest land as well as the orchard.

So it was hard not to panic yesterday when Wally got an email from our neighbor that our site was on fire.  Backing up a bit, you may remember we cleared part of the site to better read the land and determine where the house should go.  That generated a ton of debris which Nick Waters piled up - quite artfully, I might add.  Nick layered green matter with brown matter and shaped them to burn with maximum efficiency.  He planned to burn them at Thanksgiving. Well, it snowed before Thanksgiving last year so the piles did not get burned before winter. 

Our brief delay in the builder process meant we didn't have Nick out again until April, around the time the dry-season burn ban was to kick in.  Nick got an extension from the County and with rain in the forecast, he burned last Thursday.  We saw the piles very lightly smoldering on Sunday, when we met with Leo and Theresa on the site to finalize the staking, and everything seemed fine.

But something rolled off into dry brush and ignited.  David and Christie went up there with shovels and put most of it out.  Luckily Wally was in his office to see the email, and Leo and Nick and their troops were in the area and could respond to put the fire out before it went any further.

It's hard to imagine how dry it gets over there, even this early in the season, especially when it's still cool and soggy over here.