January 12, 2006

On the trip back from Fort Worth before Christmas, burned grasslands spotted the roadsides. First notice was outside the city limits from a rig accident on a gas well. Others fires on the right of way appeared to be from catalytic converters sparking the dry vegetation — a guess later confirmed by a highway worker.

Sure took away the jingle bells from the trip as my pal and I drove west. Every roadside firecracker joint symbolized that the stands outside the city limits of San Angelo were laying in loads of small explosives to light the skies and scatter incendiary fallout in all the surrounding shortgrass counties.

Bolstering my sense of dread was the fact that Mother's old home in Mertzon, in addition to adjoining overgrown vacant lots full of fuel, sits to the east of a row of six 30-foot pine trees. Beautiful yet drouth-responsive, those trees hold dry needles aloft in upper branches perfect for a skyrocket to land.

Came to mind, too, the deer camps and oil rigs too close and too many to rate the danger. Powerlines and high-pressure pipelines joined us on the ride, strung and laid across the countryside to create aerial and subterranean arson. (Okay, I apologize. Kind of got carried away.) Unpapered aliens cooking by water tanks and oil transports backfiring off the road came on board. The specter of ruin riding in the car became so real, we began to plan backfires to save the ranchland — to save the whole county.

Irony of all irony_, we passed through the small town that later would suffer huge losses of homes from grass fires. I never thought of the land east of San Angelo being dry enough to burn. Now, west of town, the ranches had always had big prairie fires.

The worst times for us were the World War II years, when practice bombing set off fires before fire departments existed to put them out. Like a lot of life's history, that era has been covered in the 40-odd years I've been a storyteller in print. Wish now I had coded my material, so I'd know the made-up part from the truth. Would help, for example, to know if 10,000 head of sheep burned in one big fire east of the ranch from bombing practice in the 1940s, or I imagined the 40 or 50-section fire burned a hundred ewes.

One point is for certain: writing the big fire story today, feeling safe that no witnesses remain, would be a sure way to contact all the fellow firefighters. It would only take setting the scene as three days and three nights over there in the rocks and playa lakes stumbling over prickly pears, whip mesquites and burned sheep carcasses to all but bring back the dead to dispute my story in an onslaught more fierce than the roll call that fateful night.

Just last year I felt safe enough to slip in a ringer about a picture of a 1920 model chuckwagon that the editor of Vogue Magazine knew more about than I did. Three days after the posting, a lady in Vermont wrote an e-mail saying the cowboy described in such detail, standing by the lid of the chuck box, was her father. I couldn't have felt worse if I'd ridden up on those cowboys in a buggy wearing a pair of golf knickers stuffed in knee-length socks.

No time was spent in Mertzon after reaching home. I knew I couldn't sleep with firecrackers popping until midnight. We'd already passed the Twin Mountain stands proclaiming "Buy One; Get One Free" to provide enough nightmares to last several Christmas naps. We'd already flinched at the long line of cars trailing out to load the home powder magazines and bombard the lake beds, subdivisions and any other areas unprotected by laws prohibiting shooting fireworks, like farms and ranches.

Once unloaded at the ranch, I connected the hose in the back yard used to fill the livestock sprayer. The hydrant made the sucking noise related to an empty pipe. Then it hit me that the guy working on the plumbing killed the water line going to an old wash house. Would have been a fine start to fighting fire to throw the hose over in the sprayer without checking the flow of water. Instead of being angry, I was grateful for the warning.

Our fears were justified. Big fires and bad fires hit all around. The blazes ranged from 50,000 acres burned in one block up in the north end of the county to fireworks in Mertzon burning the city blocks close to the courthouse and library while the fire trucks were at the big fire.

Until rains fall, it won't take but one ring to reach the ranchers. The smell of grass burning still lingers in the air. I plan on having a fire drill as soon as the back hydrant is connected.

January 12, 2006