Brush fire
Returning home from an errand today, I was driving north on Tower Road when I saw a faint gray wispy thing growing above the sidewalk, next to one of the residential lots along the street. I smelled burning wood through my open car windows. “Strange time of day to be having a bonfire,” I thought. “And that’s a really bad spot for a fire, too: it’s way too close to that brush and those pine trees. In fact, if I didn’t know better I’d think… oh.”
It took a moment, in the heavy afternoon traffic, to make the two illegal U-turns needed to get back to what I now recognized as a small brush fire. By the time I arrived, a lady in a Dodge pickup had pulled up along the property too, and she was already on the phone with the fire department. (One of the causes of my hesitation was the fact that so many other people were driving by the smoke without stopping or even seeming to notice: one of those degenerate cases of human behavior that can prove highly amusing when it can be appreciated outside the context of imminent property loss.) I climbed over the chicken-wire fence and into the yard (those “Beware of Dog” signs are just for show, right?) and began clearing unspent leaves and branches away from the flames while said lady talked to the dispatcher.
Once Truck Lady got off the phone she ran up to the house to see if anyone was home; there was no answer at the door, but she did spot a garden hose attached to the side which looked long enough to reach the fire. I pulled it across the yard and drowned the flames.
At this point the homeowner finally stepped outside: an elderly yet lively woman with a cast on her right leg. She thanked us both profusely for doing our part to put out the fire. My first thought was that this was a generous but silly reaction: of course we would stop and help; what kind of people would that make us, if we ignored the smoke and kept on driving? But then I recalled all those other cars on Tower Road, their drivers unmoved by the smoke, through which I had weaved as I committed my particular egregious moving violation of the day. And I realized that the reason these people kept going was (probably, for the most part) not some appalling moral failing, or really even laziness: they merely assumed that Someone Had It Covered, just as I nearly did. And what better evidence that the situation was already under control, than the fact that nobody seemed to be reacting to it?
At the risk of being overtly moralistic (wait, when has that ever stopped me?), it really is an object lesson in initiative. Or maybe not initiative, but something like that… autonomy might be a better word for it. It’s so easy – for me, anyway – to let the behavior of others dictate situational norms. I guess that’s a large part of what makes us human, but it can also be a hindrance to doing what’s right or necessary. Learning how to overcome this, and when it is necessary to overcome this, is important.
Anyhow, Truck Lady went on her way, and I watched over the soaked heap of branches and stray wind-blown leaves with the homeowner until the fire department’s brush fire truck, whose sirens we could already hear, finally arrived. She and I mulled over what could have ignited this; Truck Lady’s guess of a stray cigarette seemed the most likely, despite the fire’s distance from the road. (As though I needed to really cement my hatred of smokers who toss cigarette butts out their car windows.) I showed the real firefighters to the ex-fire and then I went along my way, satisfied to have discovered that my own firefighting skills do not completely suck.
