El Dorado Springs - April 12, 2008

And so it ends. We’re finished here in Missouri, after burning 1500 acres in one week (three times more than in the previous seven weeks combined), and I return to Oregon later today. It’s been fun. Besides the obvious appeal of prescribed burning (the only way of enjoying a pleasant walk in the woods and a roaring bonfire simultaneously), I got a lot of valuable job training, and had the opportunity to work with a great group of people for two months. I also got to meet many interesting locals – I’d never actually seen a guy chug two entire beers at once before reaching Van Buren (and supposedly he can also do four…). Coincidentally, I’ve also never seen so many beer bellies per capita.

This is the first place where I’ve seen baked beans offered regularly as the soup of the day.

Sweet tea is incredibly popular here, for some reason that escapes me (it’s just iced tea with lots of sugar added – which, while an improvement over iced tea without lots of sugar added, still isn’t anything special).

I was in my first car accident a few weeks back. I wasn’t driving (or I would have mentioned it before now), but it was still pretty intense. The car ahead of us (another TNC vehicle, driving well ahead) reached a sudden bottleneck at the top of a hill, and slammed its brakes on, stopping just short of the car ahead of it. We also slammed our brakes on, but with the weight of the trailer behind us, we couldn’t stop in time, and hit the enclosed trailer of the car ahead of us. Fortunately, the trailer absorbed most of the impact, without much damage being done to either the car pulling it, or ours. No one was hurt. But, we still had to spend a couple of hours parked on the side of the highway waiting for the vehicles in the other squad to reach us, and then to decide what to do and to call a tow truck. It was definitely a useful learning experience – I discovered some important things to do after a collision, and other things to avoid (e.g. parking alongside of a highway for several hours).

In other potential injury news, I got my beard singed, which was kind of cool. We were burning piles of branches along the fireline of one of our units. You wouldn’t think that this was a particularly hazardous task, which is probably why I got careless. I leaned over a fire to knock a branch further in, and either it flared up or I just foolishly stuck my head over a blazing fire for too long, because the next thing I knew, I was flinching back, and my beard and eyelashes were all singed. Fun fact: hair doesn’t actually burn, so much as melt. The tips of the hairs were all blonde, and had a melted nylon feel, like there were little bits of plastic at their ends (which meant that every time I blinked it felt like there was something in my eye).

Also, I am now blind.

Kidding.

I’m fine now. It’s all grown back.

I’ll be flying back home now, which is statistically one of the three greatest risks wildland firefighters face, after car accidents (natch) and falling trees. After that, I’ll have a couple of weeks to recover, before heading to Colorado to start my new job.

I hope you’re all doing well.

- Nathan