Fire

My grandpa is somewhat of a pyromaniac. For as long as I can remember, he's always had at least 2 boxes of matches in the backseat of his car, and someone who hasn't seen him in a while might ask him, "How is the burning going this year?" He owns quite of bit of land about an hour outside of Boise, so whenever the weather permits (i.e. no wind and not above 85 degrees), he burns old sagebrush or tumbleweed or trash. I was with him on one of these burning excursions and we decided to burn a big patch of dried up weeds. At first, everything was going fine. We kept a close eye on the fire and made sure we could put it out if the need arose. Unfortunately, that need arose sooner than we thought when an unexpected gust of wind took the fire into a rather large field of sagebrush. If you've seen sagebrush before, you'd understand the extent of our issue. Sagebrush is a very dry plant and burns in a huge plume of flames that spread from plant to plant. There was nothing we could do. The plants started burning and started a chain reaction that we couldn't stop. There wouldn't have really been a huge problem, except that on the other side of this field was a canyon, and if the grass in this canyon caught fire, we would have a huge prairie fire on our hands. That wasn't too desirable, so we went to the end of the field and started smashing down grass and doing everything we could so that once the fire got there, it wouldn't spread. Thankfully there was also a small stream between the sagebrush and the grass, so that helped our efforts immensely once the fire got to the edge of the field. The heat was unimaginable. The smoke blinded me and it was so hot that I could barely breathe. We had to stay though and stomp out any patches of grass that caught fire as it seemingly did everything it could to cross the stream. Our efforts paid off. We were able to keep it from going across the stream. As we left the field, the firetrucks were just pulling up. "No big deal," we told them. "We've got it all under control." The next day, we drove back to the site of the burn. There were still patches of ground emitting smoke from the heat, and you could see a huge black spot in the land from miles away. Good thing that stream was there!