Tuesday 01/21/2025
The cue for the writers meeting was “fire” which put me in mind of the near-burning of The Ranch, my childhood home. I wasn’t certain of the time or much else, only remembered that my father had thrown his back out beating out burning brush with a wet gunny sack. However, I have both his and my mother’s autobiographies. These were not properly published but circulated as typed manuscripts among the relatives. It didn’t take long to find the accounts.
This happened in 1950, in Western Washington State, about 20 miles south of Tacoma. In the 1930s (? I should check his bio again) my father bought 30 acres of logged-off land from Weyerhauser Timber. No such thing as sustainable forestry in those days; they just clear-cut everything, hauled the logs to the mill, and sold the ground, with hundreds of stumps and piles of slashings. For a decade he spent his spare time putting up a house and outbuildings and clearing the stumps to make tillable fields. Then he married my mother. At one point he hired a bulldozer driver to clear a new three-acre field for him. The ‘dozer ripped the stumps out of the ground and shoved them to the side of the field, leaving high piles of tangled stumps and roots, mixed with soil. Burning these stump piles was like a hobby to him, he’d keep fires going all spring and into the summer when the county fire marshall would put out a ban on open fires.
But it’s hard to squelch one of those burn piles. He wrote that often a “pitchy root” would burn down under the piled soil for days. And one managed to break out; when they came home from shopping in Tacoma, there was a nice fire going in the dry stubble of the hay field. He hauled a 10-gallon milk pail full of water to the field, and a gunny sack, and with the wet sack beat down much of the fire, keeping it from going into a forest preserve to the west, but it started into the neighboring place. Lots of anxious telephoning (only land lines of course) got help from the county and then, from nearby Fort Lewis, an army bulldozer. With that they made a fire-break around the fire and contained it. With recent events in Los Angeles fresh in my mind, I have to think they were extremely lucky in having no wind. With any breeze, they surely would not have been able to contain the fire with only a bulldozed trail.
According to my mother’s account, there was a problem in that, with so many people coming and going, they had to leave gates open. Eight year old David was assigned to keep the cows from getting out the open gate, and apparently I stood watch for several hours. I have no memory of any of this, none what-so-bleeping-ever. So very much of my past has just faded out.
Anyway I wrote that up before 10am. At 10 I met with Lou and walked him through connecting his laptop to the screen in the Activity room. Then back to my room for the 10:45 writers zoom. There were several exciting accounts of fires besides mine.
At 3pm I went to the Activity room for the monthly Car-Free meeting, where I sat beside my friend Joanne hearing Lou showing the slides I’d helped him set up, covering the details of how to use the two ZipCar rentals now in our basement garage. It’s a hard call between renting a ZipCar and taking a Lyft. With the Zip, you can make multiple stops and carry stuff. But, you have to reserve the Zip for a specific time period, and it may not be possible to extend the rental if you are delayed. (Someone else may have previously reserved the same car for the hour after you.) In any case, you pay for the time the car sits idle. So it is not a good way to go to a concert, for example; you pay for the hours you are in the show.
Codgerville 