Winter 2023/2024 Issue - Magazine - Page 30
By Karen Schwaller
I don’t know many farmers who don’t have a designated place
where they burn things—from branch piles to deconstructed outbuildings, to dead or uprooted trees, to fences, seed and feed bags,
previously-living beings, household mattresses, steaks accidently
burned on the grill and tossed out there to destroy the evidence;
to soiled diapers and assorted other treasures that might be found
on burn piles around any farm.
You might even find a bridge or two out on that pile that have been
burned.
Sometimes the pile gets pretty high before time or the wind will
allow for the pile to be set ablaze, but eventually that time does
come—and when it does, it’s quite a celebratory gala.
Here at the Schwallers’, it’s a ceremony of sorts that can only happen in the moment. There is no planning ahead for weather conditions to be right enough to burn the ‘hole.’
Yet it’s all quite work-a-day – until something goes wrong. And if
you carry our last name, something is probably going to go wrong.
We hadn’t lived on our place for more than a year when we decided to burn the brush pile. We inherited it when we bought the
place, and when we had things to burn, we just added to the pile
and waited for the day when it would be sacrificed both for our
entertainment and the creation of more space on which to burn
other unnecessary parts of our lives here again.
We gathered the pizza, our family and our various pizza-related
beverages, opened our lawn chairs, powered up the propane torch
and waited for the magic.
And it was glorious.
It was almost Fourth-of-July-like. For a few moments at first, everyone fell silent as the fire took hold, crackled and began to create
the most amazing color spectrum. It was a mesmerizing experience that led to some productive and very entertaining family exchanges.
General Lee’s surrender had to have been orchestrated around a
rubble pile that was consumed in flames.
And then it happened.
Some time into it, we heard a loud explosion. Of course, we were
roused out of our lawn chairs like teenagers at a busted frat house
party. The explosion sent sparks and flames bursting out everywhere—and soon there were small grass fires burning all over our
back forty.
Everyone ran to fetch water, fire extinguishers leaf blowers and
our phones as we all worked together to get the fires out before
they got completely out of control. Even seed corn caps, sneakers and spit were used to squelch some small fires here and there.
There was no job too small for anyone who fancied themselves
even the slightest bit of a firefighter. No firefighting equipment was
prohibited from use either – except for the hop-based beverages
my husband had been enjoying up until then.
Our neighbors a quarter mile away raced into the yard on two
wheels wondering what was going on because they heard the blast
from their living room. They had been enjoying pizza at their
30 WomenincMagazine.com
home that night,
too, except they
were eating it the
way cultured people
do.
When we were finally able to look
around for the culprit, we saw that a
propane tank from
a gas grill had been
thrown onto the
pile probably years
before. We didn’t
even know it was in
there.
It was your regulation, all-out, fouralarm “fire in the
hole.”
My husband earned his beer that night. Good thing he drank
some, too—you never know how much spit a person will need to
fight a big brush pile fire.
Karen Schwaller writes from her farm near Milford, Iowa. She is
a freelance writer/columnist and humorous/inspirational rural life
speaker. Visit her website at www.karen-schwaller.com. Contact
her to speak at your event at kschwaller@evertek.net.
