FIRE BREAK

Mike said it: “It’s a fall morning.” Really, we’re anticipating another hot week with temps in the triple digits in the Valley, but this morning it was 58 here at the farm. I put on my cozy robe and slippers when I got up.

This is the way it used to be in the Intermountain West – cool in the early morning, warming to hot by mid-day, then cooling again in the evening. When I was a teen-ager, I got up at 6:00 to do my chores in the cool of the morning. This morning I baked cookies, and Mike took off for a long bike ride.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Farmer Kyle made a fire break around the house and grounds after harvest last week. The farm yard sits right in the middle of the fields, which is lovely in one respect but also dangerous should fire erupt. Ironically, we have more trouble with water in this dry place than we do with fire. Nevertheless, a fire would be devastating, and I’m not sure the fire break would help all that much if a spark ignited the old trees.

In fact, Grandma Ina said as much in a letter to my dad in 1934, wherein she described a fire in Little Canyon.

…there was danger of the fire crossing the canyon and coming down on our side and it would have just swept us clean if it had. You see, the grass is awful thick over west and this old fence row running through to the west from the “green grove” is a rod wide at least and a regular fire trap, so with a west wind I don’t think we could have saved the house after this grove got afire.

In those days, the farmers helped one another. Ina mentions calling the neighbors, who left off haying in order to run over to the canyon to fight the fire. She also contacted a threshing crew, who came immediately. They fought that fire day and night for two days, mostly back firing and digging breaks. Ina concluded by saying, “Everything was so awful dry.”

Even today, the farmers rally to help fight a fire, but there aren’t enough of them now and other resources and modern methods are necessary.

[Ina uses the term “rod.” I don’t think I’ve heard “rod” since arithmetic story problems in grade school. A rod is 16 ½ US survey feet. It’s useful as a unit of length because whole number multiples of it can form one acre of square measure. I can just hear my dad explaining that to me now.] KW