i was cleaning out a brush pile this morning and i thought to myself for a minute, i like the moral certainty of a brush pile. but then i thought, that's something i probably shouldn't share, because everyone will think i've gone bonkers. there were cut pine boughs, old branches, a few gnarly oak stumps, lots of pine needles, and whole trees which i sorted as i went along. everything was a little soggy because of recent rains and everything in any brush pile is constantly reverting to the earth from whence it came. my wife came along and offered to pay a thousand bucks just to have someone haul it away. but that's not how i want to spend a thousand bucks. it just goes to show she lives in kind of a different universe than i do that way. even though that thousand bucks is basically both of ours.

right before the rains, i almost built a huge fire, but it was kind of out of respect for california and oregon that i didn't. at that time it was mostly california but same principle. they are having fires so huge that fire tornados are appearing once a week whereas they used to be only once every ten years or so. whole swaths of land are just burning to a crisp. is this any kind of situation to start another fire, even if it's a ways away?

then the rains came and the decision was made for me. it was a slow soggy rain that lasted a few days, and even now it's kind of drizzling and very cloudy. it was an unusual year as this was ten inches of snow up in wyoming and it's only early september. but i think i'm with most people in saying you can't count on anything anymore, and if the climate is going a little bonkers well that's only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

my hope is that it dries out as a brush pile so that i can burn it all steadily and slowly, get the fuel down to nothing. i find no pleasure in paying a thousand bucks to have someone come and burn it down on their place, and then i run out of money and have to do that for some other rich family in the area. i'll clear your brush, bring it to my place, and burn it. no, i'll just take care of my own, and yes i'm a few years behind but i'll catch up. slowly and steadily, with lots of good campfires.

i had to take a break from writing. every once and a while i take a look at what i'm doing and decide that i'm going about it the wrong way. one wrong way is doing my brush pile in the morning and waiting until i'm exhausted to actually work on it. another way is trying to finish a book of mcdonald's stories before i've really said everything i wanted to. and a final way is trying to wrap up a prairie leveretts project when there's still so much to learn about that civil war era. those books are taking me through history and i totally love it, for example reading old newspapers from 1860, but then i find myself missing content and wishing i'd done a little background research before i got started. next time around i'm going to do that. i'll do a book that's totally absorbed in one era, and i'll provide a lot of background which hopefully i'll have by the time i write.

i have a granson up in oregon who is almost one, learning to walk and talk, and they are hunkered down not going outside because of the bad air. they don't even go out to the garage, so they aren't doing their laundry, because of the bad air. and the county south and east of portland is evacuated - a friend of mine had to evacuate her three horses because of the fires. for a while i thought, i'll run up there in a truck and trailer, grab three horses, get out of there, and quick go meet that grandson. but that's the wrong conditions to go meet someone. for one thing, you can't breathe. for another, truck and trailer is a major operation. might be a pipe dream, but there i was, thinking of driving right into the fires. and the thing is, i have way too much going on around here. kids are turning into adults right in front of us, totally unprepared for the world.

on top of that i now talk to my family a lot. they are mostly isolated in different parts of the world. there's that grandson, but i think he'll be ok, as long as the whole city doesn't catch on fire. there are folks in england and albuquerque, pittsburgh, chicago and kansas, and i keep track of them all and encourage them to stay safe. that's all any of us can do. it may just back off, die, and leave us alone, but something tells me we're in for a long haul.