Tag Archives: mystery

Smoke News

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My wife surprised me and took me out to dinner this evening.  She got someone to watch the kids, got all gussied up to look more beautiful than she usually does (which pretty much makes me get all weak-kneed on a normal day) and we headed over the hill to the Bearded Frog in Shelburne.  They have good food at that particular establishment.  The last time we ate there I had to try three times to make something resembling the melt-in-you-mouth squash soup we tasted.  My soup was good but it wasn’t as good.

We sat in the corner, all cozy and romantic, only you can’t really have a cozy and romantic dinner when you are bound to run into somebody you know.  One of our neighbors and her daughter, visiting from New Jersey, sat at the table next to ours once things got hopping.  We chatted, of course, as was polite, and genuinely interesting in this case.  And fun.  We shared some laughter and the people at the next table over got into the conversation and it was generally a good time.

But the point here is that our neighbor is the one who owns the property where the smoke has been coming from (see yesterday’s post).  It was still smoking when we left the house for our sans children event.  It turns out she was away, came home about 5:00 to see the tower of smoke rising near the house.  She could tell right away it wasn’t the house (her first fear) and thought it might be the barn (fear number two).  Fortunately it was just a pile of hay.  It was a big pile of hay, combusted by the heat of the day.  Some folks pushed it around to make sure nothing else would catch, and smothered it as much as they could.  But a fat old chunk of hay is going to burn until it wants to burn no more.

The house still smelled of smoke when we got home, but it obviously was starting to burn itself out.  So no one hurt, nothing lost but a good deal of hay, and a mystery solved for sure.  The sky is still a little hazy but at least we understand more clearly.  That’s something.

Holy Smoke

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Still Smoking, 24 Hours Later

Still Smoking, 24 Hours Later

Last night as we sat on the deck and ate fresh wraps for dinner (delicious=mayo+pesto+just picked tomatoes+cucumbers+lettuce still warm from the sun+arugula+Shelburne Farms smoked cheddar) I looked up and reacted to what I saw with “Holy smoke!” What I saw was a big cloud of smoke.  We all turned and looked at it together and wondered, What’s that all about?

It smelled like burning wood and the smoke was white.  A house fire means black smoke and nasty smells, not to mention lots of sirens, and vehicles zooming about.  So I figured it was some big brush pile or a bonfire.  But it kept burning.  Long after dark it glowed, and the sound of back up beeps chorused with the crickets and cicadas.  Even when I woke in the wee hours the smell of smoke drifted through the house.  It was still going.

This morning we could still smell it.  When I drove up over O’Neil Road this morning I could look down and see the white plume.  I was gone all day but when I returned it was still smoking.  So what the hell?  It was clearly not out of control but who could be burning something this long?  And why?

My wife went for a run on a route that would take her past the mysterious smoldering.  When she returned her report was this:  It was a huge pile of hay, smoking away.  It may have caught fire spontaneously in the sun.  It may have been triggered accidentally.  In any case, the pile was big and the smoldering was going to continue.

It still makes everything smell smoky.  The sky, before the sun set, was dimmed where the smoke drifted.  And it keeps on.  It seems to be contained.  I hope it is.  It seems a loss of good hay and hopefully that is all that is lost.  Smoke in the air did provide an aura of autumn for a while.  Now, however, it is starting to seem plain old stinky.  We are on track for some showers tomorrow.  Maybe that will muffle the fire.  Just in time for the really chilly nights.

Not So Selfish

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I watched our neighbor this morning drive along the road and pick up all the cans and bottles that my children and I gathered and placed by the roadside yesterday.  I had mixed feelings about this:

1. I was excited that someone else would take the time to clean up.  We were planning to head out shortly to pick all of those up.  The children, in fact, were looking forward to it.  But someone else beat us to that.  I don’t know if they were happy we had gotten things started, or upset that we had dug the ugliness from hiding under the winter’s layers.  I hope the former.

2. I was disappointed because the children really were excited to follow up on our previous day’s project.  When I told them what was happening, and they looked out the window to see for themselves, they were disappointed as well.  But I told them we could head up the road in the other direction and they got fired up again.

Today’s haul was a lot bigger.  We walked a lot farther, for one, but there were just a lot more items to collect.  We could not carry them all there were so many, so we left another batch to be picked up by someone.  My wife walked the kids up the road while I went for a run.  I met them on my way back and she ran herself.  I carried most of the load for most of the way.  The children wanted to carry everything they collected–they each had a bag–but the bags got too heavy for the longish walk.

We picked up three dozen beverage containers and left about ten to collect later.  Over 50 empty containers.  That is just way too many.  That was in a not-quite-a-mile stretch of road.  The nutty thing is how many I saw while I was running, farther up the road–at least as many.  The idea of that many containers getting tossed makes me squinch up my forehead.

I have tossed empties out the window myself.  I am not proud to admit that.  It happened only once, when I was a teenager.  There were a few of us in a Chevy Suburban drinking beer in the back on a long drive.  The driver was clean and we were being responsible–just a couple apiece over a couple of hours.  But we were underage.  We were afraid we would get pulled over by the police for some reason, I don’t remember why, so we tossed the “evidence” to the roadside.

The thing is, that memory still haunts me.  It wasn’t my idea and I was not the one to do the tossing, but i rue my abetting that act.  I don’t even have the consolation that we were pulled over.  I try to make it up now.  I imagine who tossed these glass bottles and aluminum cans and create my own stories.  I am proud that my children are so excited to clean things up.  They do not creat such stories.  They trust my answer to their question of who would toss their trash out the window.  Sometimes it is a mistake, I tell them, and sometimes people do things we would not do ourselves.  They have entered the world of trying to understand the array of human motivations.

I can’t imagine they will ever solve that mystery.  No one ever has.  But I hope they pursue it their whole lives.  It is a mystery that offers many questions worth asking.  Those questions make the mystery worthwhile.  As a parent, I will do what I can to engage them in the mysteries of the world.  I hope all of them are not as dirty as this on