Fire On The Mountain

Published in the Desert Valley Times
June 28, 2005

“Fire on the mountain, run boys run.”
Boy, that Charlie Daniels guy sure knows how to give a weather report.
Last year around this time, I remember that being a popular catch-phrase out West, since a lot of the landscape was in flames.
I particularly recall that the heavy fire season was due to a lack of rainfall.
This year, the hills are alive once more with the sounds of burning timber.
The heavy fire season is due to…
Too much rainfall.
That’s the story being advanced by Smokey Da Bear’s keepers.
(When I was growing up, he was known as “Smokey THE Bear,” but rumor has it he changed his middle name following the 1985 Chicago football season.)
According to Da Bear’s people (not to be confused with the DeBeers people), the fires this year are attributable to the rainy January, which caused the grass to grow extra high.
The grass has now died and become more combustible than a Tom Cruise-Matt Lauer conversation about psychiatrists on Prozac.
So we have fires if we don’t get enough rain, and we have fires if we get too much rain.
Personally, I think Mother Nature is just a pyromaniac with a really big book of matches.
Word is that lightning is the most likely cause of this year’s fire crop, a fact that will really tick off the environmentalists.
They’re never happy unless they have some careless humans to kick around, and Mama Na’Ture is just a little out of their political sphere of influence.
It’s kind of tough to rally a bunch of tree huggers to carry picket signs (ironically made out of wood and poster board) and march around Washington D.C. chanting “Down with Nature” and “Nature is environmentally insensitive” and “Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who do we really hate? Na-Ture! Na-Ture!”
I also find it ironic that this is again occurring near the Fourth of July, a day noted for its man-made pyrotechnics.
First, there aren’t many bottle rockets that can compete visually with a mountain on fire at night.
Second, it’s funny to see what Mama Na’Ture can do with a little dry grass and some lightning, while dads in backyards across the country can’t get a fire going with twelve pounds of charcoal swimming in two gallons of gasoline.
And third, it makes you wonder what Mama Na’Ture has against fireworks vendors.
Once again, the flash-bang merchants will have trouble emptying their shelves in towns where fireworks have been banned due to the fire risk, except of course for the folks hired by said towns to light up the skies with high explosives and incendiary devices.
I think it may be time for us to consider moving the Fourth of July to another month, like March.
We can still call it the Fourth of July, although I like the impressive sound of “March Fourth,” which sounds like a command from George Washington to his troops.
This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, since our federal government is good at juggling national holidays.
(Since the implementation of “Presidents Day,” I’ll bet you can’t find ten kids who know when Washington was born, other than it was on a Monday.)
So as a reminder, please be careful this year with your sparklers, your campfires, and your back yard grilles.
Maybe have dad use only one gallon of gas this year.
After all, Mother Nature hates the competition.