Never again...
I started a fire half-way down a hill in the middle of a grassy paddock full of old pine tree stumps. This fire was not started as a result of my being a sort of fire-bug, but merely as a novel way of keeping warm and possibly toasting some marshmallows on. Yeah, open-air camp fires are a thing of legend to me... or mostly, anyway. It was situated under several blackwood trees in a kind of pit with no way of escape, or so I thought.

So anyway, I suddenly realised I had to go back home for some reason, and rather than come back and have to start it all over again, I left it burning merrily. Since it was small I had no thought of it getting into the kindling I had nearby, though this 'kindling' was a full-scale dead pine-tree left over from Christmas and was about as incendiary as a firecracker.

I'm not exactly sure how the fire reached the kindling, and thus the outside world, but when I was back home I began to hear some voices outside calling about a fire downhill! I raced outside, and this is where I really got scared.

Roaring uphill was a huge fire, sending off an even bigger plume of white smoke. It was starting to eat up the paddock towards us, and was starting in on some dead blackberry patches and bracken, which seemed to be even better fire hazards than the pine tree (as I discovered must have been the cause of this later).

I raced around to the shed (my heart was racing even faster) and grabbed the first implement I could find, which was a shovel, and rushed downhill to meet the fire. At first I tried digging a shallow trench by lifting the sod away from the dirt, but this was extremely tough going and to my fevered mind much too slow - as the fire was inexorably getting up to me.

I also noticed it was starting to eat into the neighbor's and likely to attack their house and sheds, so I jumped over there and left the fire to swarm up and around our place, fearing the wrath of our neighbors more than the well-being of our tanks.

If I wasn't scared before, I became even more scared now when I ran up and down the long fence beating out flames that reappeared two seconds later. My hands were becoming blistered yet I kept smashing out the flames. I kept jumping back and forth, trying to stop its onward progress on the south and east flanks, and then noticed (by this time my legs were wobbly, my arms numb, and my entire body physically exhausted) that it was licking down the hill into the neighbor's pines! I worked my way down there on the outskirts of the fire and around that time the blood blisters which had developed on practically the entire surface of both my hands popped, leaving large raw areas of flesh on my hands and blood on the handle of the spade which you can still see, 6 years later.

Around that time I noticed that the fire crews had arrived, dimly through the smoke. I gave up and walked slowly back up the hill, uncertain how to face my family and neighbors...

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Actually, nothing really drastic happened as a result of the fire, and it actually cleared a paddock which had been needing a bit of a cleanup for years. The innumerable pine stumps smoked for months afterwards, leaving many areas of the ground hot and cavernous (had to watch where you walked). The neighbors seemed to forgive me pretty quickly for giving them a scare too, and my family let it rest after about a year. I can still remember the cold, naked fear I felt when I was facing that fire though. A similar feeling is like falling in a nightmare, though many times worse because it's real...

No question it was a respectable length - you could see the burnt strip from miles away!
(satellite blows, Sun 25 Feb 2007, 10:19, Reply)