Fighting Fires

There are a lot of forest fires going on in the region. I heard on the news that one of the fires was 10% contained. I guess I don't understand that. It doesn't seem like the word "contained" fits there. Its like you tell a criminal you have them 10% surrounded. They would just laugh at you.

I actually fought a fire once. I had a summer job working for parks and recreation. We built trails, dug culverts, and paved parking lots. I'm still not exactly sure what a culvert is, but I did help build one. You know the disgusting smell when they're paving? I had to be on the back of some truck scraping the molten asphalt stuff to head it in a certain direction. I don't know exactly how to describe it. I just know I hated it. It was 100 degrees anyway and then being over that asphalt stuff made it about 300 degrees. That whole summer job experience started my love affair with the indoors.

At one point of the summer they took us out to help fight a fire. Seems like there would have been some legal concerns to taking 17 year olds to a fight a forest fire without letting parents know. I bet they've dropped that practice. It was interesting, though. They didn't put us on the most dangerous parts of the fire. In fact, most of the time we were "mopping up" they called it. There were some times of excitement, though, where we were what seemed to me to be on the front line of fighting the fire. I remember seeing helicopters flying in and dropping flame retardant. I thought, "This is just like a movie."

Lunches were awful. You can imagine how hot and tire we were. Each day we got one dried out sandwich and an 8 ounce can of unsweetened grapefruit juice. I never had grapefruit juice before. It sounds like it might be tasty. It is not. And unsweetened on top of that. I'm kind of surprised I survived that summer.