Weather

Friday Firesmith – Under the crescent moon

by

The sun is still asleep, and the Crescent arises in the east, southlands of the skies, and yellowish in hue. The air is cool, down in the fifties where last week at this point it was below freezing. This is fall in the middle of November, south of the Gnat Line, three miles north of Florida, in the middle of South Georgia.

I once stood at the place where a car had tried to pass another, couldn’t make it, slammed into the car it was trying to pass, and eventually, a three car pile up was created. The driver of the oncoming car was killed, his passenger maimed, and the other two drivers largely escaped serious harm. Something about the bodies I’ve seen being put into plastic bags slows me.

I’ve got my driving hoodie on, hood up, and I let the windows down. I want to feel the air, fresh, crisp even, and breathe. The air in South Georgia is a semi-liquid for six or seven months out of the year, the humidity carrying gnats and heat and a glimpse of hell. But this morning the air smells of the Crescent Moon and being alone on the road before five in the morning.

I have “Body” a song by a group named “The Necks” playing. Loud.

I cross the railroad bridge, built in the 1930’s into Quitman, before five. The bridge is ancient, decaying, and slated to be replace. There’s a sign under the bridge declaring it a “Fallout Shelter.” That’s where I want to be during a nuclear war, oh yeah!

I wend my way through a silent town to a predawn Pilates class, in Valdosta. I like playing long songs, and the mode of the day is a sense of wariness. This a morning when deer like to get out and feed. The dark hides them, there’s no breeze so the deer’s’ already acute hearing is accentuated, but I am hurtling through darkness at nearly eighty-one feet per second.

Monday is trash pick up day on this backroad I travel. And every Monday I see many empty cans of Busch beer littering the road between one certain spot and another. How much beer do you drink for the empties to escape the trash can, every time?

Four deer on the side of the road stare as I pass and I flash my high beams at the car heading towards me. His brake lights flare, so I know he knows why I did. This is South Georgia Semaphore at its finest.

Some places on this road are dark. No houses, no lights, no people, and the deer are shadows under shadows, and I might pass by a dozen and never know. They can hear me, see me, and I wonder what they think of the song, the product of human senses echoing through the darkness of a sharp moon. I wonder if they have their own creative measures recognized by the other deer.

This is mine.

Tell me of yours, please.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – Hell of a fire. Best in a long time.

by

On the 12th of April, 2023, the rain began around midnight. The sound was amazingly loud. Sleep had to be abandoned, so I got up, checked the radar, and a deep red splotch of clouds hovered directly over my area and nowhere else. The rain came down in a roar.

The next morning the pond had overflowed, and the Live Oak in the backyard that had a serious lean was creaking. It fell before I could get my phone, and in the next couple of months, I was able to get most of the larger limbs cut.

The next two years brought hurricanes, more rain, more flooding, and eventually, trees died from their roots being submerged for too long.

About six months ago, the water began to recede. I was able to get the fence back up, my compost pile has emerged from the ocean, and I’ve been able to assess how bad things are.

I also had two dead trees close to the house taken down. One very close to the house, a gum tree, was still alive, but it had a growth near the top that caused the top to break off. Considering the size of the tree and its proximity to the house, I had it taken down, too.

I have spent the last couple of days moving logs over to the Live Oak that fell, and setting things on fire. I’m usually a let nature take Her course, but I’ve got a lot, and I do mean a lot, of dead trees. Dozens of them have died, some have fallen, but at the time of this writing I’ve got four piles of dead stuff that if they catch on fire, it’s going to get weird. Two are so close together their blaze will be visible from the moon.

The Live Oak blocks the path from the house to the woods, and it is large. I would like to leave some of it to return to the earth as all thing should, but I have to reduce it. I have made good progress in this endeavor.

I began the process of moving parts of the Gum Tree to help burn the Live Oak. I used rollers, levers, and manual labor to get this done. If you know Physics, you can take an eight foot long log that is two feet in diameter, and move it one hundred yards without breaking a sweat. Push, move a roller, push, move a roller, push, move a roller, push, use a roller as a pivot, reset rollers, push, pivot, burn.

All the wonders of the ancient world were built by people who knew how to apply force in a manner consistent with the laws of physics. It’s not difficult once you understand how. Aliens were not needed and are not needed to build, to move, to create an environment where humans can get things done without machines.

I’m alone in the woods and can move logs some machines might struggle with. I used pieces of trees to move trees.

Take Care,

Mike