Oct. 17, 2002 ~ A firefighter friend
told me that a second fire department responded to Tuesday's fire. Well. Good thing I wasn't here, because I would have been worried sick. Have I mentioned that we are surrounded on three sides by woods, that there is not a back road out of here? We could walk or run through the woods, but there's no alternate way to drive out. So if fire comes at us from the front, we are kind of... stuck.
Lately we've been letting the cows graze in the hay meadow, and there was no particular reason why I didn't let them out there on Tuesday. I just didn't do it. Maybe they didn't seem interested in going, and it seemed like too much trouble to call them all up, or maybe the horses were slow to finish their breakfast and I didn't want to wait for them to get out of the way. But it sure would have been a pain, proably even a nightmare, had the cows been there during the fire. Last time there was a fire nearby, they panicked, and that one wasn't even on our property. The smoke and fire just terrified them. Instinct, I guess. So imagine how they would have reacted had the fire been in THEIR pasture, and had the fire trucks come in and raced around in their midst. One of the calves is at least partially blind, so he probably would have gone nuts. So all in all, it worked out well. We are lucky, and we know it.
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