West of Ahloso
Friday, November 11, 2005

Burning

The leaves are coming down in bushels around here, all yellow, red and brown. Autumn has finally crept into southern Oklahoma.

The returning harrier (a.k.a. marsh hawk) arrived yesterday, right on schedule, and this morning she was busy wheeling and diving across the pasture in front of my house, looking for mice in the boot-high brown grass. This is a big, gorgeous, lady-hawk; mostly gray with white feathers on her underside and black feathers on her top, and a perfect white ring around her fuselage like the Red Baron had. I sat on the fence and watched her through my old WW2 Japanese field glasses for the better part of an hour and never saw her land to take a breather. That's strenuous flying she does; fast up-wind, wings pumping hard, and then wheeling to go speeding lickety-split down-wind, three feet above the grass; then turning suddenly back into the wind to hover with beating wings less than a foot off the ground for a closer look. Poor old bre'r mouse. Then away again, down-wind like a loose kite.

Around here a few of the citizens still burn off their fields at summer's end, the way the farmers in Europe did centuries ago. I once read an essay written by Ben Franklin condemning the practice. Yesterday evening; with clear skies, no wind, and Mars, Venus and a gibbous Moon all hanging in the sky like fires, the moment must have seemed auspicious because everywhere I looked there was smoke in the cool layered air over the low spots in the meadows, from fires deliberately set and tended to by the good nesters—my neighbors. I saddled up Button and rode down the section line between my farm and the place to the south of me, to mingle with the crowd. The people had gathered along the right-of-way, abandoning their usual reticence by turning fire watching into a kind of country social. It looked for all the world like a Brueghel painting; smoke, fires and busy, laughing, people.

Henry Day and his daughter Aeriel (she spells it with an "e") came up to say hello, wearing black faces and carrying wet gunnysacks that everyone was using to beat the flames. They looked more like possums dressed up like people than real people. Henry owns a ranch a mile and a half up to the north and he and Aeriel run it. They had come over to help with the burning. The attraction, for them and lots of others, including me, was meeting people we hadn’t seen in a while, but they were also here in self defense; an out of control grass fire can be very bad news on these dry prairies and there was a south breeze. Aeriel tossed me a wet sack and laughed as Button, who does not like having gunnysacks waived in her face, sat back on her tail. I declined the invitation to join the black-gang, saying that she had made my horse too antsy to leave tied to a fence. Some excuse, but it was better than nothing.

Lou Heinemann and John Flemming were there; friends from the feed store crowd. They had been over at Norman all day attending a livestock seminar at O.U. and were on their way back to Stonewell in John’s two-seater biplane. When they flew over and saw the fires the fools landed on the road to see what all the activity was about. Their plane was parked on the side of the road a couple of city blocks away and there they were, black faces and all, helping out.

They planned to take off in the dark later and fly home. John said he could follow the lights on the highway.
"You could call Fern and tell her when she hears us to come out and shine her car lights on the strip for me to land by."
I asked him how he was going to know, dark as it would be by then, which direction was which and he mumbled something or other so then I asked him if he thought he knew what he was doing. He mumbled again and sniggered; that was when I realized that John and Lou were both drunk. I told John it would be safer if he and Lou doubled up on Button and rode her the rest of the way down to Stonewell; that way they could be home by morning and nobody around here would bother the plane, except maybe me. I even offered to trade him Button for the airplane, even up, but he said no-thanks. It was just as well; Button had won a couple of quarter-horse races in her time and was worth a good deal more than that clapped out old Stearman.

Finally I said: "How about let's go back to my place and have a drink. You two can have something to eat and then you can sleep in the kids' old double bunk and fly home in the morning. That way Ella C. and Fern won't have to know anything about how you both been flyin' around the state sloppy-ass drunk all day long.
“Who’s drunk?” John said.
"What you got to drink?" Lou said.
"I got Jack Daniel and Jose Cuervo, and about three fingers of squirrel."
John said: "Sh-ee-it. I'd rather stay here and fight fires than drink that sheep dip."
And so, on and on. You know how it is with drunks.

The last I saw of them they were lifting off with 2 feet to spare over the treetops. They swung back around and flew over us at about 100 feet wobbling their wings, and whoever was in the back seat was waiving a bottle over his head. Then they turned south and crossed in front of the big yellow moon. Somebody said it looked just like a picture postcard.

I borrowed a cell phone from Jesus Chavez and he showed me how to use it. Stonewell has a population of less than 1000 and they have a private phone company with a PBX operator named Laverne; she has the board in her living room. I never met her, but I have talked to her; she sounds a lot like Lily Tomlin did as Ernestine in Laugh In. You don’t need to know phone numbers in Stonewell; you just tell Laverne who you want to talk to and she’ll run them down, no matter where they are. Or you can give her a message to pass on; its real handy. I called Laverne and asked her to let Fern know that her fly-boys had just taken off and about the car lights, and to call me back if they weren’t home in about a half hour so we could start looking for the remains.

I guess you could call this year's burning of the fields a success, but it wasn't one entirely. They burned up one line shack and a couple of pastures that didn’t belong to them, and they burned up the old Studebaker Champion Harry Ryan had put up on blocks years ago for his chickens. I'm probably lucky that what little breeze there was blew the fires away from my place.

Mr. Fixmer stepped on a sharp bois d’arc stob and it put a hole in his foot. Those little spikes are like steel and will go right through a shoe sole, or a tire. Mr. Fixmer owns the feed store in Stonewell. He is the widow Biddy's youngest brother. Her field was one of the ones they were burning off and he came up to help her out. She said she would put some stuff she'd made up on his foot. I hope he survives it.

These are resourceful, capable, people and they rely on the idea of community. I won't say that "never is heard a discouraging word"; there are a few disagreements from time to time. There have even been a couple of barn burnings that I know of, and a really great fist fight over a basket-full of catfish, between Henry Day and a turd named Jack Redland; but by and large they depend on one-another to get a lot of things done that other people expect the government to do for them. All things considered, I'm glad I came here to live. It beats hell out of the big city where the cops would come if you tried to burn your grass.

And the smell of that smoke in the evening reminds me of something in the past; I wish I could remember what it was.

Alex Coyle