Grand dad puts out another fire.

MY GRANDFATHER, ERVE FORREST ROMAINE KNEW WHO TO PUT OUT FIRES...

  I've posted before about how my grandfather as a young man went deep in the northern woods of Wisconsin and started a lumber company with the help of another strong young man,  He boarded at a home where my grandmother lives, they fell in love and married.. He quickly built a log cabin and they moved in and one day while he was working in the woods, a strong storm came through and a bolt of lightning struck a tall pine tree and that started a forest fire.  Granddad ran to the log cabin and ran with my grandmother to a ditch filled with rain water...the flames burned all around them but they survived.

Now going forward many years when he had a farm on Pleasant Valley Road and my father and mother had a farm down the hill about 1/2 a mile away.  One day my mother, Rita, took some trash out to burn in a large barrel....the wind was blowing in the late summer...the hay in the fields was turned brown from lack of rain that year; as she  lit a fire to burn up that trash, including a lot of paper, swirling wind soon blew sparks out of the barrel and soon the dry grass started to burn and was quickly spreading quickly down our fields....mom ran into the house and called my granddad, her father-in law and he quickly drove his 1936 old Plymouth down to the lower end of our property.

He knew how to start a small fire and soon he had urged that fire quite a ways heading directly toward the larger fire that was quickly moving toward his smaller fire...would it be enough to stop that big fire was the question.  He raced out and attacked the fire with a large shovel and started swatting away all along the big fire...it was hot there and the flames where licking close to him...but when they finally reached the smaller fire, he continued to swat and stomp our the two fires.  slowly he won the battle and there was nothing left of the fires except smoldering dry grass, a lot of smoke and dust in the air....that's when my mother and I raced to his side.

He was exhausted and grimy and was wiping his face with a old hat he had been wearing. Leaning against his shovel my mother raced up to him and hugged him and kissed him all over his sweaty grimy face.  I just stood back with great admiration, because I could imagine that he had remembered the time he fought a large forest fire and lost that battle, but here now he stood and watched the smoldering battle that he had won,,,

I wonder if I would be able to pull off such a feat as we witnessed that day where now a much older man took the opportunity to show that he still had the strength and love for his daughter-in-law and his little grandson to show such courage and skills to ever be like him.  Memories such as this one give me hope that our younger generations will take time to be told these true storied, and they will perhaps plan for such an occasion; of course the odds are against such a time ever be happening again but we will never know for sure, will we?