Forest fire stopt

Ninety-odd years ago, my grandfather bought a piece of land five miles out of town, and he took his family to live there -- with no electricity, no car, and no running water. They were on a piece of ground that had had some gardens, so he and my father started making gardens themselves. They dug wells and carried water by hand. He bought a horse and my grandmother used that mostly to get to town. My father soon bought a car and he got back and forth that way.

Gradually, during the past two or three decades, my grandfather's land and all the land around it have been changed by housing and commercial developers. Although taxes forced the family to sell a lot of it, we still own a rump piece, a piece of forested land that acts as a green buffer to a neighbourhood of new bungalows. But it feels and sounds very much like part of the city when I go there.

Yesterday, in the middle of some hot dry weather with a very strong wind, a fire started near an illegal shack that teenagers had built, hidden in our woods. The wind took the fire most of a kilometre along our woods and the adjacent properties, literally to the doorsteps of some new houses. Some houses lost their wooden decks to the fire and suffered melted plastic siding. But the firefighters put the fire out pretty readily.

This morning I walked around to see how much damage there was. Nature is pretty resilient and I suspect the couple of hectares of fire damage on our property won't be long in greening up again.