Out in the Heat

   The Sentinel  A Little Fact and a Little Fiction 

It was one hundred degrees under sunny skies here today and what was I doing? I was out in the heat playing urban cowboy, pushing my lawnmower, chopping stumps and small thorn trees into oblivion. As you might imagine I warmed up fairly quickly. I returned to the house to cool off and have a refreshing, cool beverage, as it was already 1:10 and I was pretty sure it was 5 o’clock somewhere.

Joyce and I were sipping our afternoon cocktails and as I recovered from the heat; I remembered back to September of 2004 when I tore down our old barn in similar heat conditions.

The top picture was taken midway during the teardown. The bottom picture was the last of the leveling before I lit the barn wood on fire. The telephone post in the picture had a twin 12 feet the right with a gate that we used for our animal loading Shute. I had removed all the roofing tin and my electric line to the other post and had an old clock radio playing on the top of the post while I worked tearing down the barn. The fire went well in the back because it was all flattened, but when it got to the remaining peak of the little one room house that served as my tool shed, the air got under the nearly 100 year-old rotten wood and it just exploded in flames! I had the hose at the ready, but the fire was so intense I couldn’t get close enough to make good use of the water. So I used the hose to water down the surrounding area to keep from lighting the entire county on fire. In the midst of all this, I looked over at the old clock radio; it was playing merrily while it slowly melted down onto the electrical components inside. It reminded me of the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. I was not fiddling; I was terrified.  I thought I had planned everything out and was acting in a safe manner and I hadn’t even had a beer that day.