Fire in the Hole

A Slice of Life

Bill Lites

I’ve always had a hard time keeping the grass trimmed along our backyard chain-link fence line.  Nothing seemed to work.  Over the years I tried hand clippers, weed wackers, motor oil and just about everything else.

Well, one day I decided to burn a nice wide clear line along that fence.  My wife was standing by with the garden hose ready to make sure the fire didn’t get out of control.  I poured gasoline from a metal bowl along the fence line, let it soak in for a couple of minutes, stepped back and dropped a match onto it.  The grass was green, so after the initial “Whoof”, the fire burned slowly, just as I had expected and the results were pretty much what I wanted.  Except for small patches here and there where the grass was extra thick, my fence clearing job looked like it had gone quick and easy.

I waited for the fire to burn itself out.   Then as I walked the fence line, checking for any of the thick unburned tufts of grass, I’d pour a little more gas on them in preparation for re-burning.  I guess one of those tufts still had a glowing ember in it that I couldn’t see and as soon as the gas hit that ember, it flashed right up the stream of gas into the bowl I was holding.  I jerked back in surprise and splashed gas on the front of my shirt before I could let go of the bowl.  Now my shirt was on fire, and my wife yelled, “Get on the ground and roll.”  I kicked my legs out behind me to do a belly flop on the ground, and that’s when everything went into slow motion.  There I was suspended in mid-air with the front of my shirt on fire.  I couldn’t believe how long it took for me to get to the ground.  When I finally did hit the ground, my body smothered the fire fairly fast and with the help of my wife spraying me with the hose, it was over.

I jumped up, and ripped off my shirt, pulled up my undershirt and checked myself for burns.  The shirt was one of those 1960s polyester things and it had melted, sticking to my undershirt.  If it hadn’t been for the undershirt, I would have been burned pretty badly.  As it was the undershirt protected me from the melting shirt and I only had a couple reddish spots on my stomach.  Boy, was I lucky.  Or was Someone watching over this dummy?

As you might expect, I never used gasoline again to clear my backyard fence line. My Dad always told me that if I played with fire, I was bound to get burned. Dad was right.

Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. James 3.5 NIV

Tags: Fences, Weeding, Widom