Prairie Fire

 

They're making it. Fruit trees and bushes are growing up all over the homestead. A solid sod house stands behind them, a home to be proud of, even a spacious wooden barn out back. The family is all out front too for this portrait--Dad, Mom, a son and two daughters, all able family members. When there's work to be done on the homestead, there are enough hands to get it done and done well.

That's what they're telling the people who will receive this picture in the mail. "You were worried about us, maybe? Try not. We're doing very well out here."

Who knows where they came from? May have been New York, may have been Michigan, may have been Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands. May have been from almost anywhere, but right now they're almost literally and handsomely entrenched on 160-acres somewhere on that ocean of grass that's become, for them, a home.

They're not home free, however. Yesterday, my son sent a video of him fighting a grass fire that consumed three homes in Oklahoma, where he works as a fireman. This morning, right here--Alton, Iowa--there's a weather alert, even though we've just been kissed by two days of welcome wintery mix. We're in a "fire watch," from 4:00 this morning to 9:00 tonight: "gusty winds and low humidity will impact any fires that develop to likely spread rapidly. Outdoor burning is not recommended."

Quite frankly, it's hard to take that warning seriously, because it's difficult to imagine a a raging prairie fire. But prairie fires have a history here, where a sea of land was once nothing but grass. Prairie fires could consume entire townships, entire counties--and, terrifyingly, everything in them. . .everything, including this family's substantial start on the American dream. In twenty minutes, it could all go up in flames--and did.

I wrote this story after finding it in the history of a Holland, Nebraska, a Dutch settlements created just after the Civil War just south of Lincoln. It's a tragedy, one of the darkest stories in five years of Small Wonders; but it's part of our history here on the emerald edge of the Great Plains. 

https://www.kwit.org/post/fire-loss-and-what-cannot-be-said

Now available on Amazon (just click here).