Scene from a Brushfire: Aftermath

These have been pictures from my forthcoming book: A Million Little Fires. Click on each image for the high-res image posted on flickr.

On Wednesday I was burning a pile and said to myself, "this pile is much drier than I thought, it's much winder today than I thought and there's far more wood than I remembered. I'd be a fool to burn this today". Of course I'd already started the fire ten minutes ago at that point and I was looking at a wall of flames 40 feet wide and thirty feet high and feeling that I'd created something I could not control. But after eight hours of shoveling, chainsawing, walking across hot coals and hauling buckets of water from a nearby puddle, I tamed it. Or perhaps the fact that it exhausted 200 feet of seasoned wood is what slowed it down. It was the biggest fire I'd ever seen.

Thursday's brushfire made Wednesday look like a tiny campfire. I wasn't alone this time and we burned about 700 feet of dry, dry oak. A very conservative estimate reveals that we torched about three thousand cords of firewood, producing 84 billion British Thermal Units of heat. Unless I dropped a decimal point, that's the energy equivalent of 14,586 barrels of crude oil.