Feeling the Heat

When I first started taking classes so that I could work in a library, we were called "media specialists."  It was kind of a mixed-blessing thing.  While I was glad to not have people call me "Marian the Librarian,"--a stodgy term whose mere utterance aged me 50 years--I wasn't so thrilled about being called a specialist, either.  Lots of pressure in that term specialist.  Now that I am more than 50 years older, though, I'm grateful that the pendulum has swung back in the direction of "school librarian."

Glasses on, pressure off!

I face a similar conundrum with my title of master naturalist.  Truly, I am a master of nothing.  And I like it that way. Sure, after two seasons of feeding tiger-beetle larvae, I got pretty good at capturing refrigerated fruit flies.  But does that really qualify as mastery?

Indeed, the reason I love the master-naturalist program so much is that I feel no pressure whatsoever to limit myself to things that I know. That's why, in the past three years, I've fed beetles, counted fireflies, inspected milkweed plants, learned about bats, seined for fish in a river, laid on virgin prairie and started fires.

Oh, boy!  Starting fires!  Now that is a real kick in the shorts (although they recommend you wear cotton pants and steel-toed shoes).

 The above photo is of my master-naturalist friend, Emilie.  Two years ago, we got an email from a local landowner looking for help with a prescribed burn.  The fact that I knew nothing about lighting controlled fires was irrelevant.  I was fascinated that someone would invite a person as green as me to help out.  We drove to the Bohemian Alps, where the landowner, Sue, had gathered all kinds of people to burn a few acres of her property.  It was nothing like my ants-under-magnifying-glass days.

There, on a cloudless afternoon, a handful of people took readings of everything from humidity to wind direction. Nothing was left to chance, aside from the fact that the infants Emilie and I would be helping out in some mostly incapacitated capacity.  It was decided that she and I would be flappers. Had I known that this was going to be my job, I would have put on the awesome, spangly 20s outfit I wore to that one college party.  Alas, the heat would have incinerated my sparkly skirt.   And God knows what would have happened to my headband. . . .

At a prescribed burn, you see, a flapper is a thick, floppy slab of plastic sitting on the end of a broomstick.  Our job was to use the flappers to tamp down the edges of the fire so that it wouldn't move out of its prescribed area.  I was beside myself with excitement.  My face bandana-ed against the swirling smoke, there were times when the fire burned hot enough and close enough to me to make me wish that I'd left Mark a note to let him know where my body could be found.

For a couple of hours on a perfect spring day, this eclectic gathering of people--farmers and neighbors, Game and Parks personnel, grad students, master naturalists and members of the Tri-County Burn Association--used our feet and our trucks and lots of equipment provided, in part, by Ducks Unlimited to clear Sue's land of weeds and cedars so that it could breathe freely again.

 Emilie and I returned, last spring, to another part of Sue's property, to help with the prescribed burn.  Still green, but less so, they even let me ride in the utility vehicle and light fires for awhile, listening to the crazy man behind the wheel tell wild stories of falling in love with a flight attendant somewhere over the South China Sea.

These were two of the better days of my life, doing something I'd never imagined doing before, but knowing that I was in good, capable company doing small but important work for someone who'd become a friend to me.

Today?  Today, I long for a flapper and a ticket east, where perhaps I could do a little good, tamping the fires that consume us.