Over the past 10 or 15 years, the United States government has put a lot of professional wildland fire fighters on its payroll. Mostly they don't have very much to do, but when they are working they are generally doing things that seem unfamiliar to the average person. Including me. Last week, I was out with a couple of the crews doing some rangeland prescribed burning. It probably doesn't look difficult, and even I can be trained to use a drip torch, but I was pretty ineffective. Not only was I at least 10, if not 20, years older than the oldest crew member, but I couldn't keep my wick lit in the wind. (Those two facts are not related, are they?) Mostly I was just hiking in the smoke while the other guys took extra pulls to clean up my line. Oh well, as they say, an hour of burning is better than a day in the office.
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