The night the wind died
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Sunday evening the conditions were just right. The incessant Kansas wind, which seems to throw a monkey wrench into so many of our work projects, (and mess up my mother's hair-do) had died.
"We can't work on the barn," Tooltime Tim said to me over and over again last year, "because the wind is blowing." I'd look out the dining room window and see this tickle in the trees and question his judgment but I quickly learned that over on the edge of town, with nothing to obstruct the flow, it was indeed windy. And it was windy enough to pick up a 4x8-foot piece of tin and set it (and you, if you weren't careful) sailing across the prairie like an ocean schooner.
Here we were, again, held hostage by the wind. This time it wasn't plywood siding or metal sheeting. We were playing with fire! Scrub trees had managed to survive on the dividing lines between property for years as mowing proceeded on one side and haying on the other. And then we said, "Those trees need to come out. They are ruining a good portion of that field."
The chain saw began buzzing, the tractor started pushing, the backhoe dug out stumps and there in the field lay the devastation that occurs before we could declare progress. So, when the wind stopped Sunday, we were ready to set those trees ablaze.
There's nothing quite so satisfying as watching a pile of trash — which is what those trees were — being consumed in flames. When a field is cleaned by burning it off, there's a terrifying beauty as flames fly up into the air or snake across a field devouring everything in its path. When the controlled burn is a bunch of brush and trees, there's a quiet steadiness to the fire and you don't want it moving anywhere — hence the need for no wind.
These were big trees that we were burning and I knew the process would take some time, but I wasn't prepared for this consuming seven hours. If we started at sundown, you can figure it out for yourself — we were sitting out there in the dark watching for errant sparks in the wee-small hours of the morning. Just to be on the safe side!
While those purging, cleansing flames were my first fascination, it was the darkness that eventually captivated my senses. There is nothing quite so dark as an isolated field in the country. While the clouds came up and there was a brief period of drizzle Sunday night, the sky cleared and a trillion stars shown overhead.
Everything changes in the dark. In all this flatness, nothing obstructs your view. Lights that are miles away seem immediate. On the horizon line toward the east, it looked like we were on the outskirts of a city with white lights and red tower lights standing in a row as far as our eyes could see.
"Those white lights are in farmers' yards," explained Tooltime Tim as we gazed at this mirage. We stood in quiet awe, peering into the blackness punctuated by far-away pinpoints of light.
There was a glow on the horizon which grew brighter and stronger. "Here comes a train," Tim said. A great search light seeking out its path across the pasture. In such darkness you cannot see the familiar rails, the road, the farmhouse, the barn; all of which tell you where the train will surely pass by.
Standing in this absolute darkness, it seems like that pulsing, pounding locomotive has no boundaries and could very well veer from its appointed course and pass by at the edge of my toes. Such are the strange sensations when you stand in the dark at the edge of the world on another night in the country.
