So here’s the funny thing about the burn ban that they had going in the park when we were there for Thanksgiving. On our second day there, I saw a truck drive slowly by in the morning, and Trudy saw a sign on the side of their trailer that said:
Firewood For Sale.
In yellow letters on a big green sign, they drove around offering firewood to the campers while the burn ban was in effect.
Now isn’t that something? The signs were still up on the doors to the bathrooms announcing the burn ban, yet here was this pickup truck (it turns out from the park store) pulling a huge trailer load of Oak firewood for sale—nice campfire-sized bundles, just what you might need for a night of glowing embers.
And come to notice, there were several campsites down the way with smoke curling out of the woods and into the sky. (The winds of last night were gone.)
And funny thing: the park rangers who drove by didn’t seem to notice these flagrant violations.
So in the afternoon, as I thought about my pile of size-graded kindling sitting cold and unused next to our cold and unused fire pit, I waved down one of the rangers. I walked up to his white truck with the Parks and Wildlife logo on the door and said hello. As I strode up, he glanced at our campfire ring. He knew what I was about to ask.
“Is the burn ban off?” I asked.
No, he explained. There was still a ban in effect. And he pronounced the terms of the ban—only small fires used exclusively for cooking and extinguished as soon as the food was done. (Just as all the signs said.)
But then he explained that he didn’t really care. He said it with an empathetic roll of his eyes. Be careful, he said. Don’t get wild. No tall flames. And always have someone by the fire.
They way I figured it, they knew the winds were gone. And they knew that it was dipping into the upper 20s that night. And they knew it was Thanksgiving weekend, for heaven’s sake.
So they exercised their discretion. And we did ours.
As darkness fell on our second day there, we had a campfire burning with mesmerizing glowing orange embers throwing off that kind of heat that sinks deep into your bones and leaves you warm and content and thinking “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”