Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Totally Hot

Like, I totally think we set fire to the school dump today, dude.

Right, so there were these things, you know, all the accumulated junk of five years -- broken flowerpots, snow shovels with broken handles, the Christmas tree, a cracked glass vase and an old moldy school bench -- still sitting beind the fence of a ten-foot-square "backyard" behind the dorm apartment we just left behind. They had been there a while, and people were gonna want to move in, and the school wanted us to move them really soon, even though when we moved in five years ago the backyard was still filled with some other guy's trash, mostly rusty little-girl pinkbikes in a variety of sizes, and we had to get rid of it.

So we (that's Darcie and I) borrowed a school truck with no rear view mirror and no readout to tell you what gear you were in and asked the couple downstairs and their six year old kid to watch ours for a few minutes while we tossed all the junk in the flatbed and drove it all down to the school dump -- all, that is, except for the saggy wooden garden bench we dropped off under the tree across the way from the new place on the way over.

We'd never been to the school dump -- didn't know they had one, I mean -- but past the lower sports fields, down one paddock and through the second gate sure enough a pile of computer parts and face-down television sets at the corner turned into wide dump-piles: woodscraps, tree limbs, doorless washers. At the threequarters mark of what was obviously becoming a circle through the dump a raised ramp of road dead ended in the sky directly at the upper lips of a pair of mostly-full dumpsters, each construction site size, five times longer than wide, and we drove up it, and heaved our stuff on the top.

We went back to get the baby, now happily eating dirt and rocks by the tennis court entrance while someone else's Retriever snuffled the tennis ball at her feet. While Darcie put her in the car I drove the truck down to the back of the work control shopbuilding where it had to be returned.

Now what you have to understand is this: our school is on a hill by the side of the Connecticut river, and the back of the work control building is pretty much the only place where you can see even the barest tips of the dump-piles over the trees surrounding them. Everywhere else there's a ridge in the way. So it's a sure coincidence that right in front of me as I parked the truck the wrong way in to avoid the security vehicle in the middle of the lot was a huge paired spout-set of flame to the treetops rising from pretty much where the dumpsters should be, and a plume of smoke half a mile high besides. Darcie saw it too. And the fire trucks filling their hoses at the hydrant right next to us there in the lot were pretty hard to miss.

And we had just been there -- weren't we the last ones there? And we don't think we did anything, but there was an awful lot of wood and paint stuff and insulating fiber in those dumsters, and it was under a lot of pressure, what with the dumpsters being so tall and filled with heavy junk, and I guess we threw stuff in them pretty hard, and maybe it rubbed some of that old flammable stuff together the wrong way or something.

What was weird was really the unreality of the fire coming out of nowhere, I think. The dump wasn't on fire then -- you'd remember if the place was on fire, I mean, it's the kind of thing you'd notice pretty much no matter what, right? But then, all of a sudden it was.

Totally.

I hope they got it out -- the boathouse isn't that far away down there, and they just got a new boat.

I also wrote three four-page outlines today, each one a different half-day teaching module for the trip to Bangladesh. Yay me.