Camp Fire and Tou(w)rist

A collection of silly puns begins this post.

Please excuse them.

Today I headed out to Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Factory with my friend Ally Z, a former student of mine from my time in Cadiz, Spain.

Unfortunately I have no photographs of the tour, due to a lack of connection cord, but we had a great time learning how ice cream is made, laughing at the terribly cheesy tour guide, and eating way too much ice cream.

That done, we drove around the area a bit and then headed down to Church St, the main pedestrian drag in downtown Burlington.

And then I got a new tattoo, reflective of my recent genealogical findings, which have revealed that my last name should not, in fact, be Bond, but rather Romero. It would seem that my great-Grandfather, Hiriberto Romero, changed his name at some point to Herbert Bond. This new tattoo illustrates the unveiling of this hidden history:



Later in the afternoon, I headed off with David, Tara and Trevor out to the new house. We got a late start, and by the time we on the highway there, the sun was setting and the sky was aglow with glorious pink and purple hues. The light quickly faded and the moon, round and bright, came into view.

Sometime between these two separate and wholly different lights, Trevor remarked from the back of the car, "Wow, I see a lot of smoke."

We all spoke to him, explaining that in the countryside, people will often burn their garbage and other refuse. Fires, we told him, were quite common. We soon enough, however, arrived upon the scene of the flames, and found a huge blaze emananting from a two story wood building. A man stood by, uselessly leaning against a pickup truck. We approached, asking him what had happened. He explained that he had started a brush fire that had quickly gotten out of control, the flames leaping onto his "camp" (name given to generally, though not always rustic country homes).

The man was obviously something of a numbskull, for the source of the fire could not have been far at all from the house, judging by the area in which the house had stood and the total diameter of the fire. Regardless of the wisdom of his actions, it was obvious that things had gotten out of control. The fire blazed, huge and hot. The timbers burned and crashed to the ground. Massive sheets of sparks flew into the air, the surrounding ground steamed and smoked.

We made to leave, watching as the fire seemed to spread and the man did nothing. We commented on the fact that the fire department was not present, and Tara remarked that "perhaps now" was the time for "concerned citizens to make a move."

We did so, and called Emergency Services. And, in a conversation presumably reflective of rural Vermont, they completely blew us off, explaining that the "brush fire" was "completely under control." Perhaps they had failed to note that their "brush fire" was in fact a raging inferno threatening to burn down the entire surrounding countryside.

Whatever.

And so we left the burning embers and their owners to the fates, continuing on in our own journey, down our own path onto the island. By the time we passed by again, about an hour later, the fire had burned down quite a bit and the area around seemed safe enough. I guess the "brush fire" was under control after all.