Fire on the Hill!!!

Alpaca Shack is located at the top of Irish Hill here in Berne. We are surrounded by the woods. This has been an especially dry Spring in the Northeast, and we have had burn bans most of the month of May. It has been lifted in the last week.

Friday afternoon, our 78-year-old cousin, Ida Mae, burst into the living room shouting "Pam, you've got to call the Fire Department!" John and I were lettering some placards to hang out in the barn. I dropped the paint and immediately called 911. John did not display his usual fretting and sputtering but seemed frozen.

It wasn't until Ida Mae headed out to her car to flag down the fire trucks screaming up the hill that he reacted. He just wanted to close the door and go back to our work. He was not happy standing on the porch as we tried to access how the fire fighters were faring. He was biting his finger and swearing when the tanker came up the hill to turn around in our driveway. With a blow of the horn, the behavior disappeared and John focused on the firemen's voices over the hill. The concrete firetruck as both a distraction and fulfillment of all the vocabulary that John was trying to understand changed the panic response immediately.

The little fire in the pit that jumped to the lumber pile and spread to the trees was extinquished by our wonderful volunteer firemen. We were beyond thankful.