Reply #4: Same here... [View All]

[Sapphocrat]

I lived a couple of years in Nevada, in the midst of a valley that was all sagebrush and precious few trees, where the only time the fire danger was low was during blizzards. If you didn't get out there and clear a wide circle of sage around your house (and the way it grew, we had to do it frequently, by hand, with mattocks and shovels -- it was back-breaking work), the neighbors would raise hell. (We didn't have city services; we had a volunteer fire department, with a 40-year-old engine. If you needed them, you phoned the fire chief at home.**)

It was just one of those things we accepted when we moved in: If we wanted to enjoy the breathtaking beauty of living amidst all this nature, we had to accept the fact that nature was in control.

Which is as it should be.

** Long, long digression here (I hope nobody minds):

We never had a fire as long as I lived there. The only time I saw the firefighters in action was when the temperature dropped to -16F, and the woman down the road couldn't un-freeze the troughs to water more than 40 horses she boarded. So the fire chief, on his own, managed to get the truck through, and provide water for the horses.

Things like that happened all the time out there. One winter morning, I woke up to find a neighbor I didn't even know had plowed our driveway... just because there was snow, and he had a plow.

We knew the mailman by name; he delivered the mail in his own car, and we never complained when he couldn't deliver because he couldn't get his old station wagon through the snow. When we were short of postage, we'd leave money in the mailbox along with our outgoing mail, and he would stick stamps on the envelopes himself. At Xmas every year, we'd leave a bottle of wine in the mailbox for him.

I once left my truck's headlights on after getting home. A man I never saw before knocked at the door to tell me they were on. He looked puzzled, though; he said, "I would have just reached in, turned them off, and left, but your truck was locked."

Nobody locked their doors. When we told another neighbor (the nearest one, half a mile away) about how our phone had died mysteriously, she asked why we didn't come over and use hers. It didn't matter if she was home or not, she said -- we should have just walked in and used it.

It was like living in a time warp. People just watched out for each other. It was how people are supposed to treat one another.

I miss it. A lot. And I would gladly live with the constant threat of fire, just to experience that kind of simple human caring again.

P.S. And nobody cared that we were lesbians, as long as we were good neighbors. I think we were. We sure tried extra-hard to be.