Helping Hands

Or The Fool Who Burnt Down the Roadside

A few years ago, at a beekeeper’s meeting, we had a medical emergency in which a speaker from out-of-town fainted. We had to call the ambulance. Turns out, it was an issue with low blood sugar, but at the time we didn’t know exactly what was happening. Luckily, there were several doctors and nurses in attendance who rushed to the speaker’s aid and cared for him until the ambulance arrived. While waiting, it took several minutes for us to track down a sugary substance to help him get his blood sugar back up—yes, in a room full of beekeepers no one had any honey.

That got me thinking how important it is to know where emergency items are located in our meeting spaces. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, and defibrillators do no good if we can’t find them fast. Even something as simple as a piece of candy could save a life, at least if we can find it in time. The whole event reminded me that sometimes in life we’ve got to depend on the benevolence of strangers.

Depending on others doesn’t always come easy, especially for self-reliant types. Personally, I relish my farming and beekeeping pursuits because they do provide alone time—just me, myself, and the machinations of my mind. Granted, there may be nothing more dangerous than an idealist farmer who is the throes of agrarian reverie. Even Thoreau himself, the prophet of self-reliance, accidentally started a major forest fire, and in so doing, he depended on the townspeople of Concord to extinguish the blaze. It was definitely a blow to his ego, and afterwards some townsfolk bestowed him with the moniker “the fool who burnt down the woods.” It happens to the best of us.

Unlike Thoreau, who was merely trying to cook lentils on his campfire, I started a conflagration with the intended purpose of burning the vegetation in a field ditch that was encroaching on my line of bee hives. Over the years, the vegetation rooted in the ditch had expanded and grown unruly with antagonistic plants: briars, wild blackberry canes, poison ivy, etc. I dare not bush hog the ditch for fear of puncturing a tractor tire due to the spikes protruded from the wild Bradford pear trees. So I waited for a bright fall morning, dropped a match and watched as a wall of flames arose and traveled down the ditch, like a flame flowing down a line of gunpowder. Eventually, with the help of a major wind guest, my quaint little ditch fire detonated itself at the end of the ditch into a small grass fire, racing down the roadside.

Between the time concerned neighbors called 911 and the fire department arrived, my wife’s grandpa Lowry, who had been watching the proceedings from afar, jumped on a tractor, pursued the fire down the roadside, and smothered it with the repeated downward pressure of the front-end loader.

“Nothing to see here,” I assured the fire fighters a few minutes later when they arrived sirens blazing, but it was good to know they were there if I needed them. No man is an island.