Here is another of those found photos I mentioned yesterday. This is of a burn pile that it fulfilling its destiny.

The lake bed was cleared and the dam was constructed at about this time of the year, so even though the trees were not in leaf, they were “green” in terms of their burn potential.

In Missouri (and perhaps in other places though I’ve never checked), if you burn green wood, you tend to get white smoke. (This invariably blows in your eyes and they sting for a while, but you get over it because you’re an adult and have another beer.) The trees that were in this burn pile were “green.” Yet the smoke they yielded is not white. Why is that?

Well, another problem with green wood is that it is hard to get started burning. You really need something that burns very hot in order to get the green wood going. If you’re a resourceful builder, you might find things just sitting about the county that would work. And if you’re really resourceful, you might avoid troublesome considerations about whether such resources may be burned legally or not. I’m not saying that the man who built my dam used any contraband in these burn piles to get them going, of course. I was never around when he started them (though they often smoldered for days without ever really catching fire).

There were many burn piles in the lake bed and future pecan plantation. Only one didn’t fully burn to ash before the dam was finished. It now sits in the lake bed, awaiting its glory when the lake remains full and the fish find a wonderful habitat awaiting them.

Missouri calendar:

• Milkweed pods open.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Dam!, Stewardship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.