Sunday, May 13, 2007

Fire

I have been composing this post in my head for the last 12 hours or so, but can't think of a decent title for it, so you are stuck with whatever lameness I put up there. Sorry.


Saturday was such an interesting day. Friday, my hubby, the cold-calling extraordinaire, made some contacts at businesses in Madison, just over an hour from where we currently live. We decided that on Saturday, we would take a day trip back to the old haunts, have a picnic lunch and try to sell some bags.


We were in the small town of Stoughton and had just stopped at a great vintage shop called Montage. (Sorry no website) The owner, Karen, another knitter, was very fun to talk with. She bought several bags for her shop.


While we were there, we walked through the downtown area for a bit. There was a couple in their late 40's or so (I am a terrible judge of age) who had 3 baby goats with them. They were sitting under the awning of a shop on Main Street so passers-by could stop and pet the babies. Caleb was fascinated with how soft they were. Truth be told, so was I.


Amazingly, they were just 24 hours old. It seems that they separate them from their mother so that they bond with people and are more docile. These wee goats will be shown in the local fair coming up this summer. The woman said that they milk the nanny goat and then bottle feed the babies the milk to aid the bonding with humans.


We were just getting into the car to leave town when we heard fire sirens going off. We looked up at sky and saw thick black smoke. Following the smoke back towards the ground, we realized that the fire was right in front of us.


The police were already on the scene blocking off the street the house was on. Because it is a small town, the fire fighters are volunteer and were starting to pour in to the firehouse which was a block from the burning house. We were concerned at first that there could be injuries, so we stopped (a safe distance away) to see if it looked like they needed any medical assistance because there was no EMS on the scene yet.


After looking more carefully, it became apparent that the house was abandoned and that whoever started the fire got out safely.


Neither of us had seen an actual burning building before so, like most of the other people downtown yesterday morning, we decided to gawk for a bit. It was astonishing just how quickly the fire spread.


After talking with some of the other people standing around, it looks as if there were a couple of 10 year olds who had been using the abandoned house as their headquarters and the two of them were seen running from the area that morning.

We happened to have our camera on us, and took a few pictures. I am linking to the flickr set so the page doesn't take too long to load.

We had more stuff that we did yesterday, but I will post about it later...

2 comments:

Lucia said...

When I was a kid my whole family sat in the car and watched a disused warehouse burn down; a big part of it eventually slid down the small hill it had been built on and into the ocean. I can't remember if the fire department ever came. We had been passing by on our usual Sunday outing, and it was the first time I'd seen a real fire. There is something fascinating about it, especially if you know no one's in danger.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Knittymama said...

Wow! Lucky the kids were okay.

We came home from vacation once at 2 am to find the roofing company warehouse on fire with these mini explosions going off from the chemicals inside the warehouse. There is a strange fascination in seeing something like that...you just can't not stop and watch.