Other duties as assigned...

It’s amazing what a large part of one’s job one short line in a job description can entail. We’ve all got them though, right? It’s a pretty well known fact that in most cases fire and water don’t co-exist very well. Being that the bulk of my primary job has everything to do with fire, the fact that the vast majority of this great state of Texas is underwater has me finding out day after day what exactly “other duties as assigned” really means. For a couple months that meant spending a lot of time working on vehicles and equipment, getting everything up and running in top shape so that when things dried up we would be rip, roaring and ready to go. Still waiting for things to dry up. As of June we brought on 5 additional folks for the summer fire season, which is supposed to run from late May through the end of August or so. Unfortunately it hasn’t started yet, and doesn’t look like it will be starting anytime soon. Hopefully we’ll start traveling around the state pretty soon, scouting out every dry patch of land we can find to actually get some fire on the ground. Ideally they would release us for a while to get on some fire details elsewhere around the country, but I don’t see that happening. Too busy hurrying up to wait.

So it sounds like I’m kind of bitching about these other duties as assigned. I am to an extent, and would complain more if my primary “other duty” didn’t rock! The task at hand really doesn’t do much for me. We are re-mapping all of the private ranches we work with and I am tasked with collecting all of the GIS/GPS data to create the maps. In order to do that though, I’ve spent the last two and a half months (and will spend the foreseeable future) spending 6 to 8 hours a day riding around in some pretty cool places on an ATV. I started to complain a bit about it the other night to a friend when he just about slapped me and told me that I really needed to get over it if tearing around on an ATV for 40 hours a week was the bad part of my job. Since all I really want to do is work with fire I hadn’t quite gotten around to thinking about it that way. So, I guess other duties as assigned aren’t all that bad after all.

I try to keep things interesting for myself while out there, but I got a bit careless the other day, going about 25mph, a bit faster than I probably should have down a road with some occasional patches of high grass that didn’t let me see what was up ahead. I found an awesome three-foot deep ditch where a culvert had washed out. I saw it just in time to think, “let go of the handlebars and get your foot out from under the shifter,” which was nice because without anything to get snagged on I did a very graceful (if I do say so myself) header over the handlebars and landed about 15 feet in front of said ditch. While airborne I had time to think “whoa, thank goodness I didn’t hit my goodies on the handlebars”…”wow, I bet this looks really cool, I sure wish it was on video”…and finally “holy crap, I sure hope I didn’t bust the ATV, I’m about 6 miles from my truck, don’t have cell service and drove through knee high water for the last 45 minutes to get here”…THUNK…I was really rather impressed with my tuck and roll that left me with nothing more than a slightly sore wrist, some grass stains and a goal of figuring out how I can do that again in a controlled atmosphere where I won’t get hurt, but can get it on video so I can see if it looks as cool as it felt.

Here’s a pic I snapped on my phone of the beast right where it bucked me off. Thankfully it wasn’t damaged and I was able to ride it right out of there.





That’s all for now. Gotta’ get back to working on the plans for said little adventure.