Fuck the burn ban 🖕🔥

Two weeks of household trash mixed with motor oil and light fluid and wood went up into smoke. I remarked how black and pungent the smoke truly was.

At one level I get why they banned burn barrels and rednecks burning their garbage. Some things are pretty noxious to burn, full of carcenogenic chemicals. Still much burns down to little more than water vapor and carbon dioxide. I get the stench but life has pungent smells especially in rural areas where food and fiber are raised and processed, but the liberals are so obnoxious.

While the seasonal burn ban really only impacts brush pile burning and not small campfires for warming and cooking food, it’s been dry so one needs to be extra careful like I was a few weeks ago up at Rennselaerville State Forest and in the Green Mountains National Forest – the later now completely banning campfires outside of developed campgrounds. Hopefully soon we will get rain.

It wasn’t a fait accompli that I was going to take my week off to go to the Adirondacks starting this evening. But I sort of wanted to do this week before all the colors were gone midweek with the expected and much needed rain coming. Yet, I was so busy with work and everything else, plus I have a lot of events I would otherwise miss next week. And that rain would have impacted my mid week when I planned to be at Horseshoe Lake. And dumped me up at the St Regis Canoe Area during the busy Columbus Day Weekend where solitude might be hard to come by.

If fire danger meant no fires all week up in the wilderness that would mean many long cold nights in the wilderness next to the heater. Plus all the accumulated trash from a week camping. I’m sorry, not having a fire in the woods ain’t real camping regardless of what you say. I hate separating out all the otherwise burnable packaging and cleaning it for recycling.

Some day when I own my own land, I will continue to burn whatever paper and plastic I can, but in ways superior to a stinky smoldering burn barrel. Something that can easily consume multiple feed sacks of packaging garbage, that is the packaging of things that I can’t produce or reuse on my own land. Have lots of garbage cans so I can avoid burning in the driest of weather but also have the satisfaction of knowing every wrapper I toss ends up in the mound on the outskirts of town.

I know eventually it will rain again, and I’ll be able to spend nights again in the wilderness with fires. And in the meantime I can dramatically cut back on my trash output by once again washing out containers and separating them for the urban single stream recycling either in my parents or neighbors bin, or taking it to the transfer station. And even if I don’t get out camping this weekend or having a fire this weekend, it’s not the end of the world, other day trips end other adventures can be planned. I’ve been craving to explore the Harlem Valley Trail for some time now.