At the Carolina Sandhills NWR, Mike Housh, Mark Parker, and crew fill drip torches with slash fuel in preparation for a prescribed burn

Excerpt from "Staging a Burn"

A morning in late April, 7:00 a.m. I received calls from Scott Lanier, Manager of the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge, and Mike Housh, Fire Management Officer. “We’ll try a prescribed burn,” they said, “if we can round up a few extra bodies” . . . A freelance writer, I’d been invited along to watch.

I had a cup of coffee and turned on the Weather Channel. Low of 46. High of 80. Unlimited visibility. Humidity 93. Dew point . . . Sleepy, I wondered what a dew point was. . . .

An hour later, I was at the NWR headquarters in the office of Forestry Tech Mark Parker when Mike Housh entered from the hallway. It was the first time we had met. Strongly built, with a day’s growth of beard and a goatee, dip in his lip and a can in his back pocket, he wore a black t-shirt, green fire-retardant pants, and a ball cap lettered “Carolina Sandhills NWR Fire Region 4 District 2.” In a previous life, Mike had played rugby in Washington State, Texas, and Columbia, SC. I found out later that the helicopter pilot was also a former semipro rugby player. I wondered if there was a Pavlovian connection between the brutal contact sport and fire fighting or just some shared, unconditioned need for the rough-and-tumble.

Planning the burn, Mike and Mark immmediately fell into the shorthand dialog of those who had worked together a long time and knew the terrain. . . .