Pillars of smoke rises from farmlands. Orange glows light up the horizon at night, painting the underside of clouds with a pink hue. The smell of fire, accompanied by the sound of sirens, is in the air.

Spring is grass-burning time. For some grownups, it’s a chance to indulge the pyromaniac child within. A man with a box of matches and a legitimate cause for striking them can become a dangerous beast.

Anxieties rode my imagination the morning we began setting backfires on our farm near Vinland. I had visions of the fire “getting away,” of my home going up in flames.

“What happens if the fire gets on my neighbors’ land?” I asked my co-burner, district wildlife biologist Mike McFadden.

“Oh, you’d be liable,” he said. I was glad to have a veteran of many burns and an expert in fire management in charge, his sang froid an antidote to my own quaking terror.

The mission was a “prescribed burn,” part of our native grass restoration project. Fire stimulates natives grasses and suppresses competitive weeds and trees. Men have set fires since the beginning of time to promote grasses that nourish the grazing animals they like to eat. The American Indians called prairie fire “red buffalo.”

A “prescribed burn” implies one that’s planned and under control. But fires are like wild animals. You can guide and harness them. But they can also stampede and “get away.” That’s what the sirens had been telling me.

The wind was out of the southwest, so we began at the north. I wet down the utility poles while McFadden followed, dropping burning balls of fire from his drip torch. The water tanks on our ATVs seemed like puny artillery against any fire that got away. I wondered what I’d do if my machine stalled, trapping me in a closing ring of fire. Visions of immolation flickered in my brain.

The county road served as a barrier to the north. The backfire burned tamely, slowly to the south. Convinced that it was behaving properly, McFadden began another fire along the bordering woods. Soon, I lost him in a crowd of smoke. Alarm was followed by resignation. Mike was a goner and so was my neighbor’s woods. No amount of insurance could cover either loss. All was ruined.

My own native knack for disasters made me a liability too. Looking for an escape route, I drove up a steep incline and capsized my ATV. I struggled to right it, with one eye on the approaching fire. I do declare I discovered a reservoir of strength I didn’t know I had. Just before I became a burnt offering, I got it back on four wheels. Frantically I tried to start it. No go. Engine flooded. Start, idiot. At the last possible moment, success. Hallelujah! I gave her the gas and drove her straight into the pond.

McFadden reappeared. Without so much as a horse laugh, without unleashing so much as a contemptuous grin, he pulled me out of the muck with his winch.

The scattered fires to the west had already subsided. We drove along the woodside and doused patches of burning grass and the nest of a pack rat smoldering in the crotch of a cedar tree.

It was time to light the Big Fire. The operation up to this point had seemed orderly compared to what followed. With a whoosh and a sinister crackling, the flames exploded and tumbled forward, blown northward by the wind. Control was out of the question then. The only thing to do was watch in awe. Flames shot up 20 feet high, dancing like devils.

The conflagration was quickly over. In a matter of minutes all the fuel had been consumed. The blazes evaporated, leaving the ground blackened and scorched. A vast raft of smoke arose, a half-mile long, a quarter-mile wide, a template of the burned acres. It floated off to the north, rising, expanding, at last fading into the clear sky.

The south 80 remained to be burned, but the wind had come up. Prudence won over the urge to plunge ahead. The next day it rained. The day after was overcast. We needed a couple of hours of sunlight to dry out the grass. In mid-afternoon, McFadden rolled up the driveway and we went to work again.

This time, the fire burned slowly. A matting of wet, residual fescue produced prodigious volumes of smoke. Before long the entire valley seemed shrouded in our smoke. My lungs felt the way they used to after a pack of Camels. My sooty clothes smelled the way they do after a night at the Bottleneck.

“Firebug!” my neighbor greeted me a couple of days later. I apologized for the pall of smoke I’d caused. He laughed. Someone who’d driven through our area at the time had said to him, “Bob, they’ve set the whole county on fire.”

The black, denuded earth is a beautiful sight to one who’s seen it in summer, covered with infestations of thistles, woody asters, thorny hedge trees. There’s a sense of reprieve from nature’s disheveled hordes, a fresh start. Each year brings hope for the big bluestem and Indian grass and dread of some new plague of weeds. In a few weeks we’ll know what this year brings.

George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.