I was the nuisance. I guess I still am, occasionally.

I live in a small friendly town where many people know each other. My 4 immediate street neighbours and I all have a perfect working relationship where we leave each other alone but nod hello and are appropriately neighbourly. We help shovel each other out after snow storms and other stereotypical Canadian things.

Some of my further-down the street neighbours are not so easy to live near. They claim the smoke from our legal backyard autumn campfires bothers them, so they come down and complain about it. We always put it out, grumble a bit, and go to bed.

They live on a perpendicular street to mine 4 houses up, roughly 200 metres away from where the campfires occur, as I have a double lot. We only do fires in the late summer and autumn, when it’s cool enough to enjoy a fire. My brother brings his guitar, we get marshmallows for the kids, wine or whisky for the grown ups, and chill until about 10 pm. We have a chimnea-type metal grated fire pit, and never make fires during a drought. Also, we use seasoned, split logs, and never burn garbage or treated wood, so it’s a pretty clean burn. We speak quietly and extinguish the coals thoroughly so there’s no offensive stink afterward.

It’s hard to respect these neighbours extreme sensitivity to the smoke because I’ve walked to their neighbours place to return a wandering dog one night when we were grilling sausages around the fire (nice try, puppy!), and though I could tell that there was a campfire somewhere nearby, I could honestly say there wasn’t a huge cloud of smoke that made it hard to breathe. I am asthmatic, and I don’t like smoke either.

I was convinced these guys were nitpicking.

Still, we tried to only make fires on evenings when their car was gone, as it often was. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I have the right to live on my land. One October evening last fall I saw their car pull in around 9:45pm, nearing the typical end of our fire night. No one was in a rush to get going, though, so we sat around and enjoyed the blazing coals.

Somewhere near 10pm I hear a stick snap in the culvert behind where my husband was sitting. The fire was between us, the glow of the coals basically all I could see, but it was obvious my husband and brother had heard the sound as well. My brother put down his guitar and started sharpening a stick with his buck knife, and my husband put his hand on the axe. I was sitting in a folding camp chair, holding a sleeping toddler, useless. Whoever was creeping around the wooded culvert was standing directly behind our hedge, making a poor job of spying on us, but freaking me out a tiny little bit. I assumed it was our fussy neighbour, but who could tell?

Suddenly, the roar of a huge truck could be heard getting louder, and flashing lights could be seen as the truck slowed to a stop in front of our house. The bloody volunteer firefighters had been called. We met them in front of our house and they apologized for disturbing us, but they’d received a complaint about a fire and they were here to check on things. They saw that everything was up to code, asked if we needed help extinguishing the coals, and wished us a good evening. I followed them back to the truck and asked if the call had been made anonymously. They couldn’t tell us that. He did say that we were within our rights to have a fire, unless it was bothering a neighbour, in which case we would have to extinguish it. He was really sympathetic and I felt awful that these hardworking people had been dragged out on a weekend over such pettiness.

So we pointed the hose at the hedge and made very sure that the fire and all surrounding areas were thoroughly absolutely extinguished.

It’s entirely possible the creepy annoying spy got a bit wet, but who can say for sure?