Now that the fires have been mostly beaten back into their containment areas in the Ono-Igo area, it feels safe to talk about the management of our/their taming.  I left Tuesday morning (7-7-0-8) for work with no knowledge that the lightning fires that had caused Ono residents to be mandated away from their homes for a solid 7 days just a few days previously had gone wild overnight.  My first clue was after driving 30 minutes from home into the little town of Ono, 7 Sheriff patrol cars (are there really that many in this county?) were parked catty wampus in front of the store with their respective officers leaned over the hood of one looking at maps.  Told my guy that they were going to shut it down again and proceeded on our way, thinking that the closure would affect Ono again only.  I checked in to the newspaer later that day to discover that hard closures had cut us off from any hope of return.  I became totally distracted from the work at hand and left to watch and keep track of the fire.  I called the command center 3 times a day, knowing that they got their updates at 6:30 on either side of the day but hoping in the middle some anecdotal info might leak through.  I found that reading the comments in the local paper provided the best up to date info.  Mind you - this is normally the place of such prattle as to make a county resident proud - NOT!  Like the news story that Igonians were lamenting the end of the beer reserve before the closure was lifted.  Even CH 7 should be ashamed... I found myself riveted to the news, the real news that was not happening through any official source, and it was good news.  People and their places surviving, some of (it's who you know) priviledge, some of sheer stubborness.  Woodrose spoke elequently about the value of local knowledge and resource to the fire fighting effort, Brickwell gave honest unfiltered reports of what she learned from her husband (peripherally attached), Web published a map through his work that was the most astounding piece of GIS work I have yet seen, while I sat in a little house waiting to go home on the other side of the evac area but cut off from the administrative decision to close off over 300 square miles of the county.  If they'd only asked me, I'd have told them to soft close the west end of Platina road at the intersection with H36, and to let those folks miles and miles west of Ono go home.  Long way to get there, but after driving through Ono now and seeing the destruction down to the  pavement, I understand the closure there.  That the Grange is standing and the others close by have homes is an amazing feat.  My dogs (wolf hybrids) and the cat got water Thursday night from a neighbor who stayed behind.  So I lost the corn to heat and the tomatoes were eaten to the ground (someone's going to have a belly ache).  But we are here and back to some kind of smoke/ash covered reality.