When I travel to different areas of North America to fight forest fires, I often stay in base camps and travel to the fire-line every morning by truck, bus, or helicopter.

Ontario is the last province in Canada to require its forest fire fighters to actually live on the fire-line for weeks on end until the fire is out. This means we camp where we initially land to action the fire and are serviced by helicopter thereafter. We almost always land in a small flat wetlands where we are able to set up a pump and lay a hose-line to the fire edge.

In the 17 years I've done this job, I've calculated that just over two entire years (700-800 days) of my life has been spent living in a tent. There have been good campsites and bad ones, but mostly in bug-infested wetlands.

After the pump is shut down and we've eaten a good meal in the bug tent, I like to relax, have a smoke, and listen to the cacophony of crickets, waterbugs, frogs, black flies, and mosquitoes. The sounds of a boreal forest wetland at dusk in the deep of summer are almost deafening.

Then all at once they stop... in almost perfect concord all the sound just ends.

...and the song at dusk is over.