Who could have foreseen the horror that would befall our village's beloved sugarcane plantation that fateful January evening? The towering plume of smoke. The shouts of children going berserk. A cataclysmic brushfire of doom raging outside our window. Would Tana and I escape the jaws of fiery death or perish in a burst of flames?

Ending spoiler: Okay, so we weren't in any imminent peril at all- it was less a catastrophe and more a spectacle. I just wanted to add some over-the-top action for the eventual animated Disney movie adaptation of our blog. Needless to say, we, the titular heroes, broke away unscathed and have lived happily ever after. That's not to deflate all the drama though, since the fire was pretty freakin huge. And it led to the demise of a field near and dear to us. RIP, Fieldy McFieldington.

Not only are the fields aesthetically pleasing to the eye, they're tasty too. Neighbor kids sometimes bring us cane stalks as gifts that they sneak from the fields. Even though it tastes really good, it takes way too much general effort to get to the edible part. My guess is that you expend twice as much energy tearing the stalk apart with your teeth, fingernails, and knees than you gain from the subsequent ingestion. The process is simple to understand but difficult to master- just savagely attack the stick with your entire body and soul and repeatedly bludgeon it against the concrete. After all this toil, more than the taste itself, biting into the sugary core instills a sense of achievement over nature. It's the same achievement that cavemen may have felt after skewering and barbecuing a mastadon or an American might experience after carefully assembling the meat, cheese, and crackers of a Lunchables. Of course, Lunchables isn't quite the same full-body workout as sugarcane.

By the way, you don't actually eat it- you just kinda gnaw on it. It's like sinking your teeth into wet plywood. You can't swallow the splintering little woodchips and must therefore spew them from your mouth with all the elegance of a vomiting beaver. Eating sugarcane is one of those things you do for the journey, not the destination, I guess. Anyway, back to the action.

It's not half as gratifying to yell "LE FEU!" in French as it is to yell "FFIIIIIRRE!!" in English. When we looked out the window and saw the huge red wall of flames, it was the same feeling conjured up by all those natural disaster movies a couple years back. We were clueless as to why there was a ten-foot fire. Maybe this was how Mrs. O'Leary felt after her cow kicked the lantern. The surrealness of it all was only enhanced by the fact that a happening of this grandeur should occur on 1/11/11, a date just begging for a happening.