KERSEY, Colo. — It’s okay to say “I love you” to a man who isn’t your husband.
Though, Alycia Carmin readily admits her husband may have said it, as well.
“He kinda loved him too,” she said.
The man standing in their yard was a firefighter, who’d come to warn them they might want to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Several lightning strikes in the area had sparked grass fires late Wednesday night near Kersey, burning a large area seen for miles.
“He says, 'And we need to get through your corrals, so we can stand between your house and the fire,'” she recalls. “And I just said, 'Thank you, I love you.' And he giggled and said, 'Okay, sure.'”
The firefighter did just as he said. He pulled the truck near the back of Carmin’s property and protected it. And he had backup standing not far away.
“I’m really in the middle of nowhere, and everybody from our town was making sure (we) were okay,” Carmin said.
Within minutes of the fire sparking, she said she heard from a handful of people. Roger called from 2 miles away. Another family from 2 and a half miles. And she got three calls from 7 miles away.
“I was surprised at how many of our neighbors knew what was going on so quickly,” she said.
And she was surprised how quickly they reacted.
“It's not like a 10-minute 'here, let me help you.' It's an hour to a 3-hour chore to help us. That's quite a lot of time, and I think that's a big gift,” she said.
Doug Corliss, a neighbor a few miles away spotted the fire and instantly connected his disc to his tractor and drove it over to the Carmin's.
“I was just trying to be neighborly because I didn't want my neighbors to lose their house,” he said. “You help your neighbor out when they need you. And someday I'll need help and my neighbors won't bat and eye and come help me. I'm sure of it.”
There were about 80 firefighters working out there in the dark Wednesday night, from 14 different departments.
Watch this story in the video above.
