By happenstance, though we see him regularly but not often, we came across the large, bluff young man whose mother before him used to walk in the ravine with her black poodle.  His two young terrier-blend dogs whose good nature and inquisitiveness and focus on stalking the squirrel population in the ravine never fails to entertain were busy ahead of him, he approaching at a human pace, with his great strides.

My husband mentioned yesterday's incident with the fire set on a hillside of the ravine, and he knew instantly of what we were speaking.  It was his detachment that had responded, though he had been assigned another unit, security.  Word gets around, however.  And though we had the perspective of having been there, and been a part of the little drama that ensued, he had the inside story of what the responding firemen and subsequent police presence discovered.

The young man who had hidden himself in a copse of woods alongside the fire and who had jumped out at my husband, taken him aback at his presence, mostly because he was not a youth but a full-grown man obviously having set the fire in a vulnerable area, had been fully inebriated by the time the firemen investigated where I directed them to.  It was, as I had guessed, they who had called in the police who took the young man into custody.

It's doubtful he will be charged with anything but mischief.  He lives locally, they determined, and his crisis stemmed from the fact that his parents had ordered him out of the house, where he lived with them.  At age 25 it is not uncommon for young people to be expected to stride out usefully in the world, fully independent of their parents.  Particularly at an age when their social values likely diverge hugely from their parents'.

He was feeling pretty sorry for himself.  No one will ever really know - until and unless he has a desire to divulge the incident and his subsequent emotions - exactly what propelled this family crisis, but as our young friend commented, everyone goes through them in their lifetime, whether it's an intimate partnership breakup or an illness or a familial estrangement. 

He was taken into custody as much for his own safety, as for that of the community following on his stupid act that could have threatened a local impact on our near environment.