I found this at my family home during my last visit, inside a communal desk crammed full of pens, pencils and old notebooks, for the taking.  My stepdad was a firefighter in the forest service 40some years ago, but he wasn’t the chief or anything, so I’m not sure why he had it.  I wanted to ask him about it, but he likes to talk for an hour, and I was in a hurry that day.  The smaller type at the top reads:

Form 289

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Forest Service

Washington

Official Business

and at the bottom:

This book is Government property [I like how they capitalized government, like God] .  The finder is requested to deliver it to any officer of the Forest Service, or deposit it in the nearest post office.

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE    16-40251-2

I chose to write about this notebook because it’s odd– it’s called a document on the face, but inside it’s full of blank perforated sheets, yellow, 3×5.  The front side of each page is gridded, the reverse side is blank.  Maybe it’s a document for generating documents?  Maybe if the Chief signed one of the pages, it could become an actual document?  Otherwise, how could the Chief’s notebook be a document?

I just use it for scrawling ideas.  My ideas especially like this booklet.  Somehow it’s funner to write in this because it’s not for me, because I am the finder.  Sort of.

I googled “form 289 U.S. department of agriculture”, and found something much more current, specific, and standardized: a pdf with about 25 different boxes to fill in, check, and sign.  USDA Form 289 seems way more official nowadays, four or five decades later, and it now has a proper title: “PROPERTY LOSS OR DAMAGE REPORT, Fire Suppression”.  There’s always a forest fire in Southern California.  I don’t think forms are going to suppress any of them.

It’s funny, I just realized that the page I took a photo of has the quote: “We speak to people as if they knew fire, whatever it is.”  That’s from Plato’s cosmological treatise, Timaeus.