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Drunks-part one of many

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The beginning of a new project

“My grandmother says that Riverton was the place to be.”  So says David, the stocky 20-year-old riding behind me in our Deputy Fire Chief’s Truck.  We’re driving through the four or five blocks of downtown, and it’s hard to reconcile his grandmother’s statement with with what we see out of the windows.  The buildings are mostly brick, built up against each other in the late 1800s or early 1900s using what I’ve come to think of as firefighter-killer construction.  About every other building is occupied, mostly by antique shops that are open for a few hours a few days a week.

We pass a pair of buildings that, at first glace, look just like any others in the downtown blocks.  Look more closely, though, and you’ll see that they buildings are not buildings at all.  The front facades still stand, but behind that there’s nothing behind the brick fronts.  They burned in the first big fire I fought, and although people have talked of rebuilding them, even offered plans and obtained money, it’s never happened.

We’ve come from walking through several other buildings destroyed by a fire.  Only two of the buildings were actually touched by flame, but the other buildings on the block, feeling the loss of support from the burnt buildings, have begun to sag alarmingly.  Stand inside them, and you’ll notice that all the walls lean.  The whole block is to be torn down, but before that happens, we’re using them as training aids.  No one seems to know what will become of that block once it has been razed.

Those buildings seem like a symptom of small-town decay, and I suppose that’s what they are.  However, they’re also a reminder of triumph.  In the first moments of that fire, the duty shift saved the lives of two people, plucking them from a second-story window.  After saving the people, they saved the people’s dogs.  And they stopped the fire from spreading from building to building.

Looking at all of that, it’s easy to assume that David’s grandmother is deluded by nostalgia.  But the pictures hanging on the walls of the station prove that she’s speaking the truth.  On yellowed newsprint behind plain frames are pictures of a prosperous downtown full of people and businesses.  Look closely and you can see that the three-story building covering half of a block was once a large department store.  Now, the first floor holds a furniture rental shop.  The top two stories, I’m told, are used for storage.  Examine another photo, and you might see a corner bar with a beer sign hanging over the street and people coming and going through the open door.  That building is still there, and if you brave the buzzing attacks of the wasps that nest over the door and look through the grimed window, you can see the long bar.  It’s dusty and faded, but the wood still looks good solid.  A few hours of work, and it would be the showpiece of a nice pub.  For now, though, it sits forgotten.  As we drive past the building, the Deputy Chief notes, “That building is about to slide into the street.”  It is.  In fact, a few years ago, the back section of it did exactly that.

Decay isn’t the whole story, though.  On the next block, next to the local library, a bookstore and coffee shop does a steady, if not overwhelming business.  A pizza place next to that has hung on for several years, now.  The building next to it used to be a Bank of America branch, but sometime in the last year, with so little fanfare that I didn’t notice for a few months, the branch closed up shop, leaving another vacant building.  Next door, though, the Riverton Medical Clinic is doing a good business, as is the pharmacy conveniently located in the same building.

Past a few more antique shops, Pat’s Army Store always seems to have people in it, and the staff will be happy to sell you shoes for a track meet or a shotgun and ammo to go with it.  

Downtown today is, then, a bit underwhelming.  The days of “Block 42,” when retail businesses, bars, and cathouses jostled for space are gone, although many people still living here remember them.

Visitors to the town usually remark on the scads of antebellum homes and on the courthouse, where a cannonball (actually, it’s a replica cannonball-the original was removed for safety reasons) is lodged in one of the front columns, the result of a poorly aimed shot during the Civil War Battle of Riverton.

History is thick here, and coexists with the quotidian present.  When I first moved to town, I lived in an apartment building steps away from where the Battle of Riverton happened.  A year later, I moved to an apartment that occupied the top floor of a building that once housed a bank said to have been robbed by the James gang.  From that balcony of that apartment, I could look down on the spot where Archie Clemmons, a notorious Confederate guerilla and all-around murderous bastard, had a drink before being accosted by federal troops.  After a chase on horseback, he was gunned down near the courthouse.

Riverton was a Confederate town, and if you stand on the steps of that courthouse, you’ll be standing where slave auctions were once held.  

Lots of towns have history, but in this town, the citizens are aware of it.  Every kid here knows that the Battle of Riverton was won when troops advanced up a hill behind large hemp bales.  Outside of Riverton, William Quantrill is a name known mostly to afficiandos of the Civil War’s border conflicts.  Here, everyone knows that he led a band of Confederate guerillas, and often holed up in town between raids.  So, for that matter, did the James gang.  Archie Clemmons’ grave is around here, but those who know exactly where are loathe to share that information.  Although Clemmons died nearly 150 years ago, the grave is still sometimes subject to vandalism.

****

If you were to ask me in an distracted moment how long I’ve been living in Riverton, I might answer, “a couple of years, I guess.”  But it’s been longer than that.  Every year, the fire department hands out certificates for years of service.  My last one read 8 years.  Every time I look at it, I think there must have been a clerical error somewhere.  But the arithmetic is right.  I’ve been in Riverton for nearly a decade, and I’ve been a firefighter for just a few months short of that.

I didn’t intend that to happen, of course.  Riverton was not to be a stopping place, but a spot to stay in for a few years while I got started on a new career.  It hasn’t worked out like that; I haven’t left, and the new career that brought me here has fallen away and been replaced with a very different new career.  Somehow, this boy who grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City before moving to Chicago for college, and then spending a few years going wherever Uncle Sam told me to go, has settled in this small town on the bluffs of the Missouri River.  The town is insular, and often feels too small to the kids raised here.  But it’s also a community.  And, somehow, it’s become my community.

Although Riverton is the community I inhabit, my life here is dominated by the time I spend with my second family-the fire department.  

The purpose of this exercise is not to write some elegiac hymn to small-town life, or to offer peans to the people who respond to fires and medical emergencies.  My ambitions are much smaller than that.  I’d like to tell you some stories, and I hope that they entertain you.  There will be a few stories about small-town life, a few stories about fighting fires, and a lot of stories about working on an ambulance.  If  I have any goal beyond that, it’s to offer you a glimpse into one particular way of living.  I’m not going to try to convince you that this way of life is the best way to live.  I’d only to to show you that it’s one way to live.

****

You’ve probably heard stories about fires in the middle of the night, and about accident scenes with bodies scattered across the road among the broken glass and bits of cars.  That sort of thing certainly happens, but this is the daily reality of the job.

It’s two thirty in the morning, and my partner, Kevinl, and I are driving down an empty two-lane highway, on the way back from dropping someone off at the hospital several towns over.  The moon is out, and its light slides like mercury across the snowy fields on either side of the road.  I’ve plugged my mp3 player into the truck’s stereo, and we’ve got Johnny Cash cranked up.  I’ve got my right leg kicked up on the dashboard, and am doing my best to get comfortable in a seat that is permanently set to bolt upright.  We’re both singing along with the music, but the stereo’s volume and the clatter of the diesel engine mean that we can’t hear each other.  This is probably a blessing for Kevinl.  We sing our way through Jackson, Folsom Prison Blues, and a handful of others.  As we approach Riverton, I put on some of Cash’s newer stuff, which Kevinl hasn’t heard.  The spooky notes and lyrics of “The Man Comes Around” end as we pull into town.  At the gas station, we stand in the biting cold and fill the tank.  The lights in the house across the street from us are out.  Sane people are sound asleep at this hour.  

We pull away and tell dispatch we’re in service.  Back at the station, looking at a screen made bleary by contacts that should have been taken out several hours ago, I finish my report.  It’s nearly three thirty by the time I crawl back into bed.  I take off my EMS pants, hang them over a chair next to my zip-up boots, and crawl into bed in gym shorts and the same t-shirt I wore on the last call.  Setting things up that way saves time when the tones drop.  In about three hours, if we don’t get a call, I’ll get up, perform last-minute station duties, and end my 24-hour shift in time to drive my daughter to pre-school.