One of the goals of this blog, if it has any apart from giving me a place to deposit my brain droppings, (apologies to George Carlin) is to try to cast some light on the day-to-day realities of work in fire and EMS. You may have seen us passing by in the ambulance, gathering food in the grocery store, or speaking to your church group or your child's class. When you were a kid, you may have gone to a fire station to see the big red trucks. Perhaps a good-natured fire fighter let you sound the siren. And certainly, you've seen us portrayed in a thousand TV shows and movies.
But none of that really gives you an idea of who we really are. Who are those people, who, when you pass by an accident on a rainy night, are climbing into the crumpled remains of a car? Who are the people in bunker gear crawling into a burning building? And why the hell do they do it?
Let's start with the obvious answer to the latter question: we don't do it for the money. Firefighters on large municipal departments are paid and compensated well. The rest of us have to work mulitple jobs just to get by. And volunteers, of which there are many, do it for no money at all. So, why? When the public asks, we'll tell you that it has something to do with public service, and with making a difference in people's lives. And those things are true. But there's more to it than that. There are any number of ways to serve one's fellow man that don't involve the stresses and dangers of emergency services. But we've chosen this life. The reasons why are probably as myriad as the people who chose to do it, and many of those people can't give you a very good answer. For a lot of us, it just seems right.
Answering the second question isn't much easier. Who are we? The shortest and most direct answer is probably, "We're people." And that's true. We're family men and women, perpetual bachelors, aspiring intellectuals and lovers of reality TV who've never picked up a book we weren't assigned. We're risk takers and risk averse. We're pious and profane. As a group, we contradict ourselves and contain multitudes.
There you are then-a wordy answer that is no answer at all. But the truth is that our reasons for choosing this line of work are as we are. Ask a thousand insurance salesmen why they do what they do, and the answers will probably be fairly similar: it's something that pays reasonably well and that they can tolerate doing from day to day. I suspect that for first responders, the answers, while varying wildly, might fall into a few categories.
Some of us are keeping up a family tradition. Fire and police departments are thick with tradition, so it's perhaps appropriate that joining them is often a tradition within families. Some are thrill-seekers and glory hounds. Thankfully, they don't usually last very long. Others are truly motivated by the desire to help. Yet others want to be challenged. Most of us take some from column A, some from column b, etc.
It's also true that many of us just aren't suited for whatever it is that goes on in normal offices and workplaces. I tend refer to us as the island of misfit toys. It's hardly original, but it fits.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Of Lighted Streets and Quiet Nights
It's been a while since I've posted. While I doubt that many people (anyone?) have missed me, I apologize to anyone who did.
I don't have any good stories to share, or at least any that would be all that interesting to anyone not in Fire/EMS, so I thought I'd say a bit about the town I live in and the department I'm part of.
Riverton (not the town's real name) is like a lot of small towns in that it seems to be slowly emptying out. About 5,000 people live here, and most of those were born and raised within the county, if not the town.
Often, the most promising kids graduating high school are the first ones out the door. It's hard to blame them for that. Opportunities in small towns can be limited. The regional hospital and the presence of the county seat ensure that we have more than our share of lawyers, doctors, and RNs. The low cost of living here means that teachers, often among the least prosperous of professionals, can live solidly middle-class lives. But to enter that class, one has to leave town, at least for a while.
For those who stay, opportunities are limited. There simply aren't that many places to work here, and the jobs that are in town don't usually pay well. The plum jobs for kids without a college degree are mostly in the large city 30 miles to our west. There, a military ammunition plant and two large auto factories pay blue collar workers well enough to make the sort of middle class life that has ceased to be an option for many people in the manufacturing sector possible. People who spend years at those plants do quite well by local standards.
For all the lack of opportunity, the town has its charms. It's small enough that the odds are good you will see a familiar face at the grocery store, but not so small that everyone knows the minutiae of everyone else's life. Many of the homes in town date back to the Civil War and before, and most of those are still in good shape. Although the town is anything but booming economically, a drive down some of our streets leads through neighborhoods as nice as can be found in any wealthy enclave.
There's a bookstore downtown that offers a good selection of reading material and coffee. It's run by a woman who retired from a specialized construction engineering job. She's extremely intelligent and helpful, but has thrown at least one person out of her store for making stupid political comments. Pam came to town about the same time I did, and I was among the first customers through her door. I like knowing that her shop is there. I seriously doubt that I could live anywhere without a good bookstore and coffee shop. Pam's place combines the two.
I live in a small house with a large front porch at the end of a residential street. Although the house is near the center of town, geography, in the form of a deep, wooded ravine that hooks around two sides of the house and an old, sunken railroad right of way on a third side make the half-block of street that makes up my immediate neighborhood isolated and quiet. I like that. I live there, in something just under 1000 square feet, with my daughter. While it's certainly not the opulent house in the suburbs other people who grew up in my chronological and economic cohort have, I like it there. I don't have the land or the money to create the Japanese water garden I always dreamed of, but the vegetable garden I put in last year produced prodigious amounts of vibrantly colored tomatoes, peppers and okra. The marigolds I planted on one side of the porch grew thick and bushy, as did the herb garden I planted on the other. The porch itself has room for an outdoor dining table, a grill, and several chairs, which make it a perfect place to cook, eat, or read when the weather is not terrible.
Across the railroad right of way from me is a large cemetery, plots in which date back to before the Civil War. A walk through that graveyard can easily become a lesson in the history of this part of the world. Here, under a 20 foot tall stone plinth, lies the body of one of the founders of the Pony Express. And here, under these four identical small rounded stones, lie the bodies of four Union soldiers. They were pulled from a train by the notorious (and celebrated by some) Confederate Guerilla William Quantrill, forced to kneel down, and executed. About 100 uphill yards away, in a more central and sunny part of the cemetery, is a memorial to several fallen Confederate soldiers. Not far from that is the grave of an area Congressman who occupied a powerful position involving oversight of the military. On the day of his funeral, the sound of his 21-gun salute crashed and echoed against the front of my house, startling me and causing me to send my daughter inside before I realized what was happening.
Riverton is not the kind of place people often move to, unless they are buying a retirement home or attempting to set up a bed and breakfast. Yet it's a place I've come to and established a home, nearly 10 years ago. I never intended for that to happen. Upon arriving in Lexington, I planned to stay no more than a few years. But opportunities to leave have come and gone, and I am still here. While I wasn't looking, I became part of the community, and began to view the town not as a waypoint, but as a place to live.
For me, the heart of the community, and the center of my life outside the home, is the fire department. I joined the department almost as accidentally as I came to call Riverton home. I moved to town to take a job as a reporter, and that job put me in frequent contact with the Fire Chief. Chief Jones looks just how you want a fire chief to look: neatly trimmed moustache, short grey hair brushed straight back from his forehead, uniform always neat, and badge always shiny. Over the course of several meetings, Jones found out that I had been in the Marine Corps, and that thanks to my job as an Air Force reservist, I had some familiarity with hazardous materials and working in IDLH (Immediate Danger to Life and Health) environments. It wasn't long before he suggested that I come out and volunteer. I initially demurred. As a reporter, that could create a conflict of interest. And as a human being with nerve endings, I suspected that burning to death would suck.
On the other hand, working with the department would probably lead me to some great stories. And, the more time I spent around the fire department, the more I realized that I liked the people there. A few months later, I found myself at the weekly training, learning how to lock my legs around the rungs of a ladder and I handled heavy equipment.
I don't have any good stories to share, or at least any that would be all that interesting to anyone not in Fire/EMS, so I thought I'd say a bit about the town I live in and the department I'm part of.
Riverton (not the town's real name) is like a lot of small towns in that it seems to be slowly emptying out. About 5,000 people live here, and most of those were born and raised within the county, if not the town.
Often, the most promising kids graduating high school are the first ones out the door. It's hard to blame them for that. Opportunities in small towns can be limited. The regional hospital and the presence of the county seat ensure that we have more than our share of lawyers, doctors, and RNs. The low cost of living here means that teachers, often among the least prosperous of professionals, can live solidly middle-class lives. But to enter that class, one has to leave town, at least for a while.
For those who stay, opportunities are limited. There simply aren't that many places to work here, and the jobs that are in town don't usually pay well. The plum jobs for kids without a college degree are mostly in the large city 30 miles to our west. There, a military ammunition plant and two large auto factories pay blue collar workers well enough to make the sort of middle class life that has ceased to be an option for many people in the manufacturing sector possible. People who spend years at those plants do quite well by local standards.
For all the lack of opportunity, the town has its charms. It's small enough that the odds are good you will see a familiar face at the grocery store, but not so small that everyone knows the minutiae of everyone else's life. Many of the homes in town date back to the Civil War and before, and most of those are still in good shape. Although the town is anything but booming economically, a drive down some of our streets leads through neighborhoods as nice as can be found in any wealthy enclave.
There's a bookstore downtown that offers a good selection of reading material and coffee. It's run by a woman who retired from a specialized construction engineering job. She's extremely intelligent and helpful, but has thrown at least one person out of her store for making stupid political comments. Pam came to town about the same time I did, and I was among the first customers through her door. I like knowing that her shop is there. I seriously doubt that I could live anywhere without a good bookstore and coffee shop. Pam's place combines the two.
I live in a small house with a large front porch at the end of a residential street. Although the house is near the center of town, geography, in the form of a deep, wooded ravine that hooks around two sides of the house and an old, sunken railroad right of way on a third side make the half-block of street that makes up my immediate neighborhood isolated and quiet. I like that. I live there, in something just under 1000 square feet, with my daughter. While it's certainly not the opulent house in the suburbs other people who grew up in my chronological and economic cohort have, I like it there. I don't have the land or the money to create the Japanese water garden I always dreamed of, but the vegetable garden I put in last year produced prodigious amounts of vibrantly colored tomatoes, peppers and okra. The marigolds I planted on one side of the porch grew thick and bushy, as did the herb garden I planted on the other. The porch itself has room for an outdoor dining table, a grill, and several chairs, which make it a perfect place to cook, eat, or read when the weather is not terrible.
Across the railroad right of way from me is a large cemetery, plots in which date back to before the Civil War. A walk through that graveyard can easily become a lesson in the history of this part of the world. Here, under a 20 foot tall stone plinth, lies the body of one of the founders of the Pony Express. And here, under these four identical small rounded stones, lie the bodies of four Union soldiers. They were pulled from a train by the notorious (and celebrated by some) Confederate Guerilla William Quantrill, forced to kneel down, and executed. About 100 uphill yards away, in a more central and sunny part of the cemetery, is a memorial to several fallen Confederate soldiers. Not far from that is the grave of an area Congressman who occupied a powerful position involving oversight of the military. On the day of his funeral, the sound of his 21-gun salute crashed and echoed against the front of my house, startling me and causing me to send my daughter inside before I realized what was happening.
Riverton is not the kind of place people often move to, unless they are buying a retirement home or attempting to set up a bed and breakfast. Yet it's a place I've come to and established a home, nearly 10 years ago. I never intended for that to happen. Upon arriving in Lexington, I planned to stay no more than a few years. But opportunities to leave have come and gone, and I am still here. While I wasn't looking, I became part of the community, and began to view the town not as a waypoint, but as a place to live.
For me, the heart of the community, and the center of my life outside the home, is the fire department. I joined the department almost as accidentally as I came to call Riverton home. I moved to town to take a job as a reporter, and that job put me in frequent contact with the Fire Chief. Chief Jones looks just how you want a fire chief to look: neatly trimmed moustache, short grey hair brushed straight back from his forehead, uniform always neat, and badge always shiny. Over the course of several meetings, Jones found out that I had been in the Marine Corps, and that thanks to my job as an Air Force reservist, I had some familiarity with hazardous materials and working in IDLH (Immediate Danger to Life and Health) environments. It wasn't long before he suggested that I come out and volunteer. I initially demurred. As a reporter, that could create a conflict of interest. And as a human being with nerve endings, I suspected that burning to death would suck.
On the other hand, working with the department would probably lead me to some great stories. And, the more time I spent around the fire department, the more I realized that I liked the people there. A few months later, I found myself at the weekly training, learning how to lock my legs around the rungs of a ladder and I handled heavy equipment.
Friday, January 17, 2014
On Punk Rock and Anger
I used to be a punk rocker. I don't know what I am now. But here are some thoughts on who, and what, I used to be.
When I was about 12, a friend of mine gave me a dubbed tape of several songs, one of which was Black Flag's "TV Party." It probably wasn't the most auspicious start to life as a young punker; the song was basically a joke. Certainly, it lacked the rage of Black Flag's other stuff. But that other stuff wasn't far in the future.
Like a lot of kids who got into punk rock in the 80s, my first real punk album was Black Flag's Damaged. If you've seen the cover, you probably remember it. A bald young man is pictured smashing his fist into a mirror. Along the top of the cover were the words Black Flag and the band's four-bar logo. If you looked carefully, you could see blood dripping from the man's fist. The picture is not faked. Someone (I believe it was Henry Rollins) smashed his fist into a mirror to get that shot.
The music was just as brutal as the album cover. The album opened with "Rise Above." Greg Ginn, the band's guitarist, was able to capture in a few bars the hurt, anger, and defiance-always and forever defiance- that I felt so strongly at that age. The lyrics were the sort of thing I wanted to scream in the face of any authority figure I could find. Parents, teachers, whoever-none were to be trusted, and all were part of a system dedicated to extinguishing whatever sparks of creativity, free thought, or individualism might arise in their arid world. "We are tired/ of your abuse/ try to stop us!/ It's no use!" To my furiously Manichian pre-adolescent mind, that said it all.
In retrospect, I'm not sure where all that anger came from. My parents were anything but stifling or abusive. They were quite the opposite. Both my mother and father encouraged creativity and intellectual independence. My father could be authoritarian at home (as fathers sometimes must be), but his attitude towards power and authority in general was highly skeptical, and he never hid that from me. During one conference with some school authority figure I'd managed to offend, I demanded, "Don't I have the right to ask why?" The authority figure hemmed and hawed for a moment, obviously searching for a way to tell me that I ought to just shut up and obey. My father, who had been silently sitting to the side spoke up, using the fullness of his courtroom voice. "Always. You always have the right to ask why." When I was older, it was my father who introduced me to libertarian politics.
My mother was a graphic artist and tended to be more creative and free spirited than my strictly intellectual and hyper-rational father, but she too encouraged me to think for myself.
So, it wasn't my parents who were the source of the anger I felt towards a society I was convinced was trying to crush me. Of course, that didn't stop them from becoming targets of my anger.
My school no doubt had something to do with the early onset of adolescent rage and rebellion. There are plenty of stories to be told there, but none of them are really within the scope of this narrative. Suffice it to say that my it was a private k-8 school run by the Episcopal church. It was and is a good school, but I suspect that as a young person, I was not tempermentally suited to the classroom environment. I did and do live almost entirely inside my head, and had little interest in 'socializing' with my classmates. By the time I did develop that interest, I was already well established as an outsider.
Most of it, though, had to do with me. I was congenitally rebellious and suspicious. I remember resenting being told to sing, "I am calm/ I am still/I am doing God's will." Although I probably didn't have the vocabulary to put a name to my feelings, I was quite sure that the song was just a way to get us to do the teacher's will. I was probably seven or eight at the time.
A less flattering, and more honest account would probably be that I have always been a bit of an asshole.
Enough navel gazing. Back to punk rock. Damaged was only the start. I couldn't get enough punk rock. Within less than a year, I had acquired close to a hundred punk albums, and I listened to them obsessively. I wasn't enough to have the music playing while I did something else. I would spend hours laying in front of my stereo with the volume cranked up, listening to the songs and reading the lyric sheets or contemplating the album art. If the album was on one of the dubbed tapes I had, I would read through the catalogs that now came to the house: Alternative Tentacles, SST, and whatever else I could get my hands on. I was unaware of zines, but had I known about them, I would have acquired all I could find.
Some kids get religion around that age, and in a way, so did I. The lyric sheets of Black Flag or Dead Kennedys albums were my scripture, and I studied them as closely, and uncritically, as some read the Bible or Quoran. What I learned was what I already believed: society was another word for a conglomeration of powerful people who valued conformity and the status quo above all and the less powerful people subject to their rule. Our 'leaders' were power-hungry madmen whose machinations threatened the very existence of the human race. The best we could hope for was a few decades of drudgery, followed by a long wait for death. There were a few who saw the truth, and who tried to resist. They were almost always crushed by the system, which had a mechanistically efficient system of enforcing its rules. Kids who stood up or stood out were fed into a system that started in the schools and ended either in jails or in psychiatric institutions. A few years later, I found this idea expressed much more elegantly in Ken Kessey's discussion of the Combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The kids were big, but the machine made them small.
I knew the system was out there, and evil. And I saw it everywhere I looked. I picked a fights with it every chance I could. And I invariably lost. This isn't meant to be a detailed memoir (and surely those of you who have made it this far are bored enough already), so I won't recount any details here. I will say that things eventually came to a head, as they had to, and I lost, as I had to.
What followed was a long period of confusion. While I never really quit believing in the punk ethos, I had had enough of the fight. Listening to those albums began to feel dangerous, like feeding air to the embers left in a half-burned building. I gave away most of my collection. And I tried to keep my mind right.
Of course, it didn't work. Although I was certainly passionate, especially after discovering libertarianism, I never felt the sort of constant fury that I did at twelve, and that was probably a saving grace. The kind of anger I felt at that age was not controllable, and would have burned me out.
Leap forward a few decades. My passions and my politics have moderated. This story ends like almost every other one about youthful rebellion. I still like to blast Black Flag, Minor Threat, and a few newer punk bands. I still tell myself that I am a rebel at heart, and that the angry punk kid that was willing to go to war against perceived injustice is still a part of me. And maybe that's true.
Or maybe I'm just a middling guy hurtling towards middle age mediocrity and clinging to memories of a younger, better self.
When I was about 12, a friend of mine gave me a dubbed tape of several songs, one of which was Black Flag's "TV Party." It probably wasn't the most auspicious start to life as a young punker; the song was basically a joke. Certainly, it lacked the rage of Black Flag's other stuff. But that other stuff wasn't far in the future.
Like a lot of kids who got into punk rock in the 80s, my first real punk album was Black Flag's Damaged. If you've seen the cover, you probably remember it. A bald young man is pictured smashing his fist into a mirror. Along the top of the cover were the words Black Flag and the band's four-bar logo. If you looked carefully, you could see blood dripping from the man's fist. The picture is not faked. Someone (I believe it was Henry Rollins) smashed his fist into a mirror to get that shot.
The music was just as brutal as the album cover. The album opened with "Rise Above." Greg Ginn, the band's guitarist, was able to capture in a few bars the hurt, anger, and defiance-always and forever defiance- that I felt so strongly at that age. The lyrics were the sort of thing I wanted to scream in the face of any authority figure I could find. Parents, teachers, whoever-none were to be trusted, and all were part of a system dedicated to extinguishing whatever sparks of creativity, free thought, or individualism might arise in their arid world. "We are tired/ of your abuse/ try to stop us!/ It's no use!" To my furiously Manichian pre-adolescent mind, that said it all.
In retrospect, I'm not sure where all that anger came from. My parents were anything but stifling or abusive. They were quite the opposite. Both my mother and father encouraged creativity and intellectual independence. My father could be authoritarian at home (as fathers sometimes must be), but his attitude towards power and authority in general was highly skeptical, and he never hid that from me. During one conference with some school authority figure I'd managed to offend, I demanded, "Don't I have the right to ask why?" The authority figure hemmed and hawed for a moment, obviously searching for a way to tell me that I ought to just shut up and obey. My father, who had been silently sitting to the side spoke up, using the fullness of his courtroom voice. "Always. You always have the right to ask why." When I was older, it was my father who introduced me to libertarian politics.
My mother was a graphic artist and tended to be more creative and free spirited than my strictly intellectual and hyper-rational father, but she too encouraged me to think for myself.
So, it wasn't my parents who were the source of the anger I felt towards a society I was convinced was trying to crush me. Of course, that didn't stop them from becoming targets of my anger.
My school no doubt had something to do with the early onset of adolescent rage and rebellion. There are plenty of stories to be told there, but none of them are really within the scope of this narrative. Suffice it to say that my it was a private k-8 school run by the Episcopal church. It was and is a good school, but I suspect that as a young person, I was not tempermentally suited to the classroom environment. I did and do live almost entirely inside my head, and had little interest in 'socializing' with my classmates. By the time I did develop that interest, I was already well established as an outsider.
Most of it, though, had to do with me. I was congenitally rebellious and suspicious. I remember resenting being told to sing, "I am calm/ I am still/I am doing God's will." Although I probably didn't have the vocabulary to put a name to my feelings, I was quite sure that the song was just a way to get us to do the teacher's will. I was probably seven or eight at the time.
A less flattering, and more honest account would probably be that I have always been a bit of an asshole.
Enough navel gazing. Back to punk rock. Damaged was only the start. I couldn't get enough punk rock. Within less than a year, I had acquired close to a hundred punk albums, and I listened to them obsessively. I wasn't enough to have the music playing while I did something else. I would spend hours laying in front of my stereo with the volume cranked up, listening to the songs and reading the lyric sheets or contemplating the album art. If the album was on one of the dubbed tapes I had, I would read through the catalogs that now came to the house: Alternative Tentacles, SST, and whatever else I could get my hands on. I was unaware of zines, but had I known about them, I would have acquired all I could find.
Some kids get religion around that age, and in a way, so did I. The lyric sheets of Black Flag or Dead Kennedys albums were my scripture, and I studied them as closely, and uncritically, as some read the Bible or Quoran. What I learned was what I already believed: society was another word for a conglomeration of powerful people who valued conformity and the status quo above all and the less powerful people subject to their rule. Our 'leaders' were power-hungry madmen whose machinations threatened the very existence of the human race. The best we could hope for was a few decades of drudgery, followed by a long wait for death. There were a few who saw the truth, and who tried to resist. They were almost always crushed by the system, which had a mechanistically efficient system of enforcing its rules. Kids who stood up or stood out were fed into a system that started in the schools and ended either in jails or in psychiatric institutions. A few years later, I found this idea expressed much more elegantly in Ken Kessey's discussion of the Combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The kids were big, but the machine made them small.
I knew the system was out there, and evil. And I saw it everywhere I looked. I picked a fights with it every chance I could. And I invariably lost. This isn't meant to be a detailed memoir (and surely those of you who have made it this far are bored enough already), so I won't recount any details here. I will say that things eventually came to a head, as they had to, and I lost, as I had to.
What followed was a long period of confusion. While I never really quit believing in the punk ethos, I had had enough of the fight. Listening to those albums began to feel dangerous, like feeding air to the embers left in a half-burned building. I gave away most of my collection. And I tried to keep my mind right.
Of course, it didn't work. Although I was certainly passionate, especially after discovering libertarianism, I never felt the sort of constant fury that I did at twelve, and that was probably a saving grace. The kind of anger I felt at that age was not controllable, and would have burned me out.
Leap forward a few decades. My passions and my politics have moderated. This story ends like almost every other one about youthful rebellion. I still like to blast Black Flag, Minor Threat, and a few newer punk bands. I still tell myself that I am a rebel at heart, and that the angry punk kid that was willing to go to war against perceived injustice is still a part of me. And maybe that's true.
Or maybe I'm just a middling guy hurtling towards middle age mediocrity and clinging to memories of a younger, better self.
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