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Nobody knows why firefighters are firefighters. Not even
they can tell you why.
It's time somebody try...
Firefighting is the most risky of all dead end jobs and
yet also the one where most workers are most likely to
punch in early. It's hard enough to believe that; it's
impossible to explain it.
Fire and ice are uncomfortable separately or together.
Wives hate the hours. Kids love the noise. Fire and ice.
Any day at the firehouse the bell from hell puts the
dispatcher on the horn with a tenement tinderbox
address. Into the bunker pants, turnout coat, grab the
mask and go. Minutes later you're onsite. As others run
out, you go in. You'll need all you can carry. The four
pound axe, a six foot rake, the halligan bar. The
ceiling concealing the smoldering has to come down and
it's one of those stubborn tin ones. In the scary dark
with the heat eating your ears, you're gouging out and
tearing loose and pulling apart, gulping air and tasting
black. Your windpipe is closing and you've lost track of
which way is out. Is it worth it?
They've budget cut your ladder company from six to five,
so now everything you do is 16.67 percent more difficult
and more dangerous. Your air is low. Inside your mask
you're throwing up. There's a searing ember down your
neck. Torn gloves expose a smashed hand. So you emerge
from the holocaust hugging, with your elbows, somebody's
singed kitten. Fire and ice.
You've had minutes of exhilaration on the bouncing rear
mount of a steaming hundred foot Seagrave, hours of
using all you've learned and learning more. Now you're
back at the station house. You've unstuffed your
nostrils with soapy fingers; you can almost breathe
again. Next come the tedious hours as you and Brillo
gang up on the grimy tools. The cleanup crew at the
firehouse is you when windows need washing and toilets
need cleaning and floors mopping and beds need making,
you do it. Fire and ice, they both go with the job.
Then there's that night another engine company gets
there first and you see this wet-eared rookie
hot-dogging ahead; his academy boots still shiny. You
lose him inside the crackling dark and you forget about
him until your helmet warning bell says get out. The
battalion chief is calling you off. You get out; the
other guy didn't. He had heard a scream from the bottom
of burning basement stairs and he headed down there,
when on the bubbling tarpaper roof the three-ton
compressor broke through, that day we lost two.
Oh, yes, firefighters cry, but only briefly because now
comes the inevitable and evermore paperwork just in case
OSHA complains or somebody sues. Is it worth it?
Your B crew pumper swapped his day shift so some family
guy could be home for his kid's birthday and then,
outbound toward a false alarm, your buddy gets
blindsided by a hotrod driven by a drunk. Fire and ice.
The intercom barks again. This time it's a warehouse, a
big, fast, multiple blaze, probably torched. Onsite
engine men draped with icicles dragging an inch and
three-quarter hose are waiting for your big line: ladder
men can't make the building without you. Search, rescue,
ventilate. Eventually it's over and out. You're smoke
smudged and sleepless and wrung out, but you won. Behind
graffiti-fouled walls you saved what you could. But the
raging blaze that wanted to consume adjacent buildings
did not because you were there.
Back at the firehouse before cleanup, you and the guys
sit a spell, tired but stimulated, drinking coffee and
laughing, and feeling good about one another. Nobody
outside your world can ever quite know that feeling. In
any other uniform you get streets named after you for
killing people; in this one you risk your life to save
people. Until one day you run out of chances and at one
final fire, either you buy it or you don't. If you
don't, it's only eventually to be brushed off with a
puny pension. Yet there's no third way you'd ever leave
this job and you're doubting even God knows why.
You're out of the shower now; most of the grime and some
of the cynicism are down the drain, when you hear a
strangely familiar voice saying, "For salvaging things
and people from flames, I have to rely on your hands."
You look around, still nobody. But when you get over
your incredulity, you feel better.
Suddenly today's crew cook in the kitchen hollers chow.
It's time to eat. It smells like roast beef today, and
that'll be good. But you'll eat fast, for any next alarm
you'll want to be ready.
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