There’s something paradoxical about relics from a fire, the remainders of a destructive force. The best souvenirs were the most ominous: glass bottles melted into puddles tree resin baked into a shiny, amber-like substance green ponderosa pine cones roasted like ears of corn. If the fire was big enough, I might receive a t-shirt featuring the name of the fire, printed with bright flames and helicopters, fire engines and fleeing woodland animals. A dispatch usually meant that he would bring back souvenirs for me in the form of cookies, juice boxes and Gatorades from fire sack lunches. My dad was a firefighter too, and my childhood summers were punctuated by him receiving fire dispatch calls at all hours.
The following year I left the engines for a hand-tool-wielding twenty-person crew-the most primordial form of fire suppression, essentially unchanged since the early twentieth century-and spent my next three summers living in the woods without internet or phone service. Isolated in the forest and confronted with flames, the invasiveness of contemporary life momentarily recedes. Firefighting, even at its most intense, offers moments of freedom frequently unattainable in a digital age. For the first time, firefighting became what I, as a child, imagined it would be: digging line in the dark, close enough to the fire that my hands and face boiled from the radiant heat. The first true fire I worked was during my second year, when our engine was assigned to a fire in the eastern part of the state. This was in the years before western Washington had serious fire activity, and we occupied most of our time with brushing out roads and doing ecology projects. My fire career began in 2007, when I staffed an engine in rural western Washington. We untie the rotor blades, and within five minutes, we’re up in the air. Then we have a brisk walk out to the helicopter pad, where our flight gear lies folded on a green nylon bench in the back of the helicopter. When we do finally receive a dispatch order, it’s typically in the afternoon, after the midday heat dries out the fuels (some things remain predictable). If you don’t lace up your boots, we’ll get a fire call if you work out until your muscles cramp, we might get a fire call if you dehydrate yourself with coffee and soda, we’ll definitely get a fire call. Because of this unpredictability, we end up a superstitious bunch, correlating our behaviors to fire activity like pagan priests reading an animal’s viscera.
They don’t tell you when and if they plan to blow up into a firestorm, or sputter out for no obvious reason. The reason for this is simple: fires don’t tell you when they plan to start. Watching, waiting, and preparing occupies much of our time. Ask any wildland firefighter about the most difficult part of their job, and they’re likely to tell you about the boredom.
0 kommentar(er)
