Give Thanks

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in a time of abundance. Food, Metabolic energy, is cheap and plentiful. Indeed, many of the patients I see suffer from the side effects of abundance. Obesity, diabetes, alcoholism are all symptoms of too much, too good. It's easy to meet your caloric needs, and not much harder to exceed them, and just as easy to indulge in some recreational chemistry.

Life used to be much harder, and humans earned every calorie they consumed, whether it came from food grown from seed, or meat brought to the hearth after days of following the herd. Killing a mammoth, bringing in the harvest, warranted a feast, and the revelers would gorge on the bounty that they had wrought. I've heard that there is a "feast or famine" gene still lurking in our chromosomes. Refrigeration is a relatively new process, and it's been suggested that over-eating, over-spending, and over-indulging are related genetically-programmed behaviors, left over from the not-so-distant past, when meat would spoil if not consumed quickly.

Consider the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Assuming you aren't eating them daily out of economic necessity, it's a pretty good snack or lunch item. At worst, the PB&J is a sweet and gummy collection of tasteless and humble staples, but, when prepared with high-quality ingredients, it can achieve gourmet magnificence .

One of my favorite lunches, dating from my middle school, 4-H Club days, is a double-decker PB&J (three slices bread, the peanut butter and jam separated by the third slice of bread) and a can of V-8 juice. The sandwich is transformed by the extra bread and the segregation of ingredients. The V-8 juice forms a backdrop, a canvas, against which the elemental notes of peanut, strawberry, and wheat bread are rendered in a gustatory still life. Approaching fine French pastry, it has the supreme balance of taste, texture, that satisfies some fundamental, psycho-emotional need for sugar, fat, and salt.

Made with whole wheat bread, costing only pennies, half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich compares almost identically with a Clif bar, at $1.49. Maybe it's a little messier, and won't suffer weeks, or months, in your backpack, but a PB&J is definitely cheaper, easier, and handy. Properly assembled, it contains that balance of carbohydrates, fats, protein, and fiber for which people, athletes, spend a fortune, every year, on energy bars, hoping to find that perfectly-formulated, pre-made, pre-packaged product that will sustain them in the course of their daily adventures.

I offer the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a metaphor for the modern diet. I fully believe that the PB&J, two thousand years ago, might have spawned bloody wars of conquest, bent on acquiring the fabled sandwich. Today, it is a tried and true lunch box staple, but way back then it would have been an unheard-of delicacy, in an age without refined sugar, leavened bread, and the necessary mechanization to mill peanut butter.

This Thanksgiving, please take a moment to acknowledge the unknown, the unsung, the unappreciated men and women who came before you. The person who invented the buffalo fall, the person that first added spices to roasting meat, the one who built a boat capable of carrying passengers to a new life in a new world. The inventor of peanut butter, Dr. Salk, Thomas Edison, Robert Ranson (inventor of the cast iron plowshare) also deserve our gratitude. And don't forget the people who, today, this day, make your life possible: the garbage man, long haul truckers, oil field wild-catters, police and fire.

And when the turkey's all gone, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wallow in the gifts of civilization.

“There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character”
-Henry Louis Mencken

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr

“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.”
-Bertrand Russell

A Fire Service Pantheon

"Kinda quiet today..."

"Whuuups! What did you say?."

"Whuh?"

"You angered the Gods. We're going to get our asses kicked now."

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High above, drifting on the ever-present layer of stratus, floats a row of thrones, constructed from broken bones, the mangled wreckage of cars and motorcycles, glucometers, fire alarms, and a thousand failed human hearts. Tonus, the God of Dispatch, rears back and lets loose a deep and mighty belly laugh. Leaning on his elbow, he had been combing the surface of the earth for a foolish and prideful firefighter to torment. He motions Meteoro, the God of Natural Disaster, to his side.

'Your bidding, Oh Great One?" Meteoro clasps Tonus' forearm with his damp and cold hand.

"Create a deluge, in this City, on that busy highway." Tonus points to our freeway, "At that curve," stroking his beard, chuckling, "I want to see the horseless wagons spinning."

'It shall be done!"

A piercing wolf whistle summons Gravita, the Goddess of Falls from her perch, mincing in her too-long gown. "Find the infirm, the lame, and play havoc with their walkers. I want broken hips. In the bathroom!"

"Of course, my Lord." She claps her hands above her head, sinking through the carpet of clouds, plummeting toward the planet below, with the falling rain.

Tonus yells down after her: "And look for humans on ladders, cleaning their gutters!" Craning to see around his celestial lair, his long white hair flying, he bellows, "Bubba!"

Bubba, the lesser God of Bad Judgement, rolls in on a unicycle, juggling bottles of high-gravity beer, catching the spraying drops of brew in his mouth. His eyes are red, and his bare feet work the wheel back and forth, idling before the God of Dispatch.

"Bubba, find some, ah, vulnerable, humans. Goad them into dangerous activity. You know, the usual."

"You betcha, boss!" Bubba downs a beer, springs off of the unicycle, and cartwheels out of sight.

The mighty and fearsome God, Tonus, leans forward eagerly, rubbing his huge palms together, watching the mayhem unsue.

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And so it goes... The Gods are easily offended. Unspoken, yet understood, rules govern our behavior in the station and on duty. Never boast about a quiet shift. Never laugh at another rig's number or type of calls. Before sitting down to a meal, it's good form to acknowledge the probability of the tones going off, if only silently. Go to bed, but don't expect to sleep.

It is widely believed that one can curry favor with the Gods by taking calls for other crews, but methinks it folly to endeavor to please such capricious beings. Regardless of personal spirituality, this magical thinking pervades the station, and no one is immune. At any moment, horrible disaster could occur; It's a way of preparing your self.

Smoothie

Right now, if I run my hand across my cropped scalp, my fingers come away with an honest, earthy sort of aroma. Faintly familiar, yet muted by repeated washings, first with anti-bacterial soap, later by several shampooings. Lisa bent to kiss me this morning and was repelled by the odor. She said it reminded her of getting carsick, as a child, in her family's red Mustang. My new Airlift Northwest baseball cap may very well retain a permanent olfactory reminder of this morning. You learn some lessons the hard way.

Almost three years on the job, I claim the dubious distinction of being the lowest-ranking person on "B" shift. I have about a dozen guys below me, but none of our probies have been assigned to my shift. As befits such a dubiously distinguished fellow, completely lacking in any measure of seniority, I am the person who lays down, in the dirt, for the drill. I am the one with the dead-last vacation pick. And when there's a hole in the schedule, I pack up my box of bedding, my bunker gear, and I move it all somewhere new. I find myself scheduled to work on an aid car fairly regularly, but owing to my transient position, I seldom do. I can't claim more than a couple of continuous months on any one rig, at any one station. I ache for a permanent assignment; Constantly moving is a subtle extension of probation.

I have become versatile - I work on engines, aid cars, and, sometimes, the ladder truck. I have a broad knowledge of the City, whereas Seth, hired same day as me, has worked his entire, short tenure in the north end. I have worked with every captain, and more than 90 per cent of the suppression staff, in the same station, if not the same company (vehicle crew). This nomadism is a great way to meet people, but sometimes makes it difficult to find your groove, to cultivate that mix of partnership and smoothness that a seasoned crew possesses.

Smooth is good. A probational rite of passage, measured annually, is donning your airpack for time. The goal is to be packed-up, masked-up, in less than a minute. It's a standard in the fire service. It's a fairly simple process, anyone can do it, but it takes practised finesse to beat the thirty second mark. As a new recruit, your continued employment hangs on your being facile with your equipment, and you're tested regularly on this task. The stress of being timed, coupled with the importance of your perfomance, make it harder than really it is. A minor bungle can cost you valuable seconds that you might not have. The best and wisest advice I received was: "Slow is smooth; Smooth is fast." This scales to everything we do, especially when learning a new skill.

There's a dozen ways to tackle many of the calls to which we respond, but the smooth crew will effortlessly handle the situation. It takes a few shifts, and many calls, to polish the nuances of working together as a team, negotiating roles and responsibilities. You grow into each other, strengths complimenting weaknesses, flexibility accommodating rigidity. It takes time, time I seldom spend in a given assignment.

With six stations and a dozen assorted rigs, the details of my job change weekly. Even though the Department has standardized our engines, there are minor differences in equipment and storage, and every fire station is unique. Knowing which compartment contains the chain saw is smooth. Knowing where the toilet paper or batteries are stored is smooth. Knowing how to get to an address, through traffic and around obstacles, is smooth.

We get exhaustive training on the particulars of the BIG parts of our job: firefighting, CPR and EMT skills, deploying ladders and power equipment. Little things, details, are frequently taught by your peers, and often left as an exercise for the new recruit. When you move around a lot, it's easy to feel a little lost, to feel like the new guy. It can seem like navigating a pitch-black warehouse - you cautiously move in a straight line until you trip over something, walk into a wall, or bump your head.

I worked at station 42 yesterday, a comparatively rare duty on the aid car. I've spent enough time there for it to feel like home, but driving the aid car is a rusty skill. I turned south on the way to an address in the north, headed to the wrong hospital, made the bonehead mistakes everyone makes. My partner was a little rigid in his expectation of smooth. Every time I work with this guy, I come away from my shift feeling like a clueless newbie. It used to bother me greatly, until I realized it wasn't personal - he's critical of every partner. But I'd rather laugh over a minor misstep than defend it.

As driver, my responsibilities include maintaining the aid car, checking the fluids, aid kits, oxygen tanks, sundry supplies. This morning, we rolled on a call for difficulty breathing, just before 0700, which the medics transported to the hospital, on frosty streets. When we returned to the station, I backed the rig up to the fuel pump to top off the tank for the next shift. The hose wouldn't quite reach and I pulled about twelve feet of hose from the reel. After filling up, intending to save the next guy some effort, I made to leave the hose on the ground, rather than retracting it into the drum. To get the extra hose out of the way, I whipped the nozzle in my hand, neatly laying the hose along the station wall. In my mind, a slick and sensible technique - smooth.
The thimble-full of diesel remaining in the nozzle launched into the cold air, flying in a precise arc, splattering on my hair. Suuuunn of uuuuh... I hastily scrubbed my head in the bathroom sink, later laughing about my goof, over coffee, in the kitchen. And so now my hair stinks, and I continue to learn some lessons the hard way.

"Slow is smooth; Smooth is fast."

Rituals

I have, apparently, a psychic rooster - a faithful, imaginary bird. He's not keyed to the sunrise, like the roosters I remember. Usually, he wakes me up just before the alarm clock goes off, irrespective of its setting. I'll lay in bed, pondering the time, when the clock sounds. I wonder if there's some change in the sound the clock makes, as it approaches the designated moment, but I set the alarm, all the same, every night.

And so my eyes came open in the dark and quiet ward, ears strained to detect the tell-tale breathing of my brothers. The face of my watch glowed faintly, too faintly to read in the gloom, when I bent my wrist close. I was too awake to roll over and go back to sleep; the rooster had crowed. I wriggled out from under my sleeping bag and stood up, swaying, leaning against the bed, using it as a landmark. My clogs waited where I had kicked them off in the night, when we had gotten back from the low blood sugar call. A thin blue light, the other colors wrung from it, filtered around the curtains, and I shuffled to the door, pushing it open.

Squinting from the fluorescent glare, I scuffed into the tiled bathroom. I never flush the urinal if anyone's sleeping, and I washed my hands in a pencil stream of hot water. I could make out the squeal of an opening bay door above the splashing, and I felt, more than heard, the cough of the fire engine starting up.

On the stairs, I could taste the burnt coffee in the bottom of a pot, stewing on a burner. Instead of simply pouring myself a cup, I'd have to find coffee somewhere and brew a fresh batch. Guys are gonna want some coffee... I pulled aside the sliding door to the kitchen / TV room, reached for the light switches, noting a sleeping body in a recliner, under a blanket - one of the medics - I dropped my hand. I quietly slid the door closed again, and blinked my eyes until I could see better in the dark.

The Bunn's switches both glowed red in the gloom, and I crept to the fridge, opening the door half-way for some light. Back at the coffee machine, the foul dregs of a pot sat on the top burner, but fresh coffee was tinkling in the pot under the basket. I flipped off the top burner and washed out the carafe in the sink. I grabbed a pair of cups from the cupboard, returned the clean pot to the still-sizzling burner. I was a Ninja in the dark, deftly pullng the pot and replacing it with a cup. As the cup slowly filled, I topped off the other with the pot. Another Ninja move, and the pot was back under the basket, two cups held in one hand, and the fridge nudged closed with a toe. I only lost a drop or two as I opened, then closed, the sliding door.

Out in the app bay, I ducked into the hose tower to grab a long-handled brush. I stepped into the drizzle where Geoff was already hosing the grime from the previous day's work off the engine. A bucket of suds, a brush tipping out, sat at the tailboard. I dropped my brush into it, and handed a cup of coffee to Geoff. Inside the station, the morning tones went off, rousing the sleeping crew, lights coming on automatically.

"Thanks, Schlem!"

"My pleasure."

I gulped a hot mouthful, balanced the mug on top of one of the concrete-filled steel bollards that guard the garage wall, and grabbed a brush. I scrubbed the fire engine in the rain, Geoff rinsed.

Siren Song

The lights flash red on the backs of street signs, shop windows, the wet asphalt, a hundred shiny surfaces. Trees, poles, fences are frozen in a moment, the strobing suspends our relative motion as we pass in the dark. The siren screams high, then drops low. My hand reaches down, turns the switch to "wail", as we roll up to an intersection.

"Clear right." Any cars approaching on the passenger side are stopped. My partner returns to the map book in his lap, searching for the right apartment complex.

"Clear right," I repeat. "Thank you." Still, I double-check with a quick glance to the right. Pedal down, and we take off through our green light.

The aid car is heavy, and ponderous on corners. My eyes are narrowed, I focus into the distance for vehicles, pedestrians, any hazards on the road. Hyper-alert, I enjoy the challenges of driving priority through traffic. It's not speed that will get us to our destination quickly, but rather the dialogue of lights, sirens and the response by other drivers on the road.

A car is trapped between the median and a barrier, unable to pull out of the way. The driver panics, maybe freaks out, stopping in the road, right in front of us. Their turn signal is flashing left, but there is no left turn for them. Good Schlem is on my left shoulder, wipes off his milk mustache, whispers in my ear, Patience... I am slamming on my brakes, but I resist the urge to hit the air horn. My partner, Matt, is bracing against the dashboard. But Bad Schlem is on the right shoulder, swilling his martini, roaring, Dumbass! Move it! I agree, "Dumbass." The driver, apparently, solves this small problem, and accelerates past the barrier and pulls to the right. Bad Schlem coaxes me to hit the air horn, just a bit, as we pass the car. Let that be a lesson to ye!

Driving code, with flashing lights and blaring siren, is not a license to speed or break traffic laws. These visible and audible warning devices are our voice in the night, in the street, around the corner, begging your permission to take the necessary exceptions to the normal rules of the road, in this emergency situation. If you don't, can't or won't yield, I can't take those exceptions:
-Proceed past a red or stop signal or stop sign, but only after slowing down as may be necessary for safe operation;
-Exceed the maximum speed limits so long as I do not endanger life or property;
-Disregard regulations governing direction of movement or turning in specified directions.

It should be obvious that there's a lot of leeway for some chaos in those exceptions. Given, that all traffic has stopped, meaning: granted us the necessary permission, I can do whatever I need to do to get through or around traffic, provided, I drive with due regard for the safety of all persons. If I should cause an accident, there is no legal protection from the consequences of my reckless disregard for the safety of others. And that's the fine print in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW 46.61.035), the yin to the yang in the state law. An accident would comprise absolute proof that the safety of others was recklessly disregarded, and expect a lawsuit - against the City, the Department, and me. A fire engine weighs about twenty-two tons, an aid or medic unit seven and half tons- imagine a passenger car under that mass in a collision. When I check the speedometer, I am rarely exceeding the speed limit.

In addition to the two-dozen flashing lights and the 140 decibel siren, we have a secret weapon called an Opticom. Centered in the light bar, the Opticom strobes at a special frequency and traffic lights magically turn green for us when they detect it. This is what gets us through intersections and the associated traffic. The latest generation of Opticom utilizes infra-red pulses of light, coded to provide information about agency and emergency vehicle, but our system is old-school, just a strobing light. Urban legend has it that you can flash your high-beams quickly and trigger a detector at an intersection, but my experiments leave me thinking this is possible, but unpredictable. Suffice it to say, stopping oncoming and cross-traffic is a great tool for rapidly getting from point A to point B when shit happens.

About one hundred American firefighters are killed on the job each year. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but (barring unique tragedies like 9-11, which killed 343) the number oscillates around the one hundred mark. Of those deaths, roughly two-thirds are volunteers, the balance being paid, career staff. Firefighting is dangerous, but few firefighters are actually killed by fire. Most fatalities are directly related to cardiac issues, followed by vehicle or roadway accidents.

Arguably, the most dangerous thing we do is driving to the scene of an emergency, followed by working in the street or freeway. My kids, family, and friends worry about my safety whenever they see or hear about a firefighter getting injured in a movie, or on the news. They tell me, "Please be careful..." But they don't really understand the reality of the risks we face.

I think my department has a strong culture of traffic safety - we have the reflective vests and seat belt alarms to prove it. Every time someone gets behind the wheel and drives code, that culture is tested. Every time we operate on a busy freeway, assisting a driver, maybe cutting him out of his mangled car, mopping up the spilled life-blood of a vehicle, we put our lives on that very real line. We do it daily, and far more frequently than running into a burning building. We've been lucky, or careful, or strategic, so far. I try to keep it front and center in my brain, and both Good Schlem and Bad Schlem sit on their respective shoulders and kibitz.

Please, please, please, yield to lights and sirens. Your life, my life, my brother's lives, could depend on it.

NY State FF LODD Study: http://www.dos.state.ny.us/fire/LODDStats/LODDStats.pdf