little effort at tidying up. I watched, and my heart broke.
The Silver Star days were good days. There was life and death, and loose-limbed esprit de corps. I accumulated a deep base of experience. My hands still shook on the way to the worst calls, but I knew the shaking would stop as soon as I got into action. I was toughened but not hardened. The right sort of call could still put me back on my heels, and I was glad for that. But more and more, I wanted to take these things I had learned and apply them in a place where the faces were familiar. I was formulating this idea that if you took care of your neighbors, even to the point of letting them puke on you, one day someone would be there when it was you on the cot. The algorithm pointed toward home.
When the time came to move on, I was ready. The original renegades were gone. The ambulance service was sold to a large chain operation. Phil became a paramedic and took a job in Minneapolis. Leif is a paramedic in Las Vegas. Porter got a nursing degree and headed for Denver. Baz hanged himself. Donnie became a prison guard. I lost track of Todd. Fred I’m not sure about. Last I heard, Jacques was in Indiana. Recovering from surgery for a brain tumor, someone said. We e-mailed once, but lately I can’t raise him.
S TRUCTURE F IRE
T HIS WAS A DANGEROUS PLACE. The low-slung cellar joists dripped with runoff from the fire hoses aimed at the outside of the burning house, attacking the fire from the exterior as we attacked from the interior. We were on a mop-up, really, trying to douse a few hot spots, those intransigent little clusters of flame that soldier on in the hidden crannies of a house afire, weakening it from within rather than devouring it from without. We arrived here by feel, knee-walking beneath the collapsed roof of the attached garage, groping through the haze, dragging a two-and-a-half-inch hose, charged and heavy with water. We advance. We’re at the basement steps now. We’re about to go in. I suppose the soundtrack in my head should be thundering something like, “Let’s rock and roll, you smoke-eatin’ sonsabitches!” but it’s not. It’s fretting, Will the house fall in on us? Will the water pressure fizzle right about the time the furnace explodes? Will I get my feet wet? Will I get out of here alive? For all firefighting’s cinematic potential—screaming sirens, snapping flames, roiling slugs of luminous, milky orange smoke colonnading the black night sky—most firefighting deaths have very little marquee value. The firefighter who dies silhouetted in a nimbus of flame while rescuing a child is a reality, but a rarity. More likely he’ll be crushed under a collapsed wall. Get hit in the head by a waterlogged beam. Touch a ladder to a power line. Run out of air in some smoky hallway. Or fall to the most common firefighter killer of all: a plain old-fashioned heart attack. The dangers linger long after you knock down the big flames.
And so I worry about the guy ahead of me in this basement. I worry about him because he is my brother. Not my brother in the universal fraternity of firefighters sense, but my brother in the we-played-in-the-doghouse-dirt sense. Jed is five years younger than I, and far more competent, but as the big brother, I feel protective. He starts down the stairs, steps off into hip-deep water, totters a bit. All that heavy gear, if he falls over, I’ll have to drag him out in a hurry. I can hear a muffled exclamation from behind his SCBA mask as the water fills his boots. It’s a bitterly cold night, well below zero, with a vicious west wind. He hollers that I should stay where I am. I feed him hose and aim a heavy rechargeable lantern at the darkest corners of the basement while he slops around, craning his neck to spot signs of flame above, wetting them down when he does. When he ventures farther into the dark corners, I get nervous. I holler at him to be careful. I keep checking up and behind me for signs of flame,
The Silver Star days were good days. There was life and death, and loose-limbed esprit de corps. I accumulated a deep base of experience. My hands still shook on the way to the worst calls, but I knew the shaking would stop as soon as I got into action. I was toughened but not hardened. The right sort of call could still put me back on my heels, and I was glad for that. But more and more, I wanted to take these things I had learned and apply them in a place where the faces were familiar. I was formulating this idea that if you took care of your neighbors, even to the point of letting them puke on you, one day someone would be there when it was you on the cot. The algorithm pointed toward home.
When the time came to move on, I was ready. The original renegades were gone. The ambulance service was sold to a large chain operation. Phil became a paramedic and took a job in Minneapolis. Leif is a paramedic in Las Vegas. Porter got a nursing degree and headed for Denver. Baz hanged himself. Donnie became a prison guard. I lost track of Todd. Fred I’m not sure about. Last I heard, Jacques was in Indiana. Recovering from surgery for a brain tumor, someone said. We e-mailed once, but lately I can’t raise him.
S TRUCTURE F IRE
T HIS WAS A DANGEROUS PLACE. The low-slung cellar joists dripped with runoff from the fire hoses aimed at the outside of the burning house, attacking the fire from the exterior as we attacked from the interior. We were on a mop-up, really, trying to douse a few hot spots, those intransigent little clusters of flame that soldier on in the hidden crannies of a house afire, weakening it from within rather than devouring it from without. We arrived here by feel, knee-walking beneath the collapsed roof of the attached garage, groping through the haze, dragging a two-and-a-half-inch hose, charged and heavy with water. We advance. We’re at the basement steps now. We’re about to go in. I suppose the soundtrack in my head should be thundering something like, “Let’s rock and roll, you smoke-eatin’ sonsabitches!” but it’s not. It’s fretting, Will the house fall in on us? Will the water pressure fizzle right about the time the furnace explodes? Will I get my feet wet? Will I get out of here alive? For all firefighting’s cinematic potential—screaming sirens, snapping flames, roiling slugs of luminous, milky orange smoke colonnading the black night sky—most firefighting deaths have very little marquee value. The firefighter who dies silhouetted in a nimbus of flame while rescuing a child is a reality, but a rarity. More likely he’ll be crushed under a collapsed wall. Get hit in the head by a waterlogged beam. Touch a ladder to a power line. Run out of air in some smoky hallway. Or fall to the most common firefighter killer of all: a plain old-fashioned heart attack. The dangers linger long after you knock down the big flames.
And so I worry about the guy ahead of me in this basement. I worry about him because he is my brother. Not my brother in the universal fraternity of firefighters sense, but my brother in the we-played-in-the-doghouse-dirt sense. Jed is five years younger than I, and far more competent, but as the big brother, I feel protective. He starts down the stairs, steps off into hip-deep water, totters a bit. All that heavy gear, if he falls over, I’ll have to drag him out in a hurry. I can hear a muffled exclamation from behind his SCBA mask as the water fills his boots. It’s a bitterly cold night, well below zero, with a vicious west wind. He hollers that I should stay where I am. I feed him hose and aim a heavy rechargeable lantern at the darkest corners of the basement while he slops around, craning his neck to spot signs of flame above, wetting them down when he does. When he ventures farther into the dark corners, I get nervous. I holler at him to be careful. I keep checking up and behind me for signs of flame,
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