keep patting the hose with my free hand. That hose is our lifeline. In a spot like this, you never break contact with the hose. Like Tom Sawyer’s string strung through a cavern, it’s your way out, should things go bad. Dance with it long enough, and fire will show you the difference between bravery and bravado. We advance, but we are equally prepared to retreat. Firefighting is often framed in terms of courage, but courage does not always carry you forward.
It is supposed that fire appeared on this planet right about the time vegetation took root. Lightning struck a patch of dry something and birthed a primeval force of nature. The term implies a certain brutishness, but fire is anything but brutish. It is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.
How godlike, then, to strike a match. The quick rasp, the spit of the sulfur, and fire leaps to hand. We cannot summon the wind, we cannot—with any reliability—bring down rain, but we can raise fire at will. It is a mythic power: with fire in your hand, you will rule the world. Which is why, as Greek legend has it, Zeus went crazy-ape-bonkers when he learned the demigod Prometheus had stolen fire from Mount Olympus and given it to mankind. His greatest party trick revealed, angry Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and retained a vulture to drop in daily and rip out the demigod’s liver.
Nice story, but the human learning curve on fire spans epochs and is blistered with false starts. Recent reports indicate that man—or at least the Homo ergaster version of same—learned to control fire roughly 1.7 million years ago. Ergaster likely intended to do nothing grander than roast a handful of seeds or toast his tootsies, but Johan Goudsblom, writing in Fire and Civilization , insists the results were anthropologically profound:
The ability to handle fire…is exclusively human. Rudimentary forms of language and tool use are also found among non-human primates and other animals; but only humans have learned, as part of their culture, to control fire.
But of course, we don’t always control it. Goudsblom, five pages later: “The perpetual presence of fire in a human group is a complicating factor.”
Ergo, firefighters are required.
I have already mentioned the favorite local joke that all you need to join the local fire department is a valid driver’s license and a pulse, but the fire board does eventually require that you attend a firefighting course. The training exercises were a lark. We learned to unfurl a fifty-foot roll of hose by underhanding it like a bowling ball. We raced a stopwatch to see who could “gear up” most quickly. We practiced spraying figure-eights, the fat three-inch hose stiff and insistent, shuddering with the power of compressed water. Once, the largest student in class—well over six feet tall, 250-pound range—let his attention lapse at the nozzle. The hose tipped him over as easily as if he had been nudged by an elephant. We had a good laugh.
The instructor arranged an obstacle course. I waited my turn swaddled from helmet to steel-toed boots in heavy turnout gear, sealed in the intimate, portable environment of the SCBA mask, that transparent barrier between toxic smoke and pink lungs, able to hear little beyond the easy huff and chuff of the respirator. I felt utterly isolated and protected, the way I felt as a child curled up in the darkness beneath a cardboard box fort. We crawled around the course in pairs, the backmost partner clinging to the leader’s
It is supposed that fire appeared on this planet right about the time vegetation took root. Lightning struck a patch of dry something and birthed a primeval force of nature. The term implies a certain brutishness, but fire is anything but brutish. It is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.
How godlike, then, to strike a match. The quick rasp, the spit of the sulfur, and fire leaps to hand. We cannot summon the wind, we cannot—with any reliability—bring down rain, but we can raise fire at will. It is a mythic power: with fire in your hand, you will rule the world. Which is why, as Greek legend has it, Zeus went crazy-ape-bonkers when he learned the demigod Prometheus had stolen fire from Mount Olympus and given it to mankind. His greatest party trick revealed, angry Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and retained a vulture to drop in daily and rip out the demigod’s liver.
Nice story, but the human learning curve on fire spans epochs and is blistered with false starts. Recent reports indicate that man—or at least the Homo ergaster version of same—learned to control fire roughly 1.7 million years ago. Ergaster likely intended to do nothing grander than roast a handful of seeds or toast his tootsies, but Johan Goudsblom, writing in Fire and Civilization , insists the results were anthropologically profound:
The ability to handle fire…is exclusively human. Rudimentary forms of language and tool use are also found among non-human primates and other animals; but only humans have learned, as part of their culture, to control fire.
But of course, we don’t always control it. Goudsblom, five pages later: “The perpetual presence of fire in a human group is a complicating factor.”
Ergo, firefighters are required.
I have already mentioned the favorite local joke that all you need to join the local fire department is a valid driver’s license and a pulse, but the fire board does eventually require that you attend a firefighting course. The training exercises were a lark. We learned to unfurl a fifty-foot roll of hose by underhanding it like a bowling ball. We raced a stopwatch to see who could “gear up” most quickly. We practiced spraying figure-eights, the fat three-inch hose stiff and insistent, shuddering with the power of compressed water. Once, the largest student in class—well over six feet tall, 250-pound range—let his attention lapse at the nozzle. The hose tipped him over as easily as if he had been nudged by an elephant. We had a good laugh.
The instructor arranged an obstacle course. I waited my turn swaddled from helmet to steel-toed boots in heavy turnout gear, sealed in the intimate, portable environment of the SCBA mask, that transparent barrier between toxic smoke and pink lungs, able to hear little beyond the easy huff and chuff of the respirator. I felt utterly isolated and protected, the way I felt as a child curled up in the darkness beneath a cardboard box fort. We crawled around the course in pairs, the backmost partner clinging to the leader’s
Similar Books
