Keep a Theme Song in your Heart

I have been asked often to go places and do things that scare the hell out of me.  I have found it important to have a good theme song playing in my heart when I am frightened while dealing with some of the stuff I have seen on the firefighting / rescue side of my life.

 

I think I will use this song the next time I'm not waiting.

Alone in Alaska Tests a Man's Mettle

Many of you who are following along with my blog are probably wondering...  billy blaze, who did you get that natural poetry writing talent from.

Ka'mya these poems were written by your great - great grandpa Buster. 

The above hand written poem from grandpa Buster proves one thing for sure.  Bitter cold and loneliness can drive a grown man to write some crazy stuff.  I'm still trying to figure out what drives me to write about the crazy things I drivel about.

My own scribblings would probably resemble this if it were not for the magical world of spell checker and the computer.  I was about ten when Grandpa Buster passed away.  My memories of grandpa were cut short by his early death but I remember him as being a very hard worker.  I think he would be very satisfied to know all the guests that he has hosted on the "home place" or as we call it now Beaver Hollow, appreciate his hard work attaining such a restful place for them to enjoy these many years.  What a thrill it would be to have him tell some of his tales around a campfire at the Hollow.

The Fort Lives On

I have always dreamed of myself as being a bit of an adventurer.  I have climbed to the top of several mountain peaks through the years, hiked many miles over backwoods trails, simply stomped out through the brush from point A to point B when I worked for the Forest Service and bicycled thousands of miles all over Oregon.  I too have always been intrigued with the great expedition Lewis and Clark made across western America in the early 1800's.  Since I had never visited the far northwest corner of Oregon, where the mighty Columbia River surges into the Pacific Ocean I thought this writers weekend / mini vacation would give Larrieann and I an opportunity to see some of the country that our brave early explorers visited over two hundred and five years ago. 

On a worn piece of elk hide I ogled the rough drawn fort that Clark left instructions for his troops to build while he was away studying and mapping the northern Oregon coast line.  I had to giggle to myself because it resembled the simple drawing I had drawn just before starting the grand kids tree house last spring.  Some statistics you may not know about:  Cost for the Lewis and Clark expedition, $2,500.  Cost for the grand kids tree house, $2,500.  The site where the original fort was built in 1805 was later logged and turned into a potato growing field.  The few rotting logs left from the original fort site were burned by the farmer to make way for a bigger field.  The land where the fort used to sit was farmed for almost fifty years before the Historical Society bought the land from the farmer and reconstructed the old fort using this original map for details.  The reconstructed Fort Clatsop accidentally burned down in 2005 after a candle making demonstration went awry.  The third Fort Clatsop we visited this weekend is surrounded by a massive forest with no indication that a potato growing field had ever been present.

Writers weekend statistics; only 2% of all the books written are ever published.  I did take a third place in the poem writing portion of the conference. 

Traveling north to a writers weekend at Ocean Park.

It was a journey into the land of Lewis and Clark.

Knowing before hand the new scribes would have a religious flavor.

Which was definitely a topic I did not want to savor.

I gleaned that publishing a profitable book was a myth.

Which was a thought I did not want to be left with.

Can you believe I took third place for that whopper.  Wait till you see my sique.

So you think you are a writer?

Many of you who have been following my blog these last several months know I have been toying with the idea of writing a book about my adventures during the thirty years I have served in the fire department.  I have gotten pretty good reviews from my friends and family who are traveling along with me so I thought I would take it to the next level.

I decided to attend a writers conference held at Ocean Beach in Washington State this last weekend.  {Note to self: If a conference is held at a church camp it probably will be attended heavily by religious people.} I thought I'll go find out what some real writers and editors think about my scribblings.  As you can see by all the corrections and suggestions made by one gentlemen on a single page of one of my stories, he quickly stops, puts down his pen and says "I think you are more of a story teller then a writer".  Laughing out loud to myself, I think whew!  A story teller can wave his arms around in the air, make funny faces and shout when a story needs emphasis.  No more worrying about if I got my adjectives in the right place, if the spelling is correct or if I've used the same word too many times.  What a relief, a Story Teller I will be.  Secrectly I enjoy telling tall tales while warming ourselves around a campfire at Beaver Hollow more then I like writing anyways.

The weekend was not a total loss by any means though, I did win the "Best Opening Line" contest while attending.  The instructions for the twenty five attending scribes was to write the worst opening line you could think of...  "The bright red light on the cardiac machine blares a flat line as your eyes meet the infant mothers and you both know a miracle did not occur here tonight".  I remember that night clearly still.  It was one of the worst things I ever had happen to me.  Writers are a strange breed though.  What amounts to one of the worst things to ever happen to me, they see it differently.  They say the aforementioned sentence was the best opening line because it draws a new reader into the book where they would want to read more about the story... 

After that terrible night long ago, I didn't want to know anymore about the story, I just wanted to go home and cry.

Not all Ragu Sauces Taste the Same

From the exclusively decorated office of billy blaze the lies continue to keep coming.  We had to have a computer doctor come in and increase our computers storage and memory banks.  Larrieann has a gazillion pictures of our grand kids stored on the poor thing and I have a fair amount of my own memorabilia stored on it too.  Boy she is sure fast now, but the new components haven't helped me type or think any faster...


Our local newspaper had this photo printed in it the other night and it reminded me of the time we got called to a similar scene down by the California border one time.  Highway 199 narrows and becomes quite curvy just before it dips into the "Happy Cows State".  I never will forget tearing around one of the tight corners responding to the reported car accident when we almost were involved in another.  Crashed right in the middle of the main highway a conversion van was standing on it's own front grill like some kind of unnatural monument.  I swear the tires were still spinning around when we arrived.  We skidded to a sideways stop in our extrication rig and all jumped out to go see if any body was actually still in this darn phenomena.  Sure enough there were two older people still trapped inside, but nobody was going to be able to help them until we stabilized this fireman's death trap some how.  After warning the fire engine responding from station #3 that we were all marooned in the middle of the highway they managed to creep around the sharp corner without incident.  Since this was Station three's engine I didn't mind if it ended up with another scratch on it.  I had their old engine staged (parked) as close to the unusually crashed van as we could without toppling it over.  After carefully lashing the vertical standing van to the side of the heavy fire engine with the thick tow straps we carried on board, we finally were able to get a peek inside at the carnage.  These poor folks literally had everything they were carrying in their van fall on top them, including their own kitchen sink.  Later we found out our older couple had just stopped at a supermarket a few miles down the road and had stocked up on supplies before their big trek north into Oregon.  I guess they figured Oregon didn't have any food by the amount of supplies they had loaded on board.  Bad move on their part, it had all now tumbled and cascaded over them. 

After "popping the top" (fireman jargon for riping the top out of a vehicle using an air chisel) off this now defunct van.  When using an air chisel to extricate a patient it is very very noisy.  It is hard to convince your trapped patients that you are really there to help free them when the noise from this device starts roaring through tough metal.  The elderly lady was removed from the wreck pretty quickly but the gentlemen was a different story.  He was firmly trapped by the steering wheel and his feet were entangled in the brake pedal.  I'm on my belly in the middle of the highway trying to crawl inside through the smashed drivers door window,  digging through the grocery items, trying to get close enough to see what my male victim injuries actually were.  Every time I would move a can of corn away from his head, three cans of peas would fall onto my poor old gentleman's with a dull thud, thud, thud.  Glancing from inside the van, looking around the accident scene it was now beginning to look like a grocery stores shelves had been emptied onto the highway.  I became quite concerned when I finally clawed through the food stuffs and found red liquid coming from my old mans ear canal.  Fearing he had suffered a serious head trauma I immediately pushed myself inside even farther so I could get a closer look.  Shining my flashlight towards his massively oozing wound... what is that I see mixed in that red goo oozing from his head?


Taking my gloved finger I swipe some of the gruel from his ear and slowly brought it to my nose. With a audible sigh of relief from me, all it was was Ragu Sauce with fresh onion favoring.   The red tomato paste had exploded on impact and drained through the grub into his ear.  I didn't want spaghetti for dinner for a few weeks after that unusual call.

Don't use Smoke Bombs

...of course there was the year we decided to build a small house on Lauren's loyal float building trailer.  We planned on stashing a lovely family of four inside the home and right in front of the judges stand we would stage a heroic rescue...

...with Larrieann driving the, she was the only one who could figure out how to start the tractor that year, I was busy doing something else, tractor pulling the float trailer she crept ahead of the ensuing fire engine as we neared the judges booth set up on the Sentry Markets parking lot.  Of course any good rescue needed to have some wispy smoke involved in it to make the event look more realistic.  At just the precise moment our adult occupants hidden inside our humble abode mounted on our trailer would light the smoke grenades we had acquired from the National Guard. (Note to self:  Don't ever use that kind of smoking devil device again).

The fire fighters following in the engine would see the quaint SMOKEY signal wafting from the building prop down the street and respond in hot (code three with red lights and sirens blazing).  Lurching to a stop in the middle of Highway 199, the air brakes on the engine would set with a loud SWOOSH,  we would pull an attack line off the engine and charge it to life, while two more firefighters donned breathing apparatus, we would enter our play structure and pull our innocent family to safety.   The "Dramatic Rescue" would only take a couple minutes, wooing the dignitary parade judges into awarding I.V. Fire with another years Grand Marshall's Trophy.

Everything went pretty much as to planned until we lite the smoke grenades off.  As the putrid smoke wafted from our simple structure our role players inside the building began coughing in realistic enough sounding agony.  Their uncontrollable gaging could be heard as far as the judges stand located some distance away and the other guests lining the parade route began abandoning their viewing points as to escape the rank smelling smoke bomb fumes.  By the time we reached our delirious actors trapped inside we were able to up the excitement of our "big rescue event" by running back to the fire truck and bringing an oxygen cylinder so we could slap some O2 (oxygen) on our truly expiring actors.

I must admit after the parade was over I felt kind of bad because we made our captain, Mike Melton's, two cute little kid actors cry because the smokey conditions became so realistic.  Within an hour or so our fire victims had recovered almost fully but I don't believe we won the trophy for that years Labor Day Parade demonstration.   Every year afterwards my firefighter gang was a bit more apprehensive when I was developing the next years new parade theme for some reason.

...but the after hours Activites were the Best

"Rogue" commented the other day on my blog, " I love these stories Bill. You have so many colorful experiences to share about the good old days. We had fun, worked hard, laughed and cried"...

... volunteer fire departments scattered across our country depend almost entirely on their local communities unwavering support for them to even exist.  Those big red fire trucks don't come cheap, neither do all the life saving tools stored inside them.  Without community members pooling their money together no department could afford to continue operating.  Our little fire department perched out in the Illinois Valley was no exception.  The volunteer firefighters were constantly looking for ways to keep our fire department in the public eye through community outreach programs.  Our favorite event to participate in each year was the infamous Lions Labor Day Celebration held at Jubilee Park towards the end of each hot summer time...

...of course we manned our own quaint little I.V. Firefighters fund raising snack bar located along the right field fence line snuggled in close to the softball field where many games were cheered on during the festivities.  We always were able to raise a few hundred bucks over the three day weekend that we normally put towards some special project we had going on in the fire department at the time.   Weather it be for some newer rescue gear we wanted that the fire departments main budget couldn't afford, or adding the money towards another set of "Jaws" we needed for our growing community or even as simple as new ball caps with the I.V. Fire logo printed on them for the volunteers to wear proudly around town.  Nooo, the snack bar was not what we all anxiously awaited for all year long, it was the annual Labor Day Parade that marched it's way through downtown Cave Junction that we yearned for.  We never joined the parade route to just be in the parade itself we signed the parade entry form so we could win the Grand Marshall's Trophy every year.  It was quite prestigious to bring that big trophy back to the main fire station and place it along side all our other dusty pasted victories. Every year it took a more outlandish idea for this years upcoming float because all the other community groups in town were vying for our winning trophy also...

...like the time we decided to extricate (tear apart) a car with our "Jaws of Life" while we traveled down thou the parade route rolling through the middle of town.  We wanted our crashed vehicle to look realistic when it was mounted on the oversized trailer bed (16 feet wide) we had built for this years exciting demonstration.  "Moon" Ewing, who's day time job was working for the local cement redimix company. He drove their big front end loader up to my mom's, located across the street from our station, where our floats often times were assembled in secrecy behind the old shop out behind her house.  We chained the beat-up old car into the bucket of the loader with the feeble front grill dangling out the front of the enormous loader bucket.  Our evil plan was to roar out through the field in the gravel yards loader and smash into a huge tree stump located along the edge of the forest, giving us that real-life look smashed into the front of our car after it had been involved in a horrible crash.  Ten or fifteen of us firefighters hunkered down as "Moon"  tore out through the field in the loader...

... SMAAASH, after the dust sort of starts clearing we see Will holding his nose with both his hands and see the smear mark left from his nose smashing into the loaders thick front window, but the dent left on the front of the car was perfect.  We sawed the stump off and placed it along with our car prop on the trailers bed. By now the swelling was beginning to show on Will's nose and I think someone ran into mom's house real quick for some emergency ice.  We added a bunch of brush strategically on the float for that realistic "we left the road" look.  The next dilemma we encountered was when moving the float to where the procession route began... getting out my mom's driveway.  We had built the darn float so wide we couldn't fit between her driveway and a power pole blocking our only escape route.  Kind of like the guy who builds a boat in his own basement then can't figure out how to get it out of there. We didn't have time to go get the loader again to rip the power pole out of the ground, plus the PP&L guys would sort of frown on us doing that anyways.  Finally we "MacGyvered" a rickety bridge across the ditch along the State Highway and we were on the way down the roadway leading into town, taking up THE WHOLE HIGHWAY.  With our emergency lights flashing from our engines we escorted our monstrosity to the parade staging area. 


With cars being forced almost entirely off the road by this years winning behemoth the oncoming vehicles occupants simply waved at us and hooted encouragements towards us as we passed by.  They had become accustomed to their local firemen's outlandish behaviors by now.