I had been involved in the fire department already for several years when one cloudy afternoon an alarm comes in. Stations #1 and #3 respond for a man trapped under a tree. Our EMS crews quickly responded to the accident scene. Stepping out of the extrication rig I headed out through the woods in the direction the neighbors were pointing and others were yelling for help. An older man (70+) was felling a big tree for firewood but after he cut through the tree trunk the tree didn’t fall. The old guy had walked around the tree to take a look at his dilemma when the tree suddenly broke free and fell down crushing and trapping him underneath all its weight. Sliding in along side the crumpled old coot I immediately recognized the man. He was my, even older by then, trail boss from my Forest Service days. Harold was hurt, he was hurt real bad. I told him “Harold we’re going to get you out of here, you hang on” but in the back of my mind I wasn’t sure we could come through on this promise. Harold mumbles back at me “well don’t take your time doing it.” I don’t think he recognized me through all the pain he was in. Our fire crew went to digging and sawing the brush away around us so we could gain better access to this old woodsman. This damn guy at seventy years old was still out chopping firewood for himself and he always had some old widow woman in the community that he would be helping get by, by giving her free firewood. 
We finally were able to unscrew Harold from the early grave this darn tree had tried to pound him into. When the ambulance doors were closed and it sped away I was not sure I would ever see Harold alive again due to his serious injuries. I guess, really I should have known better, being that Harold was tough as nails even in his old age. I heard through the grapevine that he did eventually survive and heal from most of his injuries. Years later I ran across Harold downtown one day at the Junction Inn, eating lunch. He looked pretty good for almost being eighty years old and having a tree fall on him. You could hardly even notice he limped anymore because now he limped on both legs when he walked. He excitedly told me about the new adventure he was into, bus tour guide. Harold did not at all resemble the normal tour guide type person you would imagine seeing. 
Though no one else knew about the local historic past more then Harold did.
Below is a real interesting site I found about Harold Teague and his life and times.
Several years later I was chatting with some folks that had taken one of the bus tours to Vegas that Harold was chaperoning. They told me he was the highlight of their trip telling his old time stories, especially since they didn’t win any money. They said once Harold got away from the small towns dotted along the roadway, where he would remind them about the historic lore of the area. Out where the highway leading to Sin City was straight and the sage brush grew tall, Harold told this story…
…a number of years ago I was a trail boss for the Forest Service. I was in charge of a gaggle of kids one summer, a good bunch of kids, but they didn’t know anything. I had to teach them how to buck logs from the trails we were maintaining with the manpowered crosscut whip saw. I even had to train those darn youngsters how to use a fulcrum and lever to remove the big log rounds from the trail pathway after we cut through the fallen tree. There was this one whippersnapper that used to give me a particularly hard time when he was on my crew that summer. I never was sure he was going to grow up to amount to much. I was surly surprised one day many years later though. I had had a terrible accident one afternoon when I was felling this old tree. I ended up with the damn thing on top of me in fact. I figured that it was going to be the end of me for sure that day, when suddenly I felt something under that tree next to me. Looking over, it was the dang kid I had spent so much time training several summers earlier. As I lay there being crushed to death, I watched, as that damn kid went to work digging me out from under that mess. He used all the techniques I had taught him summers ago. He must have actually been listening to me after all, because if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here sharing today with you all. 
"It takes a village to raise a child," is an old proverb and it was with good feelings that Harold was one of those people that I found Blaze working for when he was a teen. I attended Harold Teague's Memorial in 2009 and told his family and the congregation just that. Harold was 89 yrs. when he past and the stories about this man would have filled a book. Mom
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