Boot Check

When I started writing down the stories for my upcoming book, my personal therapist, Dr. Kate, advised me that I should start this blog.  She could tell I had many sore memories trapped in my head and she knew it would be good for me to just blurt them out on paper or in this case on screen.  Little did she know I had already developed a relative simple form of stress relief for myself years earlier... 

...we got called one night to another sharp corner in a road that had seen many wrecks through the years.  Pulling up to the scene, we saw an older car had skidded several feet off the roadway. Now setting back on its wheels out in the large field at the end of a trail of crushed fencing and bent over weeds. The scene showed us that the car had rolled over several times before arriving at its present position.  Hitting the scene-lighting button on the engine, the evening darkness is turned into daylight.  A faint foggy mist wafts in the air around the damaged vehicle. Grabbing one of the big Streamlight flashlights fastened to the floor next to my seat, I hopped out of the engine and walked towards the wreck.  I could see the wiggly silhouette of a collie dog in the backseat car window.  With its back legs in the backseat and its front paws up on the back portion of front seats, his tongue panting and tail was wagging a mile a minute, he seemed to be telling his owner, who I couldn’t see yet, “Let’s do it again, George!” 


As I crossed the open field I noticed something awful looking on the ground.  I stepped over it, it appeared to be barf.  Knowing that people sometimes stop to assist at car accidents, but not liking what they find, they throw-up and run back to their own vehicle, I didn’t think much about the ugly mess.  I approached the car and shone my light through the broken front door window on the driver's side, petting the excited puppy dog that greeted me.  Sure enough, there was a guy slumped over onto the passenger seat with his head away from me.  So I traipsed around the front of the car and opened the passenger side front door— then I immediately SLAMMED it shut.  By then some of the other fire guys also had made it out to the car crash and were looking at me somewhat dumbfounded.  Like why aren’t you opening the car door, Blaze?  One of the other guys opens the passenger side door again and immediately he slammed it shut, too.  With both of us looking at each other nervously we slowly, together, opened the door again to find that, during the course of this accident, the gentlemen had had the very top of his skull popped off and ALL his brains had been squashed out somewhere along the way; he was very much dead.  I can still remember to this day how perfectly crystal white the inside of his skull cavity was with virtually no blood showing at all.  About then my mind flashed back to the pile of gruel I had found while walking over to the accident site.  Since this guy was dead and there was nothing we could do for him, we headed back over towards the fire engine when we again come across the pile of "puke" now recognized to be brains smeared in the field.  This time though there was a big firemen’s boot print right in the middle of it.  I told my boys with a deeper stern voice, “Go line up in the light next to the fire truck.”  Again, they looked at me nonplussed, but as they were use to following my orders without question, off they marched. 


When I got to the fire engine I announced, “Boys its time for a boot check.”  By now I think they were really wondering if I had gone off the deep end, but each one complied by lifting each of his boots one at a time for me, so I could see the sole of it.  Sure enough, after checking a couple guys down the line, one lifts his boot up and there are brains hanging from the tread of his boot.  I pointed out the stringy remains to him, just before he jetted around to the other side of the fire truck where we could hear him puking. 


Boy, we all got a lot off our chest that night by laughing and making fun of him while he kept trying to scrub the sole of his boot clean back at the station.  Making fun of others does wonders for personal stress relief.