Happy Thanksgiving

Most of the stories on this blog are about some of my educational adventures over twenty three years as a Volunteer Firefighter with the Illinois Valley Fire Department and the last seven years with Rural Metro Fire in Grants Pass. I have been quite lucky fighting the beast all these years. I have only been seriously injured once in my career—at least so far. In the old days we did not wear the protective Nomex fire hoods all firefighters use today. Before the introduction of the flame-resistant hoods, our face, neck and ears were exposed to the mercy of the fire's heat and flames. Back in the day, we actually used the pain from the heat on our bare ears to indicate when it was getting too hot to be that close to the fire. When the blistering agony radiating from our thin-skinned ears got too intense to withstand any longer, that was when we knew it was time to retreat to a cooler location, normally outside the building.

On one occasion while I was fighting a fire in a fully involved kitchen, I heard something blowup just before I felt an excruciating pain grip me on the side of my face and neck. Some boiling-hot, thick material had just exploded onto me. I’ve heard that burning to death is the most painful way to go and I am inclined to believe it. I turned the fire hose on myself to wash the molten glop from the side of my face and neck. I staggered outside where I discovered the mysterious goo was just a can of creamed corn that had gotten so hot it exploded splattering the mushy contents onto my neck and ear. I loved those new fire hoods when we finally got them a few years later.

Besides the fact the new fire hoods helped protect our bare faces and necks from the flames, they also provided a level of anonymity from the general public when we wore them on a fire or accident scene. I truly enjoyed being able to walk down the street a few days after a big car crash knowing that the person limping towards me from the other direction was the very same person I'd helped get untangled from a car wreck just a few days earlier.  But because my face had been obscured by my hood, they had no idea that I was one of the firemen who had helped save them.

During this coming holiday

season be one of those people

who helps a stranger 

anonymously.

Memories Etched in Stone

Ever since a grade school field trip to Crater Lake I have been intrigued with stone work.  The beautiful rock work guarding access into the steep volcanic caldera at Crater Lake is simply amazing.  I had opportunity when I was older to apprentice under a well known stone mason in the valley, Howard Woods.  I had a volunteer rock wall project I wanted to complete at Cave Junction's City Hall when I was a City Councilor and Howard agreed to show me the ropes of laying stone...

Placing stone is a hard, slow going labor of love when done properly.  First you have to gather your building stone material from the forest or a rock pit.  (Note to self: make sure your in the right rock pit before gathering your stone)  Unusual shaped pieces are best to work with, remembering that you may have to pick that same stone up several times before it finally fits into your work of art.  So too big of boulders are undesirable when working alone, and I almost always worked alone. You need to gather about 1 1/2 times the amount of material that you figure you will need for a particular project because every single stone will not find a home in your project.

Second it is best to sketch out a simple plan before starting your adventure.  Your final project hardly ever mirrors exactly what your rough draft looked like but it gives you a starting point to begin from.  Finally after your stones are meticulously placed you have to come back and grout the joints left between the rocks.  This at times is the most tedious part of any project, grouting and smoothing your joint seams.

There was a small piece of city property at the south end of Cave Junction.  I decided one day that Cave Junction needed a more fitting "Welcome to Cave Junction" sign.  After getting permission from our city fathers I began the complicated volunteer project.  I wanted a rock wall backdrop with a stream of water flowing from it much like happens at the Oregon Caves.  My stream would feature salmon fighting their way back towards the headwaters to spawn.  A landscaping area would grace a small pool where the water would recirculate from.  Simple, right? 

After the projects footing was poured, pool built, pump installed and tons of rock gathered the "simple" project finally began.  I would work on it sporadically after work and on weekends.  The weeks gradually turned into months as the rock sculpture slowly rose from the ground.  Being positioned right along Highway 199 I received many strange looks, a few motivational honks and occasionally a Dr. Pepper from the passing motorists.  Dr. Pepper has long been my drink of choice when creating a master piece.

I used to wear my old dirty Carhart coveralls when the weather got cold outside.  Over them I normally wore some beat up old sweatshirt too.  I specifically remember one cold Thanksgiving day I was working on my project before the big thanksgiving feast. A car drove up and a man got out, walked over and offered me a free Thanksgiving dinner down at the local rescue mission.  I think I was dressed so shabbily that he actually thought I was homeless.  My mom got a kick out of that story when I told it over dinner later that day.

Shattered Memories

Sorry the stories are coming a bit slower lately but I'm busy again doing some more after hours sheet rocking for SAR (Search and Rescue), at our club house...

     I clearly remember once collecting an artifact at a fire scene from a two story building. I think the building had once been an old restaurant, but anyway, we had a late night fire call there. We got the fire knocked down pretty quickly on the first floor and headed to the second floor to see what the fire had done aloft. We found quite a bit of heat damage, but no actual fire had crawled up into the second story. In the corner of that upstairs room, we found an old hanging lamp made of plastic. It had gotten so hot it had melted and oozed into molten strips of plastic six feet long, almost all the way to the floor. After we had extinguished the fire downstairs, it had cooled the upstairs enough for the plastic to re-harden. It was a beautiful work of fire art. We asked the property owner if we could have that unique melted lamp and he said, "Sure, it’s all yours."

     So, with the fire still smoldering in spots below us, several of us firefighters got a spine-board out and by standing on the first floor's icy roof, carefully, ever so gently we managed to ease this brittle lamp down from it's hanger and lowered it onto its side. Carefully we began removing it out through the second floor window and down the ladder to the ground. That's about when the Fire Chief drove onto the fire scene. I suppose from a distance, in the dark it did look like we were evacuating an injured firefighter out of the building. Let’s just say he wasn't very happy when he found out what we were actually doing. That old melted lamp hung in our training room at my station for years and years before someone accidentally bumped into it one night and shattered it into a million pieces.

Annie, Annie are you ok?

For generations of Americans, fighting fire has always been a male dominated sport. Very few women participate in this strenuous and often times dangerous public service. There is a spattering of females in the fire service today, but they are a hardy breed. They have to be, if they want to survive the constant Tom Foolery found within the ranks of fire departments. Participating in and encouraging practical jokes is second nature to longtime firemen. The one cardinal rule is you don’t ever mess with a comrade's turnouts. No sharp objects hidden inside the boots, no hiding his gear, no icy-hot smeared inside his fire hood. Besides not messing around with one of the brethren's turnouts, pretty much everything else in a firemen’s life is up for exploitation and amusement.

It certainly is deemed OK to take the breastplate and cute blue jumpsuit off the "CPR-Annie" training manikin and put them on a live, petite, blonde-haired young lady. Go ahead and remove CPR-Annie’s plastic face mask and carefully place it on our afore mentioned young lady. Add some clean white tennis shoes to her wardrobe and— voilà. Who cares that the CPR test you are about ready to take is 50% of your final grade and one of the last steps before becoming a certified Emergency Medical Technician? How could you feel nervous when taking your final test?

By now I had practiced performing CPR in class till I could do it in my sleep. Following protocol, I would mundanely kneel down and shake Annie’s shoulder and shout, “Annie, Annie are you OK?” That’s when this new, improved Annie sits straight up and shouts back, “YES, I’M OK!” I grabbed both her shoulders and slammed her back down to the floor so hard I knocked the wind out of this new actor, but I did no permanent harm.

Now, standing off to the side in the shadows of the engine bays(having completed this important part of my test), I got to watch other rugged firemen shriek like little girls, and some even started to cry, after getting a huge shock from a very alive Annie— those were the best. Each subsequent, "Annie, Annie, are you OK?" victim would stand off to the side of the improvised training room pretending not to be watching the next classmate step forward to ask Annie if she was OK. We intently watched as one of our most macho fire guys knelt down to shake Annie's shoulder. When she sat bolt upright, he leaped a foot in the air and traveled 20 foot backwards without touching the floor till he slammed into the wheels on one of the fire engines— that was a pretty good one, too.

Without a Face

Because the sidewalks actually do roll up at 5 o’clock on Friday nights in small rural towns, you are left with just two options if you are looking for some evening action as a young adult. Option one, go to the local bars and carouse. Not being a drinker that wasn’t an option for me. Second option, attend the local high school football games and cheer them on. It was on one of those typically cold and quite foggy fall nights just after the football game was over when the call came in—a reported M.V.A. (Motor Vehicle Accident) on some deserted stretch of country road. I rushed up to the fire station and climbed into my cold turnout gear hanging on my hook waiting for me before I climbed into the driver's seat of the extrication truck and waited… Being that we were a volunteer department, no one ever knew how many firefighters would show up for any particular incident. Unlike me, our other volunteers actually had lives beyond the fire department and would go to the movies, or would be enjoying a nice dinner with their wives on a Friday night—all located in other towns several miles away. Some volunteers, heaven forbid, would actually crack open "a cold one" with friends, making them ineligible to respond to emergency call outs because they had been drinking. So, with the extrication rigs engine running, I sat and waited for anyone else to show up. We were trained to wait for five minutes for reinforcements to arrive before charging out on your own to any emergency. Fortunately, going solo didn't happen often, but this was one of those calls where I left the station alone with my overhead lights reflecting off the foggy darkness. Knowing the streets and lanes in my community like the back of my hand, I still had to drive with extra caution that night due to the dense fog.


Seeing someone’s four-way flashers illuminating the roadside where the accident most likely had occurred, I pulled to a stop and grabbed my "Streamlight" (a powerful flashlight) anchored next to my drivers seat. I stepped into the cold night, seeing my own breath in the headlights of my truck, — a bystander points into the woods. Aiming my beam of light into the forest I could see the rubble of a pathway left by a vehicle that had left the roadway out of control. Walking towards the wreck I could hear, but couldn't see, some man screaming, “She is dead! My sister is dead!” while he ran in circles around the crash site just beyond my view. On reaching the center of the chaos, I could see that a small Volkswagen beetle had caused all this carnage. Shinning my narrow beam of light through the smashed-out front windshield, I screamed. I’m not sure to this day if I screamed only in my mind or if I actually screamed out loud. Sitting slumped over in the passenger seat was what appeared to be a girl, but without any features to her face—no eyes, nose, or mouth, just raw flesh and lots of bloodied hair.

Gathering my composure, I slowly inched forward in the darkness to see what, if anything, I could do for her. Feeling for her pulse through the crushed side window, I got one! Looking more closely at her injuries, I saw she had been partially scalped and the loose hair and skin had fallen over her face covering up her facial features. The car doors were squashed shut and I could not get to her directly, but I finally squirmed my body (I was thinner in those days) through the small, almost undamaged frame of the back window that now had no glass in it. Kneeling in the back seat behind her, reaching round and over her seat I held her neck (C spine immobilization) and assured her that real help was on the way. She was bleeding badly from her serious head wounds, so like feeling for holes in a bowling ball, I placed my individual fingers over the spots that were bleeding most profusely to help stem the tide.

So here I was— alone, scared, on a dark, dark foggy night, squished in the back seat of a Volkswagen, trying to keep the precious, life-giving fluid in this young woman. Outside the vehicle I could still hear the man running around in the woods screaming, “My sister is dead!” I could actually hear him thud into a tree now and then, but he'd get back up and resume his panicked screaming—I never did see or find out what his injuries were. Finally, far off in the distance, I could hear the wail from the siren of the ambulance coming to my aid. I begged my young lady to hang on, “Help is coming!” She had bled so much by then that she had stopped bleeding as the ambulance crew jabbed her with two trauma IV lines, one in each of her arms. To my delight, while still kneeling behind her, holding her neck and head she began to bleed again indicating she had regained at least some blood pressure. As more firemen finally began showing up, they started extricating both of us from the wreckage. The young lady was loaded onto the gurney and placed in the back of the ambulance; the rear ambulance doors were slammed shut. A hard slap on the back door signals the ambulance driver to take off. With the interior lights in the ambulance illuminating the goings-on in there, they drove out of my life and into the stiff darkness toward the hospital.

On another Friday night several years later I was again walking into my local high school football stadium to see the annual, homecoming football game. By this time in my life I had gone through a divorce, I had ridden almost ten thousand miles on my mountain bike to help ease the pain of that time and I had met a new lady friend, of course at a Firemen’s Conference in some distant city. That evening was our first quasi date since we'd met, she had traveled to my little community. I was taking her to the local high school homecoming football game for our “special night” out. As we walked by the front of the overflowing crowd in the grandstands on the way to our seats, not even holding hands yet, I hear a woman yell my name from high up in the bleachers. Looking in her direction, a young lady jumps up and yells my name again, but this time even louder, “Bill!”

Firemen are the most notorious practical jokers known to man and my fire buddies knew this new girl friend of mine was coming to town. Looking anxiously towards the quickly advancing young woman (I had no idea who she was) screaming my name from the bleachers, I was searching for my firemen-culprits, giggling in the shadows, who had put her up to this stunt. The young lady pushed herself through the Cougar fans, ran down the bleacher stairs and leaped into my arms hugging me while gushing tears. Being the “gentleman” that I am, I caught her and held her for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time, all the while I’m glancing at the new girlfriend eying me from the sideline. Finally the sobbing woman stepped back and said to me, “You don’t know who I am, do you?" I replied, “Miss, I am so sorry, but, no, I do not.” as the new girlfriend narrowed her glare towards me. The young lady asked if I remembered a particular wreck that had occurred a few years earlier on a dark foggy night and I said, “Yes.” She then informed me “I was the girl in that wreck and you saved my life that night.” Stumbling backwards I said, “Oh, my God, you look so much better then how I remember you.” (They call that Firemen's tact,) I began pushing her long dark hair back away from the side of her face and admiring how the doctors had been able to hide the scares from the accident. We laughed, she smiled and we hugged a few more times before she ran back into the bleachers.

To this day I have no idea how she found out that I was holding her together on that cold foggy night. With my attention now drawn back to the new girl friend who was almost in tears by now, she asked, “Does this happen often?” I took a long pause… and said, “Oh yes, this kind of thing happens to me all the time. I’m a fireman”.