I'm awake from my 5-1/2 hour nap. Whew! Guess I needed it. YellowDog slept next to me with her head on my pillow (she's no fool--she knows how to use a pillow). She's in good form today. She's generally a pretty happy dog (and moody dogs do exist), but today she's in especially good humor. Looks like RacerEx gave her a bath. Perhaps being clean lifts her spirits. I think partly it's just that sometimes after RacerEx has left for work she doesn't expect that I or anyone will come pick her up and be with her, so she gets excited and happy.
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Wanted to add something to my earlier post.
Last night as we started our 15-flight walk up that high-rise I thought of all the firefighters in N.Y. who lost their lives doing exactly the same thing on 9/11. It's a weird feeling to walk in those shoes. Not to minimize what they did or to inflate my own experience. Certainly, the false alarm I went to last night in no way compares to what happened to all those men, to all those people, but it's still an eerie feeling to begin an ascent into the unknown. Especially eerie was passing building occupants in the stairwell who were on their way down and out.
I think of those men, marching heavily up all those stairs, past the panicked occupants of the World Trade Center. I think of my own walk, of the automatic ascent, of falling in line behind my officers and my commrades because it is what I do. Not without question, obviously, but still I march on.
Sometimes I'll see a war movie, like
The Thin Red Line or
Saving Private Ryan and I liken what I do to the beach scenes in which soldiers storm the beaches in mass numbers only to be repeatedly shot down. And yet, the troops keep on coming. There is no choice. They are there doing what they were trained to do, what they have to do. There is no backing out, no quitting.
Again, not to glamorize what I do or liken myself to a soldier in peril, but sometimes at a fire I feel the same way: I am crawling on my hands and knees or snaking on my side down a smoke-filled, pitch-dark hallway hopefully towards the seat of the fire and I am thinking, "This is fucking crazy! What am I doing?" But there is no backing out. No quitting. Not then, not there. So I keep on moving forward.
Last night when we relieved the first-in fire crews from last night's third-alarm fire, the engine crew was out front waiting for us. It was 2:00 a.m. They were all exhuasted, but they all had notable grins on their faces. That's how it feels after a "good" fire. After looking back at the destruction we have stepped away from, while looking over the leveled structure we fought from within while the fire raged and we risked our lives--tempting fate, trusting one another and hoping to God we make it just one more time--we are elated. Even if the building is a total loss, we can be ecstatic.
Sometimes it is more grim than that. There are fires I've been to where occupants have died, sometimes needlessly and tragically and by our own foibles. Sometimes one of us is hurt or, much less often, one of us is killed, and then there are no smiles, no elation. We are subdued and somber and quiet.
And then there's the aftermath. Fact is, most of us die of cancer. Chances are, I'll die of cancer. Last night as we were chasing smoke in between floor and ceiling, I pulled up melted rubber gym flooring and burned carpet. A nasty, chemical smell permeated the air--formaldehyde? cyanide? some other carcinogen? The smell clung to the inside of our nostrils as it clung to our clothing. It is was a sickening smell which lasted for hours until I finally had a chance to wipe out my nose with a dirty rag. I think of my lungs, how the smell clings to them, and yet there's nothing to wipe them clean.
I think about the citizens of our city who scoff at us, at all of our time off, at our big pensions, at our benefits, at how much down time we have on the job. Sometimes, they even make snide comments at us at the grocery store or at Starbucks if we stop in for coffee.
The other day, some guys looked at one of our crew as we stood in line for our coffee and snidely remarked, "Great. Nice to know this is what my tax dollars are paying you for."
Rich, my truck mate, looked at him and calmly said, "Well, I don't know what
you did at work yesterday, but
I almost died last night."
