Population 485 (14 page)

And Herbie loved airplanes. If you knew anything about flying he would talk your ear off. He used to bum flights from local pilots. He never got a license himself, but somewhere along the line he bought an airplane that had been in a crash. The wings were damaged, and it wouldn’t fly, but the engine ran, and the prop was intact. Herbie used to fire it up and taxi around his hayfield, happy as a clam. If you wanted, he’d give you a ride. In the winter he outfitted it with skis. He went to visit the neighbors once, and the ski tips got caught under the snow crust. Herbie climbed out of the cockpit and was kicking the skis free when he leaned forward and the prop snicked that earflapper cap right off his head. He loved to tell that one.

We never saw them, but Herbie’s hoverless hovercraft and flightless plane were part of local legend when my brothers and I were growing up. We used to speculate on them with the fascination young boys have for things that roar and fly. Rumor had it the hovercraft was hidden in the blacksmith shop somewhere, buried under the heaps of junk and steel that gradually overtook the space in Herbie’s later years.

It got to where Herbie was falling a lot. I was out of town the last time Herbie fell and he had to be taken away in the ambulance. He never did make it back home. I turn right at the T and head south down East Street, along the edge of Herbie’s cow pasture, now hosting the two newest houses in town.

East Street dips at Elm Street, and drops to cross a swale. During the spring melt, water rushes through the culvert at the center of the swale, then cuts across the wide green swathe of the Lions Club Park. Last I checked, the New Auburn Lions Club consisted of five members, and they weren’t getting along. After a period of neglect and decline, the park is being spruced up again. Volunteers have torn down the dilapidated old fair barn, put in new volleyball courts, upgraded the softball field, and raised money to put a footbridge over the spillway in the swale. A lot of the drive to improve the park is coming from my generation. They want their children to be able to play Little League ball and get a few carnival rides in during Jamboree Days. Like the old days, in 1975.

Straight across from the park is the village trailer court. The trailers are tightly packed, and arranged along a gentle up-slope. Right beside the road, there’s a rectangle of dirt where a trailer is missing. It burned last winter. We got the call at midnight. Jack Most and I were there first, with the attack pumper. Fire can shoot through a trailer in less than two minutes, and flames were already rolling out the roof on the upwind end, so I grabbed a hand line and bulled through the thigh-deep snow while Jack fired the pump. My idea was to get to the door situated roughly midway between either end of the trailer and try to cut the fire off, keep it contained to one end. Time and the wind were against me. By the time I hit the flimsy steel steps, Jack had fed me water, so I got low, and forearmed the door open. Peering through my face shield, I could see the interior was filled with smoke, and the flames were already past the doorway. The water punched a hole in the flames, but I was overmatched. I heard the sirens of Pumper One and the other trucks arriving. Someone ran up and said the residents were unaccounted for. We huddled quickly and figured if someone was still in the trailer—someone of whom there was any hope at all of saving—he or she would be in the bedroom, which was on the downwind end. The chief sent someone around the exterior of the trailer to scout for a second point of entry. A couple of us slung on air packs and tugged our masks on. “Packing up,” we call it. You practice over and over so you can pack up without a hitch in moments just like these, but the cold and the snow and the darkness and spinning lights make it tough. Sometime your hands go numb and stiffen with cold. Sometimes you get it all on and then you’re hung up with something silly, like maybe you can’t find a glove. You bend at the waist and peer around at the ground like a myopic robot. When the tank is on my back and the straps are all tight and the mask is sealed and locked, I wave at Brianna, the firefighter who is lining up the extra air tanks. She gives me a quick once-over. She checks for any gaps between the fireproof Nomex hood and my mask, adjusts and refastens the Velcro collar tab that forms a protective wrap around my throat. It’s critical, what she’s doing. Leave any skin exposed and at some point it will be fried or frozen.

The scout is back. He has located a small porch attached to the rear of the trailer, alongside the bedroom area. We’ll make an attack from there. A new guy drove Pumper One, and he missed the drive and backed into the ditch. There’ll be an award in that. The headlights are pointing at the stars, but the crew has still managed to lay and charge the two-and-a-halfs and set up gated wyes (devices that split one large hose into two smaller hoses), so we’ve got plenty of water and hose. Armed with a charged line and a heavy flashlight, three of us head in through the porch. Two other firefighters stay just outside the door to feed and retrieve hose. I’m on the nozzle. Lisa, a firefighter who got her training in the military, is right behind me, one hand gripping the cuff of my bunkers, the way we practiced in class. They used to teach us to hang on to each other’s boots, but this often results in getting your boot yanked off. Actually, our instructor told us it was safest to hang on to the strap of your partner’s air pack, but then you wind up right on top of him. The cuff is a compromise.

We crawl through the porch, and off to the right I can feel a door.
Try before you pry
, our instructor used to say, and so I turn the knob and sure enough the aluminum storm door swings out and the interior door swings in. I can tell we are in a hallway, but that’s it. The flashlight is no help. As soon as it hits the smoke, the light turns into a white pillar. We’ve only just received our thermal imager, and someone back at the truck is still setting it up. Flames are advancing down the hallway. I sweep the nozzle back and forth across the ceiling, pushing the fire back. The flames disappear, and we can feel the heat of the steam through our Nomex hoods. We advance a little more. Muffled behind her mask, Lisa hollers at me to check for heat on the floor. If the fire is working underneath, we could break through and become trapped. Good point. I pull off a glove and feel the floor. It’s an inch deep with warm water, but isn’t hot. Later I wonder how smart it was to pull off a glove in there.

Four feet inside the door, we’re at a dead end. As good as blind in the smoke, we can’t find a way into the bedroom. And the flames keep coming back, flashing down the hallway and over our heads. We repel them, and they return. We’re still fighting time and wind. I keep having this vision of a body in the bedroom. Once, the fire drives us back out to the little porch, and the storm door latches. Flames shimmy behind the glass. I twist the nozzle to fog stream, swing it like a baseball bat, smash the glass, then stuff the nozzle inside and whirl it around and around until we can fight our way back in. We gain, and get the door open again, and make another charge. I knee-walk up the hallway, holding the hose waist-high, like an Uzi, and blast away. We knock the fire clear back to the living room. I get caught up in the battle, and like some
Backdraft!
wannabe, give out with a “
Wooo-hooo
!” Smoke and steam close in all around us.

Someone finally hands up the thermal imager, and when I swing it around, I see I might have spared myself the woo-hoos. There are flames above me. There are flames to the right of me. The black-and-white screen reveals the outline of the bedroom door—behind us, it turns out, our access blocked by the porch door—and it frames a dancing shock of flames. None of this was visible without the imager. The smoke and steam obscure everything. I scan as much of the bedroom as I can, looking for a body, which should show on the screen as a glowing white lump. Nothing. We have to retreat again. This time, while we’re kneeling on the porch steps, regrouping, someone hollers into my mask. They’ve located the family. Someone has them on the phone, they’re out of town. The battle plan is redrawn. The vinyl siding on the adjacent trailer has begun to ruffle in the heat. We go from trying to save lives to saving property. I’m glad we went in, though. It’s good to look at Lisa or Matt or Jack, or any of the others who took their turns, and know they’ve proven themselves. If they had made it in, and pulled someone out, they would be heroes. I don’t care to think of myself in terms of heroism—it’s distasteful and presumptuous (previous performance does not guarantee future results), and frankly, you do a lot of this stuff without thinking and against training and better judgment—but I am intrigued by the idea that the recognition of heroism requires your being caught at it. Under the supposition that someone is trapped in the bedroom, fighting your way into what turns out to be an empty house is no more or less heroic than fighting your way into one harboring a victim. The difference is one of result, not intent. But until courage meets circumstance, there are no heroes.

Up the street from the trailer park, I jog past the Seventh Day Baptist parsonage. The pastor’s car caught fire once. Total loss, but we kept the fire out of an overhanging pine tree. Next door to the parsonage, a small green house. We’ve been there several times to treat a toddler having seizures. Two doors farther down, the house where I fought my first chimney fire. I’d been in town only a few weeks, and when the siren went off, I ran to the hall, thinking, Please let me not do anything stupid. I’ve always been one for setting the bar low. I was an awful basketball player in high school, and was flooded with relief when I went to the foul line during a game and missed the shot, but hit the rim. Anything but an air ball, I remember thinking. I jumped in the brush rig with Mack Most, a department veteran, and, bless his heart, he popped the clutch and blasted out the garage door, forgetting the battery charger hooked to the on-board pump. The charger hit the floor with a screech and a clank, and I felt the same craven relief as I had on the free-throw line. Veteran screwed up, pressure’s off. Once we got to the fire I mostly hauled buckets of ash and cinder. Tony Barker reminded me to leave the hose nozzles cracked on nights this cold so the water didn’t freeze, and he showed me the trick to popping the heavy lantern out of the charger rack on the pumper. Little bits of knowledge to be squirreled away. Last month we responded to an alarm at the new high school and I found one of the new guys fighting to get the lantern loose. I reached over his shoulder and popped it right out. Now he knows. Off to the right I see the banker’s house. Never been there on a call, but in grade school, his daughter hit me with a dodge ball and chipped my two front teeth. I never got them fixed. When I muse, I mouth-breathe and poke at the divots with my tongue.

To the stop sign now, the one marking the end of East Street where it tees with County Road AA. There’s a little house out here, stuck out away from the rest of the town. Used to be yellow, and one night we went there because a woman thought she was having a heart attack. I believe what she was having was her seventeenth beer. I gave her a sternal rub, this thing they teach you that is the equivalent of giving someone a chest noogie, and she didn’t even flinch. At some point, that family moved on, and now Lisa (the firefighter who went into the trailer with me) lives there with her boyfriend. He’s a master electrician. They’ve fixed the place up nice—new siding, sturdy garage. They’ve got a nifty kennel setup on the back of the garage, where they keep half a dozen coon dogs. When I turn right at the stop sign and head west past the house, the dogs howl and bay. I haven’t been coon hunting since high school. It’s a pleasure listening to the dogs work, to hear the change in their tune when they switch to barking
tree
, and I liked stumbling through the woods and swamps after dark—so familiar by day, so foreign at night—but I never quite got used to the part where the treed coon was transfixed in the light and shot. When the coon hit the ground, the dogs set upon it in a fury. A coon will rip a dog up good, and given water enough, will drown a dog by dunking its head, but I was never comfortable with the coon hunt denouement. These days, a coon skin isn’t worth much, and you can’t run the land the way you used to, what with all the newcomers and smaller properties, so coon hunting is on the fade. Lisa and her boyfriend have taken to running bear. Another stop sign. I look left, right, left, and head across old Highway 53.

I try to stay in shape for the usual reasons, but also because it makes me feel better on fire and ambulance runs. You’ll notice your average volunteer firefighter isn’t always in fighting trim. If my heart has to pound—and it does, every time—I’d like it to pound strong. Although I do fear the Jim Fixx curse. Fixx was one of the forefathers of the jogging movement. Kept himself in tip-top shape. And keeled over dead at the age of fifty-two, while running. The comedian Denis Leary speculates he was discovered by a pair of smokers on their way to the 7-Eleven for a pack of Lucky’s. It will be a matter of no small irony if my beer-bellied brethren drag my carcass off someday, thanks to some anomalous disruption in my QRS complex. Or thanks to my getting smacked by a turkey truck while taking my aerobic constitutional. I feel good when I’m in shape, though, and so I put down the Ho-Hos, drag myself out of the chair, and run the loop.

I am across the old highway now, across the railroad tracks, and leaning into the easy uphill curve of County Q. I was chugging along here last fall when I was forced to the shoulder by a pack of Amish youths cruising down the hill on RollerBlades. There is really no way to prepare for that sort of thing.

I’m a little loath to write about the Amish, because I am not an expert on their culture and beliefs, and it seems that most folks are. You’ll notice that people who wouldn’t know the Pope from the Reverend Sun-Myung Moon will jump to set you straight on the Amish creed, rattling on at great length and detail about what it is exactly that the Amish will not eat, snort, wear, do, or drive. I have a friend who has researched, lived with, and written about the Amish for years. When she lived with an Amish family for a week and wrote about the experience for a popular magazine, it seemed that half of her mail was written by hair-triggered autodidacts questioning her authority because they had spied a telephone wire in one of the accompanying photos. The truth is that the Amish spin off splinter sects as prolifically as every other group organized around religion and lifestyle. “Our” Amish, apparently, are OK with the in-line skating.