Population 485 (5 page)

Before I moved back and joined the department, someone out in the county called in a garage fire. Bryan Swanson and my brother Jed were working in that neck of the woods, and got there first. The flames were just taking hold. Bryan grabbed a plastic bucket, filled it in the ditch, and handed it up to Jed. Jed flung the water on the flames. It was touch and go for a while, but when the fire trucks rolled up, Bryan and Jed were standing there in their gear with their buckets and the flames were flat. “Get the wet stuff on the red stuff,” the old-timers say, and sometimes the old ways will do.

Right now, the Beagle needs a little extra cash. Wife Number Two hit the road a while back, but it will take a thousand bucks to do the divorce and make it official. He’ll get the money in November, he says, off all the overtime he accumulates butchering during deer season. The deer come in nonstop then, stiff in the back of pickups, slung over trunks, stacked in trailers. The Beagle will cut up fifteen, twenty deer a day. He is at work by four
A.M
., and he leaves for home, bone-tired and nicked up, at eight
P.M
. It goes on like that for several weeks. My family and I butcher our own deer, but I dropped off a few extras for the Hunters Against Hunger program last year, and it was strange to see the Beagle in his apron, with his knife and steel, strange in that off-center little way it always is when we see acquaintances outside the usual context. The deer—over 200 of them—were all dragged in headfirst and laid out four wide along the chutes leading to the killing floor. The effect was riverine. One thought of logjams. Most of the deer were hung from trees or rafters after they were shot, and had frozen with their back legs and necks extended, and their forelegs bent at the knee. All those deer in that position, it looked like the mass start of a deer triathlon, everybody doing the backstroke. I know what it is to skin and bone a deer—my family and I do probably twenty a year—and when the Beagle tells me he sees the river of upturned deer legs in his sleep, I believe him. But this year, for every hide that hits the floor, another couple of dollars go in the divorce kitty.

We talked about it on our way back from a call in the rescue van, just me and him. An old lady had fallen in her bathroom and become wedged between the toilet and the tub. She had been there all night. She was cold to the touch and unable to talk. She had terrified eyes. We took her vital signs and gave her oxygen, and then the Beagle covered her with a blanket and I held her hand, talking to her until the ambulance came. Sometimes the best thing we can do is give someone a little comfort. On the ride back, we got to talking about women, and the Beagle said he knew this last marriage was in trouble when his wife wouldn’t let him look at the checkbook. I agreed that might be one of your Top Five Signs. Other disagreements—about bills, about stepchildren—followed, until eventually the Beagle reckoned it was time—once again—to split the blanket. The One-Eyed Beagle,
el lobo solo
. But I had heard he was already seeing another woman. The Beagle never stays lonely long. We were crossing the overpass when I said as much. I asked him what his secret was. I was in the passenger seat, and he turned and grinned at me. “I got a big sign on my forehead,” he said. “Blinking red lights. It says,
dumb bastard
!” He turns his eye back to the road, and laughs like it’s the best joke ever. What the Beagle has is equanimity.

Back in the mid-1600s, certain prominent citizens of New Amsterdam were assigned by the city government to patrol the streets at night with large wooden rattles. Upon spotting a fire, they spun the rattles, waking the locals, who jumped out of bed and formed bucket brigades. According to historian and
Firehouse
contributing editor Paul Hashagan, the “rattle watch” is generally recognized as the first organized attempt at fighting fire in America. You’ll read here and there that Benjamin Franklin founded the first volunteer fire department in America. That’s inaccurate, but it is widely agreed that when he formed Philadelphia’s Union Fire Company in 1736, he set the organizational standard for all volunteer brigades to follow. Franklin’s fire company would put your fire out no matter who you were; prior to this, many fire “clubs” and “societies” existed only to protect paying members. The Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Company of Alexandria, Virginia, counted among its members a surveyor named George Washington. In 1774, he bought the city its first fire engine. Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Benedict Arnold, James Buchanan, and Millard Fillmore were all volunteer firefighters. The first female volunteer firefighter of record was a slave named Molly Williams. The juxtaposition of “volunteer” and “slave” produces a certain irony.

If I could swing the time-travel thing, it would be a kick to convene Ben Franklin and the Beagle over some beers and venison sausage. Maybe a basket of deep-fried cheese curds. It would be a ripping chat. They would speak of firefighting, of course. Of all that has changed, and all that remains the same. It is difficult to know what the Beagle would have made of the Franklin chestnut “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.” There is much there of pertinence to a cross-eyed double-divorcé. Franklin filled
Poor Richard’s Almanack
with that sort of wit, but here too the Beagle would be more than able to return serve. The Beagle can turn a phrase. One frosty morning we work half an hour to extricate a young man from a mangled car. Later, the Beagle declares, “Hell, you couldn’t a got that guy outta there with a shoehorn and a plunger!” When rotund Tee Norman and skinny Dude Fawcett get to horsing around next to the portable reservoir during a training session and Tee pulls Dude into the water, I try to describe the thrashing and splashing to someone back at the fire hall, and the Beagle breaks in. “What it looked like,” he says, “was a water snake wrasslin’ a walrus!” Once the Beagle and I made a call after dark on a godforsaken logging trail and got jumped by some cheesehead
Deliverance
feeb. The Beagle was cool, but later, when we were safely home, he turned that eye on me. “Hell, Mikey, I was nervous as a whore in church!”

Ben Franklin was fond of promoting a list of thirteen virtues. Temperance, moderation, and chastity among them. Historical records and assorted offspring suggest he knocked holes in the list on a regular basis, perhaps leading him to write, “A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.” Your top-grade aphorist covers all the angles. Truly, though, what you’re hearing there is equanimity again. I crave equanimity. I have more than I did as a young man, and am beginning to suspect—rather hopefully—it is a product of age. Equanimity is the only thing that will save you from this world, and it doesn’t come easy. Or cheap. And you can’t fake it for long. Guys like Ben and the Beagle, they do not succumb to false hope, but neither do they cave in to absolute despair. Don’t expect much, but don’t give up. “People ask me,” says the Beagle, “they say, ‘You must be upset about the divorce.’ I say, ‘Nope. It’s over. That simple.’” I ask the Beagle why he stays on the fire department. “I do it because I enjoy it,” he says. Matter-of-fact. “Same reason I’ve been cutting meat for twenty-five years—I enjoy it.” A little pause. “Course when I’m an old man, my hands will be so bent up I won’t be able to scratch my ass.” A big laugh. “Who is rich?” wrote Franklin. “He that rejoices in his Portion.”

We get paged at two in the morning. A semi full of bananas has rolled over on the interstate. The dispatcher says the truck is north of the overpass, in the median. I won the race to the hall, so I’m driving the van, and the Beagle is riding shotgun. I hammer down the on-ramp and slide over to run in the passing lane so that we can scan the median. We’re cruising at about seventy when this pickup roars up the right side of us. The driver is gesticulating and pointing back down the road. The Beagle has his sleepy face to the window, peering, trying to figure out what the guy wants. The brim of his helmet keeps bumping the glass. After some charades, we realize the driver is trying to tell us the accident is
south
of the overpass. The dispatcher sent us the wrong way. We hit the crossover and backtrack, and sure enough, we find the semi, and the tumbled mound of bananas. The semi is destroyed but the driver is OK. I’m just wishing I could hear the conversation in that northbound pickup truck. What they must have thought—first all those bananas, then the wrong-way rescuers, speeding directly away from the scene, and then this drowsy cross-eyed guy goggling at them from beneath his slantways fire helmet. The Beagle and I are not always able to support the image of Ace Rescuers.

You try. You do feel a responsibility. You are, after all, working on behalf of the community, using equipment the community helped pay for. It’s fun to play at this, to give each other the needle and treat the whole thing like fun with cool toys, but there’s a seriousness at the base of it all.

When polls are conducted asking people who they most trust and admire, firefighters consistently finish at the top. It’s nice to piggyback to that, even as a citizen volunteer, but the blessing isn’t a given. A single misstep and you break a trust that can take decades to repair. Every year there are reports of volunteer firefighters starting fires so that they can go out on calls. This being related to human nature, it is nothing new. In
Fire and Civilization
, Johan Goudsblom mentions historical instances of firefighters committing arson recorded as far back as
A.D
. 64. He cites motives including looting, self-aggrandizement, and pyromania. You want to be a hero bad enough, you make your own disasters. There have been cases of firefighters starting fires so they could earn extra money. You’d have to burn down a lot of stuff around here to make it financially viable. You’re on call twenty-four hours a day for free. You get ten dollars an hour for fighting a fire or making a medical call. You get seven dollars for attending the monthly meeting, and seven dollars an hour for training, with the training not to exceed two hours. The average New Auburn firefighter took home around $400 last year; the largest check was for $1,561. I’ll get some justifiable argument from professional firefighters, but in our situation, I prefer low pay. Weeds people out. Keeps your motivations pure. If you get big enough to where you need full-time professionals, pay them accordingly. In our case, I prefer to believe that my neighbors are showing up simply to help, not to pad their Christmas fund.

The Roman Marcus Crassus, who operated until 53
B.C
., used to show up at fires with a corps of five hundred slaves trained as builders. With his men standing by, Crassus would find the owners of the burning buildings and those adjacent and make an offer to buy the structures at a ridiculously low price. Once the owners agreed, Crassus would order his men to put the fire out. As soon as the smoke cleared, Crassus would set his crews to rebuilding. He then resold the properties at a grand profit. I told the chief maybe we wanted to think about some sort of similar program. Our motto would be, First You Pay, Then We Spray.

Rusty, one of the firefighters who keeps our trucks tuned, just donated a kidney to his son-in-law. He and the Beagle have something in common now, although Rusty’s eyes still track. Twenty-four firefighters on our roster, and two have given away kidneys. I wonder how that stacks up against the general population. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. It’s easy to look at the Beagle simply as a character—in the “he’s quite a character” sense—and he comes well armed. But when his first ex-wife’s new husband got serious facial and inhalation burns from an exploding heater, it was the Beagle who separated from the responding crew and knelt at the guy’s head, giving him the best care he knew how. Down there on his knees, his cud working, his eye shooting off south, doing the neighborly thing. I would trust the Beagle with my life. Not would,
do
. He’ll be goofy, but he’ll be
there
.

Selflessness has its drawbacks, and the Beagle will point them out. We get dispatched to a forest fire after midnight. One of the decisions you make when calls come in at that time of night is whether or not to stop and pee. Tonight nobody did. The forest fire turns out to be a small brush fire, and after an hour on scene, we’re on our way back to the hall. There are four of us jammed in the cab. “Jeez, I gotta take a leak,” says Matt Jeffski.

“How ya think I feel?” pipes up the Beagle. “I only got one kidney!”

The Beagle has other problems. Both his ex-wives work at the only gas station and convenience store in town. So he’s gotten to where he avoids the Gas-N-Go. Drives to Bloomer for his gas and morning coffee. Sometimes he’ll send his new girlfriend in to get him a can of chew. The ex’s have been known to give her the evil eye, and sometimes they slap the Kodiak down a little sharply. “They don’t like it,” says the Beagle, “but they know my brand!” Big guffaw.

The year has cycled around, and it’s Jamboree Days again. It’s Saturday night, late. We’ve got a nice little husband/wife band in, they do country and rock covers, old and new, and under the big white tent, the dance floor is jammed. The Beagle had his twenty-five-year class reunion today. He has just arrived from the party and, frankly, he’s happily loaded. He’s got his girlfriend with him. She’s a stout girl with smiling eyes, looks like she could toss some hay bales. The Beagle has his groove on. He dances song after song, twisting and shucking and jiving and doing this move where he twiddles his butt and pops his knees up and down in sequence, like a beefy marionette. Every now and then he gives his sweetie a little belly bump. Me and the Chief, we’re not drinking. We’re sitting in lawn chairs in the grass on the outskirts, and the dancing Beagle has us cracked up. We reckon it’s like watching some sort of courtship ritual on
Animal Planet
or the Discovery channel. When he finally leaves us, it is with a grin and a salute, and someone to keep him company. Monday morning he’ll be hoisting sides of beef before the sun comes up, but tonight he is a dancer and a lover, and he is tripping the Beagle light fantastic.