fbpx

Hersch Wilson

Firefighter, Writer, Speaker

You are here: Home / Archives for Hersch Wilson

Hersch Wilson

By

My Fire Department: Sticking Together In A Country Tearing Apart

Our ambulance bounced up the shoulder of the interstate. The freeway was a parking lot, backed up for miles. Greg and I jumped out when our truck slowed near the scene; we jogged the last few yards. Our rescue truck, driven by Dan, pulled up right behind us. Dan got out, and elevated the big light tower. He turned the lights on and night turned into a black and white movie.
What we saw was horrible. There was a destroyed motorcycle and body parts.
Greg and I stood next to each other.
“Fuck,” I said.
I looked at Greg, “You take patient care? I’ll take triage?”
He nodded, “Got it.” He walked over to the first patient, a guy laying on the road, missing a leg. Greg yelled to Dan, “Dan, see if you can find this guy’s leg! I think I saw it by the white pickup they hit.”
We were at a house fire. This time I had command. One room of the home was fully involved. We’d transported one patient with full-thickness burns who would later die. We were short of firefighters. I got on the radio and told the interior attack crew to come out; they’d been in too long. The last one out was Paul. He took off his SCBA mask and I noticed that his face was grey. He staggered. My heart went to my throat. I jumped out of the truck and jogged over to him. He waved me away, saying he was fine, but I walked him over to the rehab station and asked the medic to check him out.
I was kneeling on the highway. We’d just extricated the only survivor of a family of five from a head-on crash. Bruce, our captain that night, put his hand on my shoulder. “This sucks man. Why don’t you go home? We’ll call Laurie and tell her to take care of you.”
​I tell these stories, stories that any firefighter will recognize, when people ask me to describe my volunteer fire department.
My fellow volunteers are people whom I care deeply about. But I would never known them were it not for the department.

We are born-again Christians, ministers, ex-military, gun-toting NRA guys, lawyers, artists, contractors, Republicans, Independents, Democrats, the uber-liberal, gay, straight, radical feminists, and what I am sure was the only anarchist-socialist-atheist firefighter in the state.

​Yet for decades, we’ve been close as a department. Even in the last few years, when the country seems to be tearing apart, we take care of each other. We enjoy being together and know we are serving — together — an important purpose.

It is the work that bonds us.
​
Standing there in the middle of that chaos of the motorcycle-truck collision, with people yelling and body parts strewn across the highway, Greg and I knew we had to solve this together, we had to go through this and come out the other side with each other. These are among the most honest and ruthless moments humans can share.

They are honest because in those times we are vulnerable and scared. They are ruthless because the decisions we make together in those moments are life or death — save someone or watch them die.

Firefighting Transcends Politics
Our work — a privilege — transcends politics. Fires are apolitical. Our work transcends whatever faith you put your faith in. On the fire ground, the crazy conservative has my back and I — an insane liberal — will do all I can to save his. The atheist has the Catholic who watches out for the Baptist telling the agnostic to be safe.

​It is not simply a catch phrase that firefighters think of the vocation as a Brother and Sisterhood.

A Call to a Nation Divided: Unite Like Firefighters
​
How does this inform us as a nation divided? I celebrate human differences. But we can and must come together when we need one another: when the barn needs to be built, the car rescued from the flood, the child caught jumping from the burning building.
Most of us, even in our fragmented world, yearn for the kind of connectedness and love that exists when people come together to do vital work. We are here, after all, to do important and meaningful things. We are at our best when we do it together. Fire Departments prove that every day.

By

April, 1917


One hundred years ago this month, the United States of America declared war on Germany and joined what was then called the Great War or with terrible lack of foresight,  “The War to End All Wars.”

My Grandfather (pictured) Herschel Wilson, aka Woody Wilson, was among those Americans who signed up and became part of the American Expeditionary Force. He served as a Machine Gunner in Flanders. He was 18.

Machine Guns. Artillery. Trench Warfare. Mustard Gas. 250,000 dead at the Battle of The Somme. The First World War destroyed forever the illusion that war was a Grand Adventure.

Here is a poem by Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est . Owen was a Lieutenant in the British army. He was wounded in 1914, blown out of a foxhole by a mortar shell. He laid unconscious for days among the remains of other dead British soldiers. He had what we would diagnosis today as TBI and PTSD. None the less, he volunteered to return to the front in 1917. He was killed in 1918, one week before the Armistice was signed. He was 25.
​

Dulce et Decorum est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

By

Dancing the Hora

A blur.

​We roar around the circle; strangers, family, friends, arms around shoulders, ties undone, dresses flashing, flushed faces, singing and laughing, my nephew and his bride right there, celebrating this moment of all moments. A big Jewish, Ukrainian, Irish, African American, American wedding: My family.

A lifetime ago when I was a dancer, we’d be in rehearsal or on stage, all of us, when we would forget we were dancers and just dance with abandon, big circles of us to the music of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Copland’s Rodeo. Bright faces, colored lights, sweat flying and the joy of humans dancing.

These moments are connected for me.

The physical act of dancing transported us. This is what dance is supposed to do. We were not just struggling artists, we were not just a wedding party, we were all part of a larger universe of us: Humans, dancing. We were connected to the First Tribes, who danced before there was a name for it.

Can you imagine us, pounding our feet in the dirt, faces glowing in the fire underneath comets, bursting novas and stars? Can you imagine?

I can. I don’t need to eat. I just need to keep spinning in that circle of us, dancing with tears in my eyes. Nor do I need to sleep, the radiance of the people around is enough for me.

This is what transcendence feels like. We lose ourselves. We no longer experience ourselves through the lens of self-awareness or self-pity. We stop thinking about how we look and whether we fit in. We are in the circle of dancers and that’s enough.

But transcendence is temporary. Life is hard, there is suffering and pain. People leave us, punching holes in our spirits. We can be ground down by the daily inanity.

Sadness can envelope us and loneliness can eat at our souls. We want to exhume ourselves from sadness. Sometimes we just don’t know how. So we dance.

Thirty years after my sister Katie died, I felt the need to dance. I was thirty-six. Alone, through the entire house I flung myself around until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to paint my face in the ancient Celtic way and be violent for a night, smashing all that I could find in that rage-against-the-young-dying. But I danced until I fell to the floor and slept.

Even dancing alone, I felt connected, in John Dunne’s words, “a part of the main.” I was just one more human, one more of the billions of us that are and have been, experiencing and expressing humanness by dance.

The Hora. The Circle. Arms around each other. Moving slow, moving faster, flying now, clinging to each other, spinning, laughing, crying and holding tightly to each other. Don’t let go. Never let go. We face the universe; cold, frightening and mysterious, and we dance…