Fighting Fires

Our patient was eighty-nine-years old with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a progressive, incurable neurologic disease.

For our patient, maybe twenty years ago, it began with a small tremor in his hand. But now it had rendered him helpless. Helpless: completely dependent on others for survival; you can’t feed yourself, clean yourself or move without assistance.

It doesn’t matter if you were once a powerful CEO, or a hard-core individualist—diseases like Parkinson’s don’t discriminate.

The page went out as a “public assist call.” His wife needed our help to lift him off the toilet and back in to his bed.

Let me stop here. If you’re young, busy with life and work and you think, “I don’t want to hear about lifting a patient off a toilet, this has no relevance to me,” please think again.

Why? Each of us, in our turn will likely play one of these roles. We will need to be lifted and cradled like a child, or we will be the care-giver, the lifter, the caller to the fire department because we simply do not have the strength. O’ my friends who believe themselves unique, immortal and indestructible: it’s immutable truth; all living things are vulnerable, even you.

When our patient was in his thirties I’m sure he was well over six feet tall. There were pictures of him in the hallway, portraits of an active and vibrant man. He was still taller than me, but now he’d atrophied down to, at best, one hundred pounds.

He had lost control of his bowels and bladder. It’s the natural progression, part of the disease. His wife profusely apologized for the mess and the smell, but we told her there was no need. We should stop pretending. This is who we all will become. We will lose control of our very basic functions, we will cede control of ourselves to others.

He was sitting on the toilet facing us. Our first task was to lift him, turn him and sit him in his wheel chair.

Did you know that we now have archeological evidence that suggests that 40,000 years ago, our ancestral tribes were taking care of the elderly and weak? At first glance, from an evolutionary point of view that doesn’t make sense. Why not cull the weak and injured? But there is a deeper evolutionary drum beat. The impulse to care for the tribe and even the most vulnerable is the glue that allowed us to survive.

I squatted down in front of him and lifted his arms around my shoulders. I reached around his back and hugged him. Then I stood up with him in my arms. We stood there for a minute finding our balance, holding on to each other. I murmured the words of every firefighter or medic ever in this situation, “I got you, I’m not going to let you fall.”

His chin was resting on my shoulder, I felt his breath and beard against my neck. My partner that day, Terry, reached in and repeated, “We got you, we’re going to take care of you.”

We gently maneuvered him to his wheelchair and then slowly rolled him down the hall and lifted him into his bed. His wife continued to clean him and thanked us again. He smiled and then closed his eyes and slept.

Walking out of their house I felt content. It was such a little thing, a public assist call, helping a very sick man back into bed. But in that hour or so, I forgot all my problems and pains, all my worries. During that hour we were doing the most important work any of us can do—caring for someone else.

“We got you” is our slang for this. The desire to help is core to our identity as firefighters. The adrenaline addiction to big fires wears off eventually. But that impulse to say, “we got you, we’re going to take care of you” endures. Diving in with our hands and hearts, diving in to the mess of us, vulnerable, needy and helpless is, as it always has been, the essence of being human.

Sheila and I walked up to our engine, grabbed SCBAs and tools and headed up the driveway to the fire. It was a fully involved house; dark smoke was rolling out of windows, doors and the eves. The garage had collapsed and flames were barreling out where the roof used to be.

We walked up to our Chief, Jed, to get an assignment. As we watched, Dan, my best friend on the department, and a crew forced open the front door, got down on their knees and, hauling a hose line, crawled into the smoke.

Jed pointed to Sheila, “Second line in!”

He pointed to me. “Second 360. Let me know about exposures!”

Just then, we all heard a “Whumph!” The garage walls bulged out and a second column of smoke rose in the air. We all flinched. I ducked. Drums of paint thinner had exploded inside the garage.

Another day, another fire.

Dan and his crew made it out with no scratches. We fought the fire for another couple of hours and finally knocked it down. A typical fire: a few moments of adrenaline-fueled excitement followed by slogging hard work.

But this blog is about bravery

Dan and his crew going into a burning house is what we generally call heroic bravery. Putting your life at risk to save someone. Now, every firefighter I know will also say that the act of going into a burning building is not necessarily heroic, it’s what he/she is trained to do. Years of practice, experience, knowledge and mentoring reduce what we perceive as the risks. We know how to rescue ourselves if required, and we know that there are other firefighters who will let very little stop them to save us if we need help.

Strangely to many, we also enjoy it.

But heroic bravery is not something that the vast majority of us first-world civilians need to call upon. In a sense, civilization is designed so that we don’t have to use heroic courage (for better or for worse).

There is another kind of courage that we need daily, minute-by-minute in our lives: the bravery to accept life on its terms, with no illusions. To accept life for what it is and then get on with this glorious, miraculous adventure called being alive.

Physicists like to talk about the rules of the universe. For example, you can’t exceed the speed of light or go back in time.

I submit for us there are also universal rules that we need to accept as humans.

• First, life is short and we will die.
• Second, we are not in control. We can influence our lives, but we can’t control them. Uncertainty is baked into this cake.
• Third, and we see this on the Fire Department routinely, everyone you love is subject to the same rules. No one is protected. This is a hard truth, but a truth nonetheless.
• Finally, for all we humanize it to be, the universe is an indifferent and immutable place. It doesn’t care whether we succeed or fail, live or die. It is not coming to the rescue. We are responsible for ourselves.

Accepting all of this and then getting on with living requires bravery: the willingness not to collapse into nihilism or see life as meaningless.

This brings us back to firefighters. Firefighters do things other people regard as brave. Why? Because they train, practice, know how to minimize risk and they take care of each other. They have experience in dealing with fires, big and small, and catastrophes. As a result, they are not often brought to their knees by the stuff that happens. They are able to continue to function and carry on.

Here is what I’ve learned: We are all capable of carrying on and being brave in our own lives; we have the opportunity to train and to work at being braver every day.

Think about it: Every day we can try, push, fail, start again, get up, speak, not quit. Speak even though your voice shakes. Tell someone you love them. Tell someone you don’t. Challenge ideas. Ask questions. Ask another question. Question authority. Enjoy being the challenger of the status quo. Why not? Don’t take the first, second or third “no” for the end of it. Try something new. Break habits. Go on a road trip. Go camping. Quit a job to feel that sense of freedom and terror all at once. Refuse to be bored. Sing in public. Refuse to be silent. Live every day as large as you possibly can.

In acting brave every day, in dealing with our fears head on, we become a little braver and a little more able to live life on its terms with no illusions.

Firefighters learn to be brave; it is what we expect of ourselves. As individuals, out in the big and dark universe, we need to expect the same of ourselves: Be brave.

Laurie wanted to talk about my truck.

“Your Suburban is a piece of crap … We should sell it.”

I shook my head. I loved that truck, so I said: “But…”

Laurie raised her hand.

“Reeeee!” My pager vibrated. “Hondo, structure fire, mutual aid for El Dorado. Flames showing.”

Me: “Gotta go!”

A difficult conversation avoided. A few minutes later, driving my beat-up but sturdy Suburban in the general direction of the fire, I heard on my Fire Department radio, “the garage is fully involved, twenty foot flames and black smoke. House is evacuated. White smoke in house.”

I parked a block away, pulled my gear bag out of the back, kicked off my shoes and bunkered up: pants, jacket and helmet. I grabbed my fire axe and a medical bag.

Mike, another Hondo veteran had parked next to me and repeated the same practiced routine. Between the two of us, Mike and I had forty years of firefighting experience. We were both in our sixties but neither of us was thinking of retiring. We still loved the problems of fire.

We moved quickly into the tight group around the Chief. In an average house fire, the fire doubles its size every minute until it runs out of fuel—the fuel being the entire house.

The Chief yelled to us over the roar of the garage fire. “The garage is gone. Gas and electric are turned off. We’re going to set up a fan and send a crew through the front door. Push any fire back towards the garage.”

“You four are the entry team. Two in, two out.” the Chief nodded at a group of El Dorado firefighters.

He looked at Mike and me, “I need you guys to stand by. Cool?”

Stand by. We were okay with that. In our world “stand by” doesn’t mean “do nothing.” I’ve done everything on standby at a fire: fight the fire, run an engine, fix tools, get pizza, hold a terrified dog.

Standing by means, to me: “be at the ready to be useful, because we’re gonna need your help.”

I love that word, “useful.” It’s not a big headline word like “success” or “purpose” or “power.” It’s simple and practical. We’re helping solve someone else’s problem. I hold a door open for a stranger, I listen to my daughter talk about school, I restock the med unit, I pick up tools on the fire ground. Simple stuff, but useful.

For the rest of that morning, we let the young guys take the front lines. Later we cut trenches on the roof to survey the inside of the house, checking for heat with a thermal imaging camera. Finally, that day, “useful” meant salvage: hauling wet, burnt, black and twisted junk out of the garage.

By the end, we were exhausted, dehydrated and hungry. But there were fist bumps all around. We’d helped save a home and we proved yet again that, though we might not be young, agile and strong, we were up to task.

It’s a powerful feeling to be useful, and being a firefighter has given me a simple mantra, a thought to rise with each morning: “allow me to useful one more day.”

If being happy and fulfilled is the goal, being useful is the path. Think about any day and the opportunities to be useful: to help, to fix, to explain, to walk with, to make someone smile, to solve a problem, to read to, to hold, to carry, to drive and to listen.

I drove home after the fire and pulled into the garage. I turned off the engine and the suburban shuddered a few times before it stilled. It was an old truck.

Laurie stood there, arms crossed and smiling. She laughed as I, stiff and sore, got out of the truck and limped towards the house. She was a retired firefighter so she knew why I was smiling; she knew the feeling of being useful.

She hugged me and whispered in my ear, “I guess you and that truck have a few more years left in you.”

We’re in our station. It’s May in the mountains and it’s snowing. Not just snow, but hail and rain in a band a half mile wide. It only takes a few minutes to get four inches deep.

We all know what’s going to happen next, but we’re shocked by where it happens. Right behind our station, a big SUV slides off the interstate at high speed and rolls multiple times down the arroyo.

We quickly shake off our surprise and move into our practiced routine. Two of us go out the station’s back door to do a size-up and the rest bunker up and head for the trucks.

I jog to the crash and get there in time to see the small trees that have taken the impact of the SUV still quivering.

But here is what strikes me.

Within minutes, a dozen people show up—I don’t even know where they come from—all there to help; a couple of cowboys, a guy in a suit and a young girl slide down the arroyo towards the crash. The crashed SUV is packed with kids, jammed up against each other. It’s on its side, propped up on the slope against small piñons. It’s precarious but this group of Samaritans is determined to help the family out of the car. The young girl crawls on her knees through the mud and slush, through the window and into the car to help those trapped inside.

A few minutes later the rest of our department arrives with our gear, our training and the experience of hundreds of these kinds of crashes. Everyone is extricated and all are fine.

But the image of all those strangers who, without qualm or doubt, came to help is what’s burned in my memory.

Nothing ignites our spirits more than watching individuals come to the aid of strangers, despite risk, despite harm.

We so badly need this inspiration! Daily we are inundated, beaten down by news that traverses the path from the cynical to the horrific, from the selfish to the gaudy. Our brains, evolved over millennia to interpret all “news” as local and tribal are now flooded with the images and voices of banality, harm and evil that come at us through our screens. The screens tell us that athletes and media stars are heroes. The screens tell us of obscure dangers and tell us to be afraid. It warps our perception. We wonder whether the world is devoid of good and of courage.

And then a bunch of strangers slide down a snowy slope to help at a car crash.

I should tell you, this happens all the time. I’ve seen:

• a guy in a suit stop his car, run over to help us and hold the head of a man—with a broken neck—in an overturned car while we completed an intubation.
• an older man, a neighbor, go up and down a rocky trail at night multiple times to help us locate a body, and then help us carry it out.
• an off-duty nurse, first on scene, crouch in the mud to comfort a trapped driver.

And I am inspired.

The word inspire means to “breathe in.” In these moments we “breathe in” this larger sense of who we are.

And I believe we are large, we are courageous and helpful. We are often just untested. Yet our test will come; it’s one promise the universe always keeps. We will come to the aid of another, or fight cancer, or care for the dying, or stand in a room, voice shaking, and speak to the powerful.

The Fire Department proves this to me. It’s an ironic vocation. On one hand we often exist in soul-wrenching darkness, surrounded by sadness. Yet the twist is there are angels who fly down slopes to help, who crawl on their bellies in the mud to whisper, “I am here, I want to help.”

The blessing of being a firefighter is that we see this and are inspired daily. I can’t imagine living in a world where I never hear the most spiritually powerful words in any language: “Can I help?”

To the acquaintance in the line at the grocery store:

You shook your head and asked me, “Did you hear about those poor kids in the crash?”

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I was holding the head of the girl in the backseat. The driver was dead in the front seat. 

A woman with a Santa Fe Fire Department jacket stuck her head in the window.

“Are you a paramedic?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said. “What do you need?”

My gloves were bloody, and there was a long cut on this teenager’s head. The list of things I needed at this point would’ve taken hours to go through. But I knew I didn’t have time for that.

“The driver’s dead, and the front passenger was ejected. This girl needs to be extricated. I need a board, collar and O2. And someone needs to find the front passenger.”

“Got it,” she said calmly. Like ordering lunch. Like it was her tenth crash that night. “I’ll be right back.”

The girl in my arms moaned, “what happened?”

“You’ve been in a crash,” I said. “My name’s Hersch, I’m with the fire department.”

Then I heard the extrication crew. The hydraulics starting up.

“We’re going to cover you up, Hersch! Here’s a blanket!”

Someone threw a blanket over the girl and me to protect us from breaking glass. The blanket muffled all the sounds.

“What happened?” she cried again. “Is anybody else hurt? Fuck, my head…”

I heard the glass on the window shatter. There was the crunching of metal as the crew began prying the door off.

“I got ya,” I told the girl. “The door’s all smashed in, so we need to take it off. A few minutes and we will have you out of here.”

I heard the woman paramedic I had spoken to earlier: “Your patient is number two. We’ve got number one and we’re going lights and sirens to St. V’s.”

The blanket came off.  The backdoor was gone. A board slid in.

“Let’s take her head first!” someone suggested.

I grabbed her legs and we slowly pivoted her around and got her on the board. She grabbed my arm.

“We gotcha,” I said, “We gotcha!”

Then someone grabbed the board; I was still holding her head. A minute later we were at the Med unit, brightly lit up inside with its big rear doors open. I let go of her as two EMTs slid her into the back. The door closed and they were gone.

I squatted down and watched the rig take off, lights flashing and siren echoing off the hills.

“Yeah,” I said to you. “It really sucks.”

The page came in: “9 Echo. Infant.”

A “9 echo” means a cardiac arrest. I threw on a Fire Department t-shirt and jogged out the door to my truck.

I felt dread. I visualized infant CPR. I hoped that I wouldn’t be first on scene. I drove fast, replaying “​9 Echo. Infant,” in my mind. That’s all the

information we had. Was it a traumatic arrest? SIDS? A newborn?

A few minutes later I heard 911 dispatch back on the radio: “Baby now has a pulse of 150!”

I muttered to myself, “Come on, baby! Come on!”

I drove up a wet and winding mountain road, and then descended into the little village. Parking on the road, I jogged down the dirt driveway to join the crew on scene. Two other firefighters arrived at the same time and ran with me.

Excited dogs barked and nipped at us. The sheriff pulled up. The medic who arrived first popped his head out the door, relief on his face. “Baby’s fine. Pulseless when he was delivered. Doing good now. Waiting for the placenta. Midwife is here.”

Midwife? I thought. ​It was a birth?

All of us tried to pretend we were “cool,” but there were big smiles all around.

Another firefighter and I sat on the porch and calmed the dogs. Even though it was late on a snowy night at the end of April, I didn’t want to leave.

We’d gone from dread to determination to relief in a few moments. I suddenly began to feel the exaltation of a birth. I hadn’t even been in the room, but the sense of a newborn emanated out of the little house. I just wanted to sit on that porch for a few more minutes and let it wash over me.

New life. If you allow it in, it’s primal feeling. Wet, bloody, painful, fragile and single-minded. It hung there on a thread between the extraordinary promise of life and the abyss. This time, life was chosen. “I am!” the little voice cried out. “I am!” And I just wanted bask in that sound for a moment.

A few weeks later, another medic and I were talking in our noisy station, firefighters laughing, talking and checking equipment. He had been in the room with the baby. We talked about that birth and the others we’d been on over the years.

“It balances the scales,” he said. “All the stuff we see. . .” his voice trailed off.

“A healthy baby balances years of the horror we see.”

I nodded. It was true.

I thought about my family’s favorite movie line, from the first Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.”

I think that is what we mean. The cry, “I am” from a newborn is life one more time finding a way. It’s all around us all the time. It’s truly miraculous when we stop, look and listen. Life is all around us finding ways.

My medic friend, who can be taciturn, was smiling. He still had that inexplicable feeling of lightness that comes at a birth, when life triumphs yet again.

And I thought that although death is ever-present for our vocation, life is the most powerful force on our planet.

“I am” cried the newborn.

“I am!”