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Red lights, Sirens and Sweat Editor’s Note: ninetyandnine.com is happy to share an exclusive book excerpt from Firework, by firefighter/paramedic, and regular contributor, Stuart D. Kent. The book is available September 11, 2003. In these opening pages, Kent shows what goes on in the heart and spirit of a Christian firefighter.
I must be crazy, a fireman that is, running inside burning houses while everyone else, including the roaches, runs out. I’m the guy who puts out fires. I live and work in Macon, Georgia. I’ll tell you how I got here, but first I have to go on a call. When the bell rang a few seconds ago, I only hovered a few inches above my chair before my brain remembered to set down the cup of coffee I just poured, and get on the fire truck. I learned to walk to the truck instead of running, in order to avoid broken bones or pushing my hand through the glass door on my way out, which causes too much blood and paperwork to flow. Today, it’s a “10-17” fire call, fire on Monday morning. Morning usually brings a heart attack call, but not a fire call, especially not a working fire. So I quick-dress in turnout gear the way the captain taught me to in training, and climb on the truck. The house address is only a few blocks away in the Fort Hill section of East Macon. We can see the column of smoke rising behind the old historic fort when we turn the corner onto Emery Highway, hanging off the side of Engine One like farm boys on a hay wagon. The air horn bellows, the siren screams and the red lights paint a wide path through the cars. The truck, like a red rodeo bull, stampedes through traffic. We see the flames licking under the front porch, and Jim-Bob whoops out a rebel yell. We roar past the house in order to catch the plug, the stench of smoke in my nose. I jump off the truck at the corner and wrap the four-inch supply line around the plug; Grit turns the truck around and heads back to the house with the flames. The truck snorts off, dropping the hose in the street like cooked spaghetti noodles from the pot. Plop, plop, plop. I hook up the supply line and wait for Grit to signal a quick blast on the truck’s air horn before I crank the hydrant open with my plug wrench. The horn blasts out a long, solitary note. I spin the plug wrench and water fills the hose and transforms it into one long flexed muscle. With fifty pounds of firefighting gear and airpack strapped on, I jog back the one city block to the burning house. I feel like an astronaut bounding across the moon in slow motion. Old folks in rocking chairs stare at me as I jog past. When I arrive at the house, I strap on the airmask, twist the tank valve, and cool air rushes through the tube every time I suck in a breath. Following the attack hose-line in the front door, I crawl underneath the heat and charcoal-black smoke. After a few feet of crawling in the cave-like blackness, I bump into a wall of legs. Three or four firemen are standing here talking calmly (“It sure is dark in here”), as if they were passing around popcorn before the movie starts. Jim-Bob put out the fire earlier with a charged inch-and-three-quarter hose-line, but the smoke is still trapped inside. I stand up and stumble down what must be the hallway until I’m at the back door. I hear several muffled voices yelling behind me so I turn around and find the kitchen and a window. I fumble with the window lock using my thick rawhide gloves and push up the smoke-yellowed sash. The instant I smash the window screen out with my fist, I hear a siren, or perhaps a woman screaming a very long scream. Maybe because I’m standing in her kitchen, stumbling over her pots and pans. I want to escape the screams and scorn of the woman whose house I invaded. I clomp back outside, out the front door and discover the purpose for the screams: a large blackened man, shirtless and still. Jim-Bob dragged him out of the house. He’s dead all right, lying on the patch of brown grass between the front porch and the street. Grit is squeezing on the ambu-bag trying to push air and life into the man’s parched lungs, while Jim-Bob slaps two sticky defibrillator pads on the chest and starts CPR, trying to push death back out of him. I figured I had walked right past the man in the smoky house, crumpled up next to the hot water heater in the kitchen. It was probably his final voyage to the kitchen for a pot full of water to splash on the blaze in his front bedroom before the smoke got him. The ambulance pulls up fresh from the hospital, and paramedics sling the man onto their stretcher and whisk him away. The idea is to turn the patient quickly over to a higher power: from fireman to paramedic to nurse to doctor to coroner to mortician to God. I was warned in training not to give high fives to other firemen after the fire is out, but I do it anyway. The general public does not understand why firemen would be happy at such a moment as this. But we put out the fire and did it right, which is cause to celebrate. Since the fun part is over, my adrenaline high slows down. After the crowd of fire tourists dwindles, the smoke clears, and we catch our breath, and the family reunion begins, a fireman reunion. We talk, swap news and war stories, and carefully shovel burnt stuff out the front bedroom window onto the driveway below. I inventory the burnt items: one bed, one chair, three dressers full of clothes, eight pairs of shoes, seven stacks of laundry, nine pieces of four-by-eight-foot paneling, a lawnmower, a Bible, a human being. The arson investigator later tells me it all started when a three-year-old boy found a cigarette lighter. We scoop up the remaining black sludge with horse manure shovels and sling it out the window on top of the other items, watching it fall and laughing as it splatters. Everything in the room is one color: burnt—except for a Bible. Grit holds it up like a trophy and says, “Look, the Bible never burns!” making eye contact with each fireman to see if any will challenge him. While shoveling, the story of our working fire unfolds as each fireman steps to the plate to tell his part in extinguishing the mighty blaze. Jim-Bob puts aside his normal shyness while performing instant replays of himself running down the shotgun hall spraying water with the inch-and-three-quarters. I tell my story: I turned on the plug. Before we leave, I walk back to the kitchen, over to the little window where I had pushed the screen out. I push it again, expecting to hear screams again. Nothing. I pull the screen in, sort of hoping everything will go in reverse and the dead will come back to life. I realize how fire allowed me full invasion of privacy to enter and search this little shotgun house, with an axe instead of a warrant. I think about how we found the dead man too late. And how I became better acquainted with the dead as I dumped all his personal bedroom belongings out the window with a shovel. We see closely how people live; we see closely how people die. I don’t think about getting hurt myself, or burned. I think of how my career as a fireman started less than a year ago. The first week of fire department training seems like yesterday, the week I met Joe (Training Captain), when I wanted to run away from Macon and family and this crazy job. Firework is available at www.fireworkseries.com.
ninetyandnine.com © 2003, Stuart D. Kent --------- Stuart D. Kent is a firefighter/paramedic with the Macon/Bibb County Fire Department, in Macon, Georgia. He will observe 9/11 with his wife, sons, cat, and hamster, but not necessarily in that order. |
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