Gator Bait

               After four adventure-filled days on the road we arrived at the small town of Fargo, Georgia. We took our strike team of engines to the base camp and checked in. We found out we would be pulling night shift. Night shift. In the Okefenokee Swamp. Understand; we are all hardy Montana boys used to the woods, bugs, bears, etc. But this is a swamp. Swamps are, by nature, very, very scary. And spooky. Well, we thought, at least we will be in our engines patrolling the fire, close to friends and safety.

                We head over to our briefing and are immediately met by a fellow named Everett. But we are to call him Earl. We didn’t get it either. Now, Earl was a very nice guy. He had a very weak chin and maybe ten teeth left. He had sores on his arms that the omnipresent gnats were always bothering at. He spoke with what you might euphemistically call a southern drawl. He was, and I’m sure still is, a walking cliché for all things southern.

Everett/Earl says, “Okay, I’ma send summa you boys out patrollin the swamp roads lookin fer far (fire?). I’ma need one engine to head down at t’boardwalk to run a pump.”  After we interpreted his words we realized that one of the two most experienced engine bosses would have to do this solo job. Guess who’s one of the two most experienced engine bosses in this strike team? Moi. Guess who can’t rochambeau for shit? Moi. This job would involve keeping a water pump running through the night. This pump was attached to a sprinkler system that was plumbed to protect the Stephen F. Foster State Park and the boardwalk that extends into the woods that surround the buildings. Stephen F. Foster State Park is in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp. The pump sucks water out of the swamp and sprays it on the buildings and boardwalk. The pump, we will later discover, sits at water level on a small boat ramp. In the water there are gators. Gators will eat you.



Hungry fella?



 Everett/Earl looks at me and says, “Now, I don’t want yew out on that boardwalk in the dark. Been a big ol’ gator walkin ‘round on that thing at night. Gator can run thirty-five mile an hour and that’s a whole lot faster’n you. Y’hear?”

Me: “So we’re going to be out in the dark by ourselves in the swamp?”

Earl: “Yep. Y’all head out there and I’ll meet ya after a while.”

Me: “Holy Shit.”

Let's throw that guy in.

          We say our goodbyes and wonder if we will have time to tell our relatives we love them before gators eat us. When we get to the park, we see that the pump sits on a pond about 1/3 the size of a football field. With great trepidation we near the pond and start counting gators. I think we saw three or four right away. The fire is very quiet at this time, and there is still some daylight so we decide to check out the boardwalk. We grab Pulaski’s, not to fight fire, but to irritate gators while they eat us. The boardwalk leaves the pond at a right angle through a very spooky forest of live oak and cypress trees. In this swampy forest live snakes, bugs, and alligators who all have joined together to ravage us. We go about ten feet, look at one another, and as manfully as possible, we fall back to the safety of our engine. Everett/Earl eventually shows up and it is decided that the fire will not approach us tonight. Therefore, the pump need not be run. Therefore, we may survive the night.

                Once it is fully dark the swamp explodes with sound. Bugs, frogs, gators, and skunk apes meld their voices into a cacophony we couldn’t imagine. Literally, we had to shout to be heard.



The Skunk Ape

 The good news is, with all that sound we won’t hear things sneaking up on us in the night. Since we have little to do I arrange it so two guys can sleep while the third patrols the area. I take the first shift. As I’m walking along my headlamp is reflected by dozens of pairs of tiny eyes on the roadway near the pond. Turns out they belong to cute little toads and frogs. These I can deal with. As I bend to pick one of the croaking cuties up I am struck by the realization that these are probably deadly poisonous. Awesome. After about fifteen minutes of racking my brain for the characteristics of poisonous amphibians, I realize that I don’t know shit about poisonous amphibians.

               

I gently pick one up with my tool and look it over. It looks just like the toads I used to play with growing up in Iowa. As I’m holding this little guy a thought occurs to me: I wonder if gators like to eat frogs? Now, we had been told over and over not to feed the gators. They get spoiled and so forth. But this is natural, right? Gators prey on frogs. It’s not like a Moon Pie or something. With a quick glance I make sure no one is watching and I toss the frog into the pond. He lands right in front of a big gator and proceeds to swim right up to the side of its mouth. At which point the gator consumes natures little treat. Of course I sprint to the engine and roust the boys to show them.

We may or may not have spent the rest of the night looking for frogs.

                                        

The End of the Season

Hey all, sorry about no posts for a while. Fire season 2011 is hanging on till the bitter end. On October 1st we had a fire near Unionville, just south of Helena. I was the incident commander, and I was not expecting to fight fire on October 1st. Okay, we think, now we're done right? Incorrect. We met October 3rd fighting a fire east of Montana City called the Haystack Fire. We wound up spending the night on this one. Normally, this would have been fun. The thirty mile-an-hour winds made it a little difficult to sleep. 

Lately we have been tidying up around the station: taking gear off engines, draining water from the tanks, winterizing, completing paperwork for our seasonals, etc.

I feel sort of ambivalent this time of year. On the one hand, this has been a pretty busy season for us. We had local fires in March, went to Colorado in April, conducted training throughout May and June, went to Georgia and Florida in June/July, and had a more fires around here into October. I am tired of fire for a little while.

On the other hand, the summer is a very fun time. All our seasonal firefighters are working and in general we have more fun than people should be allowed to have. So, while the pace slows up in the fall and winter, it gets a little lonely staring at my counterpart Andy all day. Plus, we lose people every year to new jobs, full time work and such. You miss these people a lot. We share a lot of laughs, and we have bonds formed by mutual participation in shitty work. An example: My buddy Chris and I spent a few days of our roll to Colorado digging out stumps that had burned deep into the ground. The fire just keeps smoldering away at the root systems and every root has to be followed, excavated, and extinguished. Every wildland firefighter has done this, and it sucks.

                     Here is Chris in one of our excavations.

Yep, having a ton of fun.

At the end of this shift we hiked up to the top of the hill and regrouped before hiking out to the rigs. While we sat around munching on the last bits of our lunch, which that day had bagels and cream cheese, someone had the great idea to see how much cream cheese a person could eat. Apparently, I was the "person". So, as firefighters are wont to do, we haggled for a while and settled on an agreement. I would fill my mouth with as many packages of cream cheese as I could, and would then have 60 seconds to swallow it without hurling cream cheese all over the mountain. I agreed to a price of $45 for my fee and began taking on cream cheese. Once my mouth was full they made me put in about two more packets worth, and the clock began ticking. And Steve began gagging. Have you ever tried to swallow cream cheese? Don't. Well, I managed to overcome millenia of deeply ingrained biological reflexes and I won the bet. $45 later, and that much closer to an early heart attack, we hiked back to the trucks. You see, its these kinds of impulsive things that make digging stumps fun. If we didn't do this we would go crazy.

Here are a few pics I took in 2007. They are from the McKnight Fire near Dillon, MT. They have no relevance to the current article, but they are cool pictures. Plus, its my blog.

 

Traveling to the Fire in Georgia, Dodging Tornados in Iowa.

On June 19 of this year (Father’s Day) we received an order for five engines to drive to Georgia to fight fire in the Okefenokee Swamp. The dads among us kissed our wives and kids goodbye, and we all headed to the southeast. There were 17 people, 5 engines, and 1 support truck. We made it from Helena to Rapid City the first night. Our plan was to spend the next night in Kansas City. First, we had to make it through Iowa; the Hawkeye State, the state in which I was born and raised. You can imagine my excitement at the prospect of showing off my home state to our crew of Montanans. Things were going great; corn, rolling hills, rivers, corn. Then we hit the little town of Shelby. Its ok, I didn’t know there was a Shelby either. Our radios began to go crazy with emergency broadcast service tornado warnings and other sorts of doom and gloom. It made sense; the sky was becoming darker by the minute. We stopped for gas and noticed what I like to call a “roach motel”. There was also a Dairy Queen and a local restaurant nearby.

The leader of our group ran over to make arrangements with the motel. They had something like six rooms available, so that was going to make for an interesting night of bonding for some of us. We drove over to the motel just as the front was approaching. Those of you who have experienced severe thunderstorms in the Midwest know that they are spectacular. There were flashes of lightning, the wind was ripping, and you could see the edge of the storm very distinctly, roiling about 500 feet above us. Some of us were doing fine, snapping pictures and shooting video. Others were making quick mental calculations as to how they could fit three people in one bathtub and survive on the second story of an old motel.

While some individuals were getting footage, the old lady running the joint says, “What are you guys doing out there?” One of our crew, who shall remain nameless, said, “Well, what are we supposed to do?” “Well I wouldn’t be standing out in the yard like a dumb ass.” An old lady called a strapping, professional Montana firefighter a dumb ass. As we were snickering at this exchange, her statement was somehow translated to: “Take shelter NOW! The tornado is here. You are going to die!” So we did what anyone would do. We ran. Fast.

Ever seen a group of dumb-assed firefighters trying to look cool and nonchalant while running from a tornado? Well, I have. You could even say I lived it. Not my proudest day on the job. As we neared shelter we began to realize that she did in fact say “dumb ass”, and not, “run for your lives”.

We went back to looking cool and nonchalant.

Next time we will continue the journey south toward Georgia, and talk about the importance of having safe-words.

About the Title, Floods, and MLK Jr.

So, why did I choose the title “Walking Through Fire”? Certainly not because it’s some heroic thing firefighters do. No, usually we are very unheroically digging in the dirt. I chose the title from Isaiah 43:2.  

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they will not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched,
Nor will the flame burn you. (NASB)

God is speaking here to the Israelites who are being persecuted. He is reminding them that he has promised redemption, and he will not leave them. I think this is an appropriate passage for us today. I have often thought we are very much like the Israelites. God has promised us the best things, as long as we do some things in return. Chief among these is loving God, and loving your neighbor. This is the Ten Commandments in a nutshell. However, like the biblical people of Israel, we choose to not uphold our end of the deal. And here we are today.

When we were helping out with the flooding this spring we came to a woman’s house, right in the worst part of the floodwaters. We waded over to her house and we could see the basement was completely full of water. It was certainly the worst house we saw that day. We started to put a plan in motion to begin sandbagging and pumping the water out of her basement. She just looked at us and said, “It’s ok, it’s too late for my house. Take those and help my neighbors.” It was pretty neat, what she did. The whole flood experience was really something. We stood alongside old and young, high school and college sports teams, volunteer firefighters. Nobody complained, we just looked at each other and knew we were doing something special. We were probably the only people there getting paid. Even this had a limit. After the first day we were told we would get no compensation for the hours we worked after five o’clock. Fine, we said. We went back out for two more days and worked as long as we were needed. We didn’t complain; we just helped. It was a situation where we just did the work because people needed help. It’s amazing, but those devastating situations bring out the best in people. In a time of what often seems like widespread despair, it was really a moment of hope.

I am reminded of what Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others endured in the fifties and sixties in the U.S. Do you know how they overcame their persecution? They joined together, bonded by a common struggle and a common goal, and, using the same nonviolent resistance utilized by Gandhi against the British in India, they bought their freedom from oppression. They didn’t war against their country; they didn’t sit in their houses and complain; they acted. What’s the point? If we are not happy with our condition, or the way things are, all we have to do is act. I realize this is very different than a flood, but the point is the same: People in times of hardship or persecution can accomplish whatever they want to.

If you never have, even if you have before, I encourage you to read some Martin Luther King, Jr. Read I Have a Dream, read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, read I See the Promised Land, the speech he gave the day before he was killed.

Ok, so I may have rambled a little, but I will leave you with a quote:

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi

What am I doing here?

Welcome to my first foray into blogging. I don’t know what I’m doing. Can everyone see this ok?

Kidding aside, I’m here for a couple of reasons. I have a pretty interesting job as a wildland firefighter. It is not necessarily a unique, exclusive, or overly frightening job. But I have had the pleasure to experience some pretty interesting things on this job. There have been days I wouldn’t wish this job on anyone, but other times I wouldn’t trade it. I have also been scared out of my wits, usually by my own doing. The point: I have a lot of stories to tell. Many of them are funny, some are tragic. I think many of them are worth sharing.

Another reason for this blog is my experience with philosophy and theology. I have degrees in both, but I consider myself a student still. I like to dialogue about matters religious, philosophical, political, etc. I also love books and movies that make me feel something and I want to write about them too.

I also have the pleasure to be married to a great wife (coincidentally, she has the pleasure to be married to me because, well, never mind). We have four wonderful children. Wonderful. But, well, challenging. Who doesn’t want to read about me removing the toilet from the floor to find it jammed with Lego’s?

I was planning to start this blog at the beginning of this fire season and kind of give you a day by day or week by week account of what my experiences were, etc. However, in my typical fashion I have waited till the end of fire season, so now I must regale you with tales of fires past. However, fear not, gentle reader.

We had a lot of unique experiences on the crew this year. The fire season started with the crew filling sandbags and trying to hold back floodwaters. Not exactly our forte, but hey, we do what we can. After that most of us went to Florida and Georgia to fight fires in the Okefenokee Swamp. (Note to self: Never do that again). Eventually our fire season kicked off in Montana and we had a pretty decent year overall. As a side note, I feel compelled to warn you that I ate about half a pound of mayonnaise for fifty bucks a while ago, so I may not be able to blog too much before my health fails (Note to self: See above).

Stick with me, more to come.