NAKED AGGRESSION: Funny stuff on a funny call.

WOW! Blink too long in the blogosphere and a year goes by. No comment about timing. I just haven't been up to writing, so I haven't.

I was inspired to get back on the blogs by my niece, who set up a blog to document her trip to Spain this fall. I told her in an email that she should take a look at this, but that I hadn't updated in more than a year. I was thinking how lame or negligent that was, so I decided to post a tale of something that happened a few weeks ago on the streets of our little town. It was a good reminder that you can still be a hard-charging fireman, even if you aren't as young as you used to be, and in this story, I'm not talking about me.

It was a pretty normal day at duty. A couple of no-account calls, and nothing terribly exciting. After dinner, we were considering what to do to maintain staffing of our engine company and ladder truck, owing to late-day personnel shifts. The decision was sort of made for us when a call came in for our fire boat. The boat is kept in the water in a location remote from the firehouse, and our engine usually responds to the boat either to meet an operator or to form a crew. Boat calls are either extremely high acuity or total bullshit, usually trending toward bullshit. Steve, my former fireman/now my lieutenant, was literally walking out the door to cover another assignment, but before leaving quickly shifted people around to maintain coverage.

On the engine and going to the boat call was Dave (driver), my brother "J" (Officer), and a complete boot rookie whose name escapes me. On the ladder truck, staying home, was John (Driver, captain of ladder company), myself (officer- a nice tip-of-the-hat from the captain), and Gary, our solid-skilled firefighter. Thin crews, but legal. It would do. In a hasty conversation as the engine was going out the door, J and I discussed firming up riding assignments when the engine returned from the inevitably unfounded boat call. The engine left.

I grabbed a radio to listen to the boat call while I sat on a bench out front of the firehouse. As expected, the call turned out to be almost less than nothing. The engine was on their way back when we were dispatched to a house fire.

The fire was in our "first due" response area, which for the uninitiated simply means that the house was in the primary coverage area of our firehouse and our companies would ordinarily be dispatched first and arrive first at any sort of call to that area. The particular neighborhood for this dispatch is very well known to us, having been the site of many dozen fire incidents over the years. Guys in our company literally know how to get around these houses in complete darkness, just from seeing what floor plan they are walking into.

So, we load up on the the ladder truck and head out toward the fire. Based on the timing of the engine leaving the boat slip, I half expect that we on the ladder will be first on the scene. I plan accordingly, making sure that my gear is perfect, that I have all of my stuff ready to go, thinking about where to put the rig. John says to me as we load up that he knows the address and doesn't need me to look it up. That's fine with me, and from the provided cross streets, I can narrow it down to six houses. So, instead of reading the map, I'm checking my gear, dealing with my airpack, changing channels on my radio, doing horns and sirens, all at a rather leisurely pace.

J gets to the fire first. Not a total surprise, but not exactly what I expected. J, who invented the "iceman" form of radio-speak, marks on the scene in a perfectly flat and intentionally under-excited tone: "[unit] on the scene with a two-story Cape Cod, smoke showing from sides A, B and D, it'll be a working fire, we have our own water supply and will be advancing an attack line." So, it's totally on.

I shift gears from leisurely pace to "I'm going to be ready to go in the building when I step off the rig" mode. Accordingly, I put on my mask, pull on my hood, apply my helmet, get my gloves on, etc. All the while, I'm sort of looking down. As we pull onto the block, John asks me "Which one is it?", to which I respond, "I thought you fucking told me you knew exactly which one it is..." I look up and see a huge plume of long, white hair topping a guy doing the "round third" base coach arm swing and pointing down the street. I look around the corner, and I tell the captain "Oh, cap, it'll be that one over there that is on fire." We share a quick laugh. Dave and J left us a good spot in front of the house, and we pull in. I hop down from the rig and glance at the house, which I assess to be a "small deal", which is to say not the most serious fire ever. Here's where things get weird and funny.

As I'm walking up to the house, J is already inside and Dave is shoving a hose line at or through the front door. I finally look up at the porch, which is a 6x8 slab of concrete with two steps up to it, and flanking the sides of the door are two sort of fat, hairy old guys who I thought were naked. Both of them are bent over, with their hands on their knees, clearly out of breath and leaning back toward the door. I ran up on the porch, and I asked them if they were OK. The guy on the left stands up, puts his hand on my shoulder, and I recognize him as an older member of our company, a 35 or 40 year guy who lived at the firehouse for most of his adult life. I ask him again if he's alright, and it dawns on me from where we were that this might be his house. He takes in a deep breath and says "Matt, it's a kitchen fire, back right corner, on the stove top and probably behind it. I crawled in there with the garden hose, but it wasn't enough and I'm not sure I got it all." By now, I'm sort of laughing, at least on the inside. Here's this guy, mostly naked, taking one of those spiral self-retracting garden hoses into a house fire and trying to knock down a grease fire. Awesome. It gets better.

Bear in mind that I'm literally geared up to do structural firefighting. My man is mostly naked. The other mostly naked guy is also a long-serving member of the fire department, who helped with the initial garden hose attack. As I'm talking to the first guy, whom we shall call "Puddin'", a female police officer charges up to the little stoop we're standing on, smoke cranking out the door, and gets right in Puddin's ass in her exercise-of-authority voice about how he has to "get the fuck off the porch, NOW!". Puddin turns to her, in his unclothed glory, and calmly says, "Ma'am, I'm with the fire department.", to which the officer responded "Bull fucking shit you're with the fire department, get down off the goddamn porch!" So I lean in to her, through my mask, and say to her: "No, really, he is with the fire department". She gives me this incredulous look, and gave up on it. I wonder if she kisses her momma with that mouth.

Now I'm really chuckling. Those old knucklers crawled into this bullshit cracker box of a house and tried to put out the fire. I quickly realize that this is no place for naked dudes. It was smoky, and hot enough that I could perceive the temperature elevation in my gear. I found J in the kitchen putting out the remains of a stove-fire-gone-awry, which was exactly what our guys described. Short work. Gary and I did a quick search of the basement and two above-ground levels of the house and then vented the place. The smoke cleared quickly and once the work was done, we went back outside.

When we got outside and I got my bearings, I realized that the block we were on is a little enclave of homes where a bunch of our older members live. The big poof of white hair waving us in turned out to be yet another of our members (we'll call him "Bob"), who is a proud VietNam Vet and recently-retired government worker, who finally got to grow out his hair to its current glory. Puddin' and the other guy (whom we'll call Ed) were next door at Puddin's house and saw the fire start while they were in the backyard pool. It turned out that they weren't quite naked, but they both had on what I would describe as "questionably small" shorts. I asked Puddin, who was still huffing and puffing, if he was OK and what came over him. He simply said that he saw the fire, got the people out of the house, and noticed that the hose was just there and ready, so he thought he'd take a stab at it. By this point, J, Dave, Gary and I were all sitting there talking with the older guys, and I observed: "Once a member of this company, always a member of this company. Gear? We don't need no stinking gear! Shit, clothes? We don't need no stinking clothes! Give me a garden hose and a pair of underwear, and I'll put your fucking fire out! Woo-Hoo!"

The cop apologized, we all had a good laugh. It was sort of a short-form "survival breakfast" situation [See "survival breakfast" post]. It made me happy that our guys could do such a good job under impossible, if not embarrassing (em-bare-ass-ing?) conditions.

Maybe I can go another 20 years. Hmm. Whatever it was, it was good times.

I'll try not to go another year. If anyone is still out there, leave me a comment and I'll be encouraged to write more frequently.

DTXMATT12