Siftings
Apr
15
Quiet Time
County Highway CS west of the Hardees at the I90 Loves truck stop may seem an odd place to ponder late-stage capitalism. But I have some alone time and who knows how these ponderings begin. Maybe because the Hardees shoe-horned into the corner of Loves never registered with me before. The...
Apr
13
COMMS
What if The Replacements were not just the best band of all time -- too cool for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame -- but also ran an obscure firefighter t-shirt company? What if “Lights that flash in the evening” was not a lyric to Can’t Hardly Wait but was stenciled in a Swiss modernist font in white...
Mar
27
Couldn’t Not
I was once not embarrassed by something I wrote. There is a sentence in the Prairie Crossing Charter School chartering document -- dated July 4, 1998 -- that ends, “Prairie Crossing students will subtly but profoundly come to appreciate a very special place; the natural landscape of their youth.” ...
Mar
16
Loopy
Something’s been bugging me, so I did some spelunking. Not the traditional caving, because confined spaces and bats creep me out and I can never remember which ones are stalactites and which ones are stalagmites.
If spelunking is, “exploring wild, non-commercial caves, often involving...
Mar
10
IDLH
The Chief asks a question as we pass in the yard on his way to the house. I take the question to be rhetorical in nature but, just to be sure, I give him my best “I dunno” look. Not a great look, for a quite excellent question – how was there fire on both floors?
There’s a longer answer above...
Feb
05
Ink
I don’t hunt.
I don’t have a pickup truck.
I don’t have a mustache.
I don’t have a tattoo. Or several.
How I am a Wisconsin firefighter is anyone’s guess.
Some of my failures to conform are philosophical. Some practical. Some merely convenience.
Because I was put on Team Mammal,...
Jan
27
Slippery Slopes
Of all the icy slopes I have ascended, this one hardly registers as a slope. No crampons or ice axe needed. No pickets, no jumar, no rope. This is just a driveway.
But it is a long, sloping driveway at night, with ice and snow, running down to a house on the lake. A man in the lake house...
Jan
04
O Six Hundred
Six in the morning, Sunday. There are 180 gradations on the Fahrenheit O’meter between water being a solid, liquid or vapor. Apparently, it takes only one of the water is a solid degrees for a collection of state and local officials to muster for a firefighting rite of passage.
Firefighter One...
Dec
29
None Too Slick
Schroeckenthal (sp?). “Shrek”, for short. Captain 2 Zach’s nickname. But Schroeckenthal, in full, on the “butt tag”. Butt tags are the last name tag that hangs off the bottom of the back of a firefighter’s jacket. In theory, they are there so you know who is in front of you at a fire. So you...
Dec
09
Beasts of Burden
Uh-oh. I just had a negative thought about the fire department. Let me sit down and try to figure this out. Is it about somebody at the fire department? No. Is it about something at the fire department? Well, no (the radio thing seems to be moving in the right direction). Is it about the...
