Beds Made
The alarm goes off at the LZ at 2:30 AM. Time to head back to Wisconsin. Out the door into the nighttime chill, as the marine layer slithers into Carmel Valley. Up and down the Laureles Grade, through Salinas and north on the 101 to SJC. I’ve taken to parking the cars in the same general area at both airports so I don’t have to remember where they are. Off the parking shuttle bus and enter the zen state that allows tranquility through the indignities of commercial aviation. Poked, prodded, patted down, delayed, scanned and folded into seats made for people several inches shorter, six flyover states scroll past to arrive in Madison.
Released to freedom, grab the Jeep and do the farm-filled twenty minutes to Poynette. Happy to be home, enter the code on the garage door. Duck to enter as the door rises to carve an extra second off being away and ARE you kidding me? the fire pager goes off. Not even in the utility room door.
Through the door, set my bags down, flip the phone open to respond and it’s a fire. The restful Saturday afternoon / evening at home is up in smoke. Warm cookies on the kitchen island. Grab one offer thanks and head back out the garage door.
Get to the station and learn there’s a dairy farm in Fall River with a barn on fire and Fall River FD needs help.
We arrive and have to drive through a barn full of cows to get to the barn on fire. The cows are conditioned to trucks passing through meaning food, and they’re perplexed at the big red foodless thing. Making final tugs on the SCBA straps in the back of 39 whilst cows are staring disappointingly at me. On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin, drive right through that barn …
The barn on fire is the hay barn. Or maybe the straw barn. No idea because all I know about cows is the one Mrs. O’Leary owned kicked over a lamp at just the right time and Chicago became the most glorious collection of architecture on the planet.
The barn is mostly gone by the time we get there, but the hay has no intention of being extinguished. All kinds of water being sprayed on it but it’s dense and insulated and well-ventilated and barn-sized and it just keeps going. Tasked to pull roof panels off the pile and dig into it and stuff 125 gallon per minute nozzles into it, it’s tough going. High-fiber quicksand, it is difficult to just stand up or move in it, and then add in pike poles and charged lines. It is a roly-poly heavy breathing heart pumping chunk of work. Probably fifty fire-fighters from a half-dozen departments are working in exhausting twenty to thirty-minute recycling shifts, for hours.
We get relieved after nightfall by Columbus FD and head back to the station to get Squad 39 ready for the next run.
The LZ (as in landing zone) is the new name for the old FOS (as in Fortress of Solitude). It is where I lived from 2016 to 2020, in my first four years of working for Seaside. Maybe 150 square feet of separate building / guest bedroom set in a garden / forest, it is a five-minute walk to Garland Ranch Regional Park, with an excellent collection of hiking paths into the Santa Lucias. Refreshed and renamed to be more positive, the LZ needed a bed, so I made one.
My dad used to say, “you’ve made your bed, now sleep in it”. He mostly said it to my older siblings. But I overheard it enough that it stuck with me. I suppose I could be irate about the whole start a day at 2:30 AM and fly and drive 2,200 miles home only to answer a fire call at a place I’ve never been and will never return to.
But the choices were mine. Work two jobs 2,000 miles apart. Lose twelve to fourteen hours of sleep a week while doing so. Volunteer for PDFD. Lose another random several hours of sleep a week while doing so. Honestly, not optimal. But, with the exception of Lancia’s run of Stratos, 037 and Delta, things rarely are. So, suck it up and tough it out.
Whether building a bed at the LZ was a choice or not is the crux of this somewhat wayward narrative journey.
We’ll get to that at the end, which is mercifully near. But the process was this. The LZ’s owner had the old bed I made eight years ago in storage on site. Having lived with how damn difficult being away from family was while I was there the first go round’, I needed to change up the vibe. I did NOT want to sleep in that bed’s accumulated darkness.
So I wandered up to the Amish sawmill in Westfield and found some gorgeous spalted maple in their stacks. Did some milling and rough sanding of it in the shack, and then UPS’d it to Seaside City Hall, along with a palm sander for finish sanding. The folks at Seaside City Hall are perfectly happy with the quirkiness, so a large box of wood arriving while I was in Wisconsin was just another Craig thing.
A general rule of furniture design is simple designs should have complex wood and complex designs should have simple wood. The spalted maple grain (resulting from fungus) is about as complex as it gets, so the design was simple. As was the construction, given the basic hand tools I had in California, augmented with a rented pin nailer.
My gardener (technically, landlord) helped a little with clamping as I assembled it and the bed became more beautiful with each board set in place. Some Danish oil for finish, and the bed became positively swoon worthy; ready to provide solace (or better) to whoever rents the LZ after I leave. I suppose there’s a metaphor somewhere in making something gorgeous out of distressed components.
Which answers the question about choice. I imagine there are folks born to easy circumstances and ample resources who are happy, as is. Far for better than for worse, I was not one of them.
My happiness comes in being of service and changing things for the better. The cities I work for. The places I inhabit. The fire scenes I arrive at. I don’t think it is a choice. It just is. I made my mental bed of intractable optimism and bemused resilience in the learn to walk again after Car #1 (of five) hit me to escaping the orphanage sequence.
That’s the bed I made. I know there are more comfortable beds. But I don’t know of a better or more purposeful one.
