EDC

Everything starts with something.  These Siftings tend to start with an auditory, visual or tactile spark.  Rarely olfactory, which is probably for the best.  There’s a flicker, and sometimes the neurons catch fire, only extinguished when the words get typed onto the screen in just the right (?) order.  More typically though, the spark starts an unconscious smolder and my brain works on it in the background without much success, like a months-spanning subterranean peat bog fire.

This one started with a joke.  Not a great joke, which is my specialty.  Thursdays are training nights at PDFD and I’m missing those nights while being the Ernie Banks (“Let’s Play Two”) of the city management profession.  I’m missing the nights in more ways than one.  Missing the training itself, which is important and necessary and needs to be its own regular thing.  But I’m also missing the camaraderie of the guys as we do whatever’s on the agenda on any given Thursday night.  Again, if you’ve skimmed through these things and have not yet joined your local volunteer fire department, you are really missing the point.

You say your local fire department is not a volunteer department?

Ready for some genius problem solving for which I am famous and have made a living doing for several decades?

Move.  Move to a town with a volunteer fire department.

Anyway, missing training in more ways than one, the idea factory peat bog goes to work and comes up with … I’ll train with Seaside Fire.  Fire engines, ladders, hoses.  Chainsaws, halligans, extrication tools.  They’re largely interchangeable. 

Dragging a heavy hose through the dark brutally sucks everywhere.  “Throwing” (i.e. raising) a ladder in California is the same as throwing one in Wisconsin.  And if you throw a 24 foot ladder up a wall 220 times, you will have thrown a mile’s height of ladders.  Captain Lexin did that in Poynette, and got a cool helmet sticker and some excellent muscle memory that will come in handy on many a fireground in the future.

So I settle on doing the mile high ladder throwing thing to keep in shape and get some excellent bruises I mean muscle memory.  Do some of it in Poynette.  Do some of it in Seaside.  Seaside Fire hooks me up with turnout gear and fit tests me for a mask and I’m ready to go.

That’s a long set up for a not great joke but the joke was, “Now I just have to get another six flashlights”.  The joke was told as I was packing up the gear and made fun of how many flashlights firefighters carry.  The joke of six is only one or two more than firefighters actually carry.  Fixing bad stuff in the dark is kind of our thing, so flashlight OCD comes with the gig.  Same with knives, gloves and door stops.  

The smoldering thus started leads overnight to EDC.  EDC is a sub-genre in the I’m a guy, what is that supposed to mean testosterone industrial complex.  EDC stands for everyday carry and there’s a whole cadre of self-important, preening dudes who explain in detail on YouTube how the things they carry on their person everyday makes them special.  Pens, penknives, Norwegian flasks, artisanal tourniquets … that sort of stuff.  It can be more than a little too precious. 

But the joke about the six flashlights was real. Firefighters become meticulous about what they affix to their helmets, clip to their jackets and carry in their pockets.  The new Seaside gear is appreciated, but feels a little naked in not having the stuff in it and on it I’ve become accustomed to in Poynette.  So I’ll square that away next time I’m back. 

The squaring away of EDC writ large is more interesting.  People just don’t carry physical stuff, they carry memories of happiness and trauma and everything in between along with them as the days add up.  Happy to be of service, I’m back in Seaside for good and valid reasons.  But it comes with a toll.  Flying back and forth each week with airplane “sleep” is its own thing, but the bigger thing is dealing with the memories of a half-decade of family separation.  2016 to 2021 were five brutally difficult and often dark years, and now I live two days a week in the same spaces I inhabited back then.    

This all became clear as a Seaside staffer who arrived after I left came into my office to talk about a departmental issue, which we fixed together.  But he happened to ask a question and got an answer he was not expecting.  He had heard of my mountain adventures from the first go-round which would prompt people in City Hall to ask if I was trying to kill myself and asked why I went off into the mountains alone.  Caught a bit off-guard, the truth spilled out and I told him being alone in Seaside on weekends was far more deadly than climbing mountains alone.

That seems like a crazy reply and part of it is (er, was) absolutely crazy.  But it’s also partly true and you’d have to ignore an entire body of contemporary research on middle-aged solitary male mortality to skip over the part that ain’t crazy.  To live in a tourist destination and see families and couples enjoying life while depressingly alone for reasons not of your own making can be (caution: understatement ahead) a little sad.  So, rather than deal with that, I immersed myself in nature.  And the no off position on the genius switch problem solving kicked in so I decided adventures above the tree line were safer than dealing with bears and mountain lions and snakes and whatnot in the forests of California.  So … up I would go, until there was no more up to go.        

If you think about it from a certain angle, every day drawing breath is death-defying by definition.  I just did it up where the problem-solving was significantly consequential and the drawing of breath was more difficult.  But I have no doubt the mountains saved my life.  Much appreciated, Santa Lucias, Sierra Nevadas and Cascades. 

Here’s the crux and the segue.  The adrenaline rush of risk is addictive, and the risk of being village administrator for a town of 2,600 is never going to be adequate given the life I’ve led from roughly age five to sixty.  So the fire-fighting thing fills the gap. At its core, it is an adventure club.  An adventure club operating wholly in the public interest, utterly unreliant on plate tectonics and comprised of like-minded do-gooding swell dudes.   It is the definition of significantly consequential. 

In the backroom of the Seaside fire station, I am hooked up to the “fit test” machine/computer, monitoring my respiration over the course of several minutes while wearing a firefighting air mask (Seaside has Scott’s, Poynette has MSA’s).  The (age-defying) results on the computer screen lead to a, “you must do a lot of cardio” declaration. 

To which I happily and unironically reply, “I used to climb mountains.  Now I climb stairs in a hose tower.”   

The mountains were full-on crazy, but fun and life-saving.  The stairs are the opposite of fun and are only crazy given the ultimate futility of defying age.  They also don’t have anywhere near the view, trading state-sized vistas for the tedium of close-in concrete block.  Which leads to even closer in peat bog ruminations.

But up and down I go.  Happily and unironically.