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 Practical, it is called; a nationally credentialed, state-proctored exam of practical fireground skills. A few weeks ago, it was five degrees with a ten-below windchill, so the test got postponed. Today it is a balmy six degrees with light wind. Game on.

The class started way back in August, but the federal government shutdown messed up some of the funding, so here we are in January, finishing up. Firefighter Skills and Hazardous Materials Response (5th edition) spans 1,524 pages. All but 271 of them are on the Firefighter 1 / Hazardous Materials Operations combo that gets you an FF1 on your ID card.  Whether you are a volunteer or a paid, career firefighter, the FF1 standard is the same.

Practically speaking, FF1 means you can go to mutual-aid calls and do anything the incident commander needs done. Truth told, FF1 don’t-ask, don’t-tell is practiced with regularity at rural fire scenes.

Me, Pete, James, and Lyle all passed the FF1 written exam months ago. Held in the test-taking room of the Protective Services Building at Madison Area Technical College, all the Gen-Z students who were not in my evening class thought I was an instructor when I showed up to the test center and started asking me questions about the test.  “No idea,” I said. “I’m here to take it.”

I’m not sure they believed me until I sat down at a computer like everyone else. Enough master’s degrees to construct a rudimentary Calder mobile brings with it some test-taking experience, so the 100 multiple-choice questions flashed by in seven minutes and I was out the door. The kids in backwards ballcaps must have thought pops got to question eight and gave up.

There are no computers today. MATC has a fire training center with burn buildings and props -- cars and propane tanks to set on fire, roofs of varying pitch to cut holes in, interior mazes to test whether you can keep your wits in the dark with your SCBA on. There’s a ladder tower, somehow permitted just outside the flight path for 737s landing at Madison’s airport on the other side of a chain-link fence.

We were there yesterday for a final tune-up. Everything went well, though my tendency to get to the fire quickly almost doomed us when I almost went through a second-floor window without the hose. Almost.

Another team got the hose-in-first part a little too correct by heaving the nozzle through the window, not controlling how it landed inside. The bail on the nozzle knocked open, and the unmanned hose whipped around, spewing water at 90 PSI.  In single digit cold, that turned the second floor and stairwell into a skating rink waiting patiently for us this morning.

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. once noted that America was most segregated on Sundays -- separated by race, class, and religious choice on Sunday more than any other day of the week.  He did not mention the solidarity of Dairy Staters on Badger hockey and volleyball, or the Packers.

With a full moon low in the western sky, the homes of Poynette are dark as I turn onto Main Street and then Highway 51 toward Madison. There’s a hint of peachy orange in the southeast valleys beneath a dark blue pre-dawn sky. With no one else on the road, I think again of what MLK said about Sunday segregation -- and about ways of seeing the world, your neighbors, and the cosmos unknown. Whether we choose religions or religions choose us can be debated, but I was born in the closest hospital to Wrigley Field, so I went with the Cubs.  Hail Ernie, full of grace.

Some years later and completely of my own volition, I added public service to the dogma. So have a couple dozen other central Wisconsinites heading to the same place I am at oh-six-hundred on a frigidly beautiful Sunday. In the scheme of all the things that can and do go wrong across the hundreds of square miles we are driving from, that’s not nearly enough. But there are still some, faithful to the canon of service.

It is a pass/fail potluck at fire church today. Ropes, knots, ladders, air tanks, utilities, more ladders. Axe maintenance, fires, water supply, more fires, searches, victims, chemistry, physics. The stoicism of pretending it isn’t cold. The mysticism of shouting “checking for overhead obstructions” like frenzied Shakers. I’ll spare you the suspense -- the Poynette / Lodi foursome passed.

Well, we sort of had to. Because we decided to wear Hawaiian shirts.

The paid career Portage firefighter next to me at the pre-test briefing asked how long Hawaiian shirts had been a Poynette test day tradition.

“It started today,” I said.

If you’re going to step beyond the seriousness of fire instructors who have seen too much trauma over the years -- and who will be judging whether you toe the line exactly right -- with something as brazen as a festive shirt, you had better be ready to turn a stern glance into a smirking sign-off on the OFFICIAL STATE OF WISCONSIN form.

The test did not start auspiciously. We all flunked something we were not trained on. The proctors let us ask questions, we figured it out, and did the thing we had to do. After that, it was four guys who had trained together – since August -- doing what we had trained to do.

Pete scaled the ladder tower like a sure-footed mountain goat. Kyle kept the team together in the pitch-black maze of burn buildings. I did not get ahead of myself -- or the team. James forced entry through a door like a surgeon slicing into a patient. Not many surgeons are eighteen years old, though. 

Each member of each team is assigned a color. You do not know your specific task until the proctor tells you at each station. The theory -- a good theory -- is that you must be ready to do anything and not be able to hide a weakness by doing only what you are good at. I was assigned “blue,” which both matched my floral shirt and just happened to have the toughest physical jobs as our liturgy wound down. No mercy for the aged, it appears.

Nozzleman on fire attack went well, mostly because of the team behind me. Hose appeared when I needed it and disappeared when I didn’t, snaking back down hallways, up stairs, out the window, and down the ladder at a good pace. Still, I was first in and last out, and every second means exertion meets the limits of breathing through a tube. Anaerobic energy production commences, warming me like an old friend’s hug and reminding me of VO2-maxxing slogs up icy slopes in the Cascades.

Immediately after came my final physical test of the day: search and rescue. Up a ladder to a second-floor window, through the window, crawl around in the dark, find the victim, and bring he/she down the ladder to a waiting Stokes basket. Blue is last in and first out on this one, which means I get to carry the victim down the ladder.  okie dokie

Up the ladder and through the window we all go. Into the maze.  In darkness, Kyle finds the victim. I am back out the window, waiting on the ladder for Pete and James to toss another 150 pounds onto the sixty I’m already wearing, all while breathing through a straw. If I drop the victim, it’s a team fail. Which is more than ample incentive not to fail.

Standing on the ladder with the bottom of the window at chest height, they hand me Mr. Chunky.  He immediately lurches to the right.  Though not prone to deep thoughts while on a ladder, I wonder if the Old Testament Lord has the weekend shift, and has been aggrieved by our non-regulation shirts.  This is not good.  Gravity has this thing about always needing to win.  Plan A is thus hastily assembled to get the dummy down the ladder fast before he slips out of my arms.  Two steps down and Plan A is a quaint memory -- Chunky’s right arm has dropped into the rungs and gets stuck.  He cannot, will not go down.

My new friend has a head, a body, arms and legs -- but no hands or feet. He is six sacks of sand wrapped in space-age plastic designed to be hosed off. Slippery as an eel, but not nearly as personable.  His arms are twelve inches in diameter, and there is no way I can grip the problematic one to unstick it.  Any moment less than three points of contact on the ladder is a team fail.

In retrospect, the best part of the day is that no one laughed. Mr. Smarty-Pants Hawaiian Shirt has a problem on the ladder.  And what’s that sound? His low-air alarm. Perfect.

I am working the levers of the pinball machine that passes for my brain at a feverish pace.  There is no solution to get the dummy down.  Other than the sweet release of F=mg, he is stuck.  I cannot get him down.  Sorry, Pete, James and Lyle. 

Wait! blares the pinball machine. Tilt !  Go UP two rungs, tilt left, and free the arm. Then go back down.

Now, the oldest test-taker by decades is carrying 210 extra pounds UP a ladder. 

Have you ever noticed there is never an orchestra around when you need one?  Like ... maybe ... to play the theme from Rocky. 

Nevermind.  Gravity will assuredly win one day.  When I slip this mortal coil to take the Big Nap, gravity will hold the matter that was me tight as we arc through space and time together.  Gravity will win.

But not this day.  

Hypoxia meets its match in refusal to let go. I do the go up to go down routine and the crux of the test passes with me placing another ungrateful mannequin into another training basket as the rest of the team comes down the ladder.  I don’t want to get cocky about outwitting 150 pounds of sand, but I am fairly certain no other sixty-three-year-old has beaten me to FF1 this year.

I do know this for sure; every dawn is a gift and I take my benedictions like I take my victories -- where I find them.