Probie XIII

In Madison, the pager tones.  Flip open the phone and pull up the IAmResponding app.  It’s a fire.  Rats, I am going to miss a fire.  Scroll down.  It’s a forest fire, with structures in danger.  Forest fires take a while.  Do the math in my head of Madison to Portage drive time.  The math might work.

I was watching some stand-up comedian a few months back and she wandered into a bit about her firefighter boyfriend.  Standard issue stuff about fearlessness in certain situations, but unwilling to secure feminine hygiene supplies at the grocery store.  Then she went into an impersonation of him getting a page on his iPhone while they were at dinner on vacation.  Being despondent he was missing a fire, and reading dispatches while at dinner.  “Oh, der sending Truck 52 and Engines 44 and 46.  Dat must be a good fire”.   Sporadic laughs from the audience.  Apparently, not enough women or men in the audience have firefighter boyfriends / girlfriends.  Or upper Midwest accents.  

Take my leave of the capital city, and head north.  Leave the Jeep running and run into the station to get my wildland firefighting gear.  Check the board and Brush 36 and Tender 35 are still up in Portage, working the fire.  Toss the gear in the Jeep and head up to the action.    

Get there, and there’s not much action.  The Chief and Zach are with some firefighters from other departments, staffing the staging area for the fight, which is down somebody’s driveway, and then nearly a mile down a gravel road / path.  There’s a half dozen or so departments working together, along with DNR.  Somebody who knows what they are doing needs to coordinate the resources going in and coming out of the fight, and that’s Chief Radewan at the moment.  So, I hang out with the Chief and Zach for a while.

A tender from another department has run out of water, so our 3,000 gallons are going in.  The Chief takes pity on me driving all the way up from Madison, and sends me in with Zach.  Dispense some water, get wet, chat up the guys tamping down the blaze.  Our guys show up for water.  Zach has the water distribution under control, so I get to go with our crew, and do some mop up.  It’s routine, and uneventful, but I got to get a little dirty, so it was not a complete waste of a drive up. 

Here is where it got fun.  Poynette Fire has a tradition of stopping at the Portage Dairy Queen whenever we are heading back from a fire in Portage.  It is, basically, Little League.  The boys have won a game, and coach / chief is buying them ice cream.  The boys are a little larger than Little Leaguers and we are typically more than a little dirty, but we have the same goofy grins I remember from all the post-game ice cream in Davenport.  We all amble in and people are always nice to us, and the kids usually come out to climb on the fire truck.  Were Norman Rockwell nearby, he would be painting. 

So, we are standing there in our pants and suspenders, ordering up our Blizzards, and all our pagers tone at once.  It is an enormous racket, and we all fall silent to listen to the dispatch.  There’s another wildland fire, about three miles away.  As the effervescent Ernie Banks put it best, “Let’s Play Two”.

Because I came up in the Jeep, Assistant Chief Small barks out the order – Craig, you get the Blizzards, we’re leaving.  Damnit, I’m missing another fire.  Four eternities pass as the teenager assembles the four remaining Blizzards.  Do I want lids with them, is the question at the end.  Well, let me think about this.  I am going to be driving to a fire in a Jeep with a manual transmission while trying to eat my Blizzard and not spill everyone else’s (I think this to myself, because it would be too rude to say it).  “Yes, please.  Lids would be great”.

“Thank you!”, as I bolt out the door and fire up the Jeep.  Execute a semi-legal maneuver out of the parking lot and pick up flashing reds in my rear view mirror.  Firefighters, rather than police - going to the same place, and I’m staying ahead of them.  Gulp down my Blizzard, nearly pass out from a brainfreeze and make it to the fire in under three minutes.  Jump out, put out some actual fire and a football field-sized grass fire is under control quickly.  The mop up will take another twenty or thirty minutes … which is far too long for an unprotected Blizzard to last on the roof of the Jeep.

Luckily, the grass fire has proven of interest to all the homeowners across the street and they are standing in their front yards, watching the day’s excitement.  I scan the crowd, looking for an easy mark, and walk up with my tray full of lidded Blizzards.  “Would you mind putting these in your freezer for about a half hour”, I ask.  “Of course”, they reply.   People are always nice to firefighters.   

There’s a well-worn firefighter joke that goes like this – how are police officers and firefighters the same?  They both want to be firefighters.   

We do the mop up, get a little dirtier, and the incident commander releases us from service.  I go to the house to get the hostage Blizzards, and our guys are soon kings of the playground.  No other department has ice cream waiting for them to eat on the ride home. 

But our boys do.