Fire Season

I was driving off the line last night, right through a big burn that some hot shots had just fired. It was beautiful. More beautiful than Christmas Lights on Snob Hill. More beautiful than Pirates of the Caribbean. More captivating and powerful and terrifying and beautiful than almost anything. All at once. As I drove, I thought to myself, you're the luckiest girl alive. Here you are, broken, weak, quite nearly useless, and you get to see this. To be here. Not only that, you're getting paid. Fire is awesome. You know you're doing the right thing when you can't get over how frakking much you love it.

This is fire. There is no camera or artist that will ever be able to capture the heat that radiates over the road, through the windows of the car, warming the side of your face to remind you, ever-so-gently, that it could melt you into a puddle of nothing. If it decided to - If it ganged up with the wind and felt like it.

Fire is a destructive force. As with almost all naturally occurring elements, given free reign. It is one of the most amazing and valuable chemical reactions. It has the power to heal as much as destroy. But such power. Two days ago, the only road to where we were working looked like this:

Today, after a some zealous hotshots had their way, and we nearly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of heavy equipment, it looks like this:

The fire blew so forcefully and quickly through that the needles on the trees on the east side of the road didn't even have time to burn off, just to blow sideways and fry to a crisp fall orange. Unnatural for an evergreen. This part of the forest isn't healed. If any of the trees survived, they will struggle through decades of fighting with a new ecosystem to continue their growth. In some places, the burn is gentle and friendly, like a mother changing her baby's diaper. Just cleaning things up. It's not pleasant, unless you happen to be a fire junkie (most of us out here are), but it's necessary and good. Kind of like killing all of the spiders in the world.

I can never get enough. The smell, even when my eyes and throat and lungs are burning - The smell makes me want to strap on a shelter and a hard hat and tromp into the woods just to see it move through the trees. Something so powerful and mysterious and uncontrollable. Watch the silly little people in their yellow and green chase it furiously with their ineffective tools until the fire grows weary of the game and chases them back to the relative safety of their precious lines. Lines that often don't hold, in spite of the countless hours and dollars pumped into them. Whether the lines hold is really more up to the wind, and the sun, and every entity in the woods that isn't wearing green and yellow. All it takes is a singed bunny with a smoking hieny to cross the lines and drag his glowing, emberous cottontail through the crispy green brush. It's happened. But we're here, we draw our lines and chase our smoke and sometimes we get lucky and have the wind and the sun and the rain on our side, when they get tired of the arrogant flame front and his bossiness. And then we win. It's a melancholy win through, killing the passionate beast and trudging through gray sludge as we cool down the messy remains. Every job has its downside. For this one, putting a fire out isn't nearly as fun as outwitting the prolonged chase of it, directing it to where you want it to go in a fashion that will serve the purposes of the forest. Putting the fire out just means moving to the next game of tag, and starting all over. From April Showers til well past the first snowfall of winter, we chase it. Like a virulent strain of a deadly contagion, we must catch up with it and squelch it. Not much rest. Losing sight of everything else that is important in our lives. Knowing that we can put things off until later. That it's FIRE SEASON and we must go.

Fire People

… The men in the ever stylish yellow and green, storming the forests to save the world from Certain Demise. On my last fire assignment, I worked with a handful of smokejumpers from the Redmond Air Center. For the layperson (i.e. not fire savvy), let me clarify a few things about wildland fire: as much as I love the dramatic lauds of glory ascribed to me for my bravery in being one of these stalwart soldiers, defending trees everywhere, I do not actually fight the fire. I have in the past. I am trained to do so, but somewhere along the line I wised up and realized I could make way more money do way less work as an EMT that follows the actual fire-FIGHTERS around, ready to swoop in and catch fallen heroes. Mostly I sit in my truck and read Cosmo or US Weekly.

And to quell another commonly held misconception (for the generation basking in the glory of Howie Long's Firestorm), even the actual fighters of fire do not parachute out of helicopters. Or throw running chainsaws in the air from the back of a motorcycle. OK, maybe we do that sometimes. Just to be cool. Smokejumpers are an elite, or maybe the Most Elite (sorry hotshots) echelon of wildland firefighters. Most smokejumpers are older than the average hotshot, engine slug or type 2 firefighter, because it takes years of experience and maturity to be responsible enough to parachute out of AIRPLANES into burning conflagrations. They really do that, and it is pretty epic. In a not-kitschy-and-diluted-sense of the word.

To clear up any confusion, Hotshot Crews consist of 20 firefighters with at least some experience who are trained, expected and required to hike crazy amounts of ridiculous terrain to attack a fire head on, carrying their own tools, gear and enough food and water to be self sufficient for at least a few days. They are, in a word, bad-*ss (sorry mom). Engine slugs are, well, slugs who work on engines. They work with water and pumps and usually stay closer to roads and the relative movable safety of their trucks. They work hard, or at least some do, don't get me wrong. Most hand crews are type 2, and the type 2 firefighter, along with the engine crews are the meat and potatoes of every wildland fire. They are the boots on the ground that scratch hundreds of miles of fire line in the dirt every summer, mop up acres of ash, and populate the crazy tent cities that spring up overnight on any large incident. But back to the smokejumper: there is an unspoken rule that in order to be a smokejumper, you must prove yourself as a master storyteller. What is most interesting about these stories is that the smokejumper delivers them in a manner that would have you believe that the very act of jumping out of an airplane at a couple thousand feet strapped to approximately 120lbs of gear, into a burning forest, isn't actually the most interesting part. Usually the story line kicker is something about criminals inside the fire that started it as they were running from the law, or saving someone from a bee attack on the edge of a cliff, or hiking out (because it turns out you CAN'T actually parachute OUT of a fire) to the road on two broken ankles, or something like that, while you (the listener) are still processing that 2000 ft drop into Trees That Are On Fire, the jumper is cracking up about How Funny it was that his buddy's chute got hung up in a tree and he had to cut himself free with a two inch pocket knife. I

f ever you get the chance to listen in when one of these guys is storytelling. Don't miss it. It's a stark contrast to the slightly less mature storytelling of hotshots which usually have to do with burnouts, R&R days and memorable bars, or type 2 guys who are still talking about the hot chick on Engine 62. I really have a ton of respect for all of these hardworking people, jumpers, shots and FFT2. I have met some of the best people I know working on these fires, and will never lack gratefulness for the experiences I get to have every summer, and get paid for it. Yep, I'm a lucky girl.

Fire Camp Survival Tips

This is my tenth season in wildland fire. You'd think by now that I would have it figured out, surviving this mini-world with its own rules, but I am still learning. For my fire and non fire friends, I'd like to share with you some of the survival techniques I have adopted.

Fire Camp Survival Tips

1. In a wildland fire setting, the more smiley and friendly you are, the farther it will get you. Being cute helps, but isn't entirely necessary. I have heard that this approach works well all hours of the day, but because of personal handicaps, I can only vouch for the hours of the day beginning at about 9 AM.


2. Personal hygiene is a highly subjective and easily justified area of compromise in the wild land fire world. The necessity and frequency of showering, with or without shower unit availability, is hotly debated and widely considered to be of a personal nature, except when you share a crew rig with one or more other people. At this point, it must be decided as a collective whether bathing is a requirement, an option, or strictly forbidden. Thank heavens most Hotshot crews are moving away from the idea that a shower is a sign of weakness, but we still have some paradigms to overthrow. I, personally am of the every-other-day school of thought, any more would seem indulgent, any less, assuming you have showers at you disposal, would just be unnecessarily gross. In the event that showers are not available, dry shampoo does serve a purpose other than decorating the inside of Paris Hilton's overnight bag. Also hats. Hats are good.*


3. Getting dressed. This continues to be one of the Great Challenges of life in fire. For those of you who sleep in tents occasionally for "fun", it is readily apparent that standing to dress can be problematic for any adult of an ordinary size, unless your tent is the Taj Mahal of outdoor lodging, which I would frankly be too embarrassed to unfurl at a fire camp. The Taj Mahals are here, and widely mocked by hotshots who still insist that people who are not weak sleep sans-tent on any not-flame-engulfed piece of ground. But a reasonable tent of the 1-3 man variety still leaves room to be desired (literally) when one goes to get dressed in the dark, cold, early mornings. Over the years I have learned to dress myself in a laying position. This is pretty easy, except for the Bra, which as we saw in recent stories, becomes a day long issue at times. The other danger in this lying down approach to dressing, is the risk of catching something in the Velcro of your nomex pants without noticing. This could be something innocent, like a sock, or one of the many hats that are placed strategically around the tent for quick retrieval. More often than not, the thing stuck to your Velcro will be a pair of dirty underwear. Dirty underwear on a fire are different than regular dirty underwear at home. Whether this is because of the generally understood rule of 4 (inside, outside, front and back, gets you four days of "clean" underwear out of one pair), or because squatting to pee in the ash results in a gray/black dusty effect regardless of the color they started as, dirty fire undies are just embarrassing. Especially when you wear them to the morning briefing in the Velcro of your Nomex pockets. So always check your Velcro. Also zippers. Zippers on Nomex pants are notorious for refusing to go up, stay up, or close without catching the yellow tail of your Nomex shirt. The standard fire fighter finger sweep of the zipper fly is at least an hourly occurrence, and can be pulled of deftly, as if one was just reaching casually for one's pocket - but making sure the zipper pull is exactly where it is supposed to be for maximum modesty. Again, no one wants to see fire undies. Especially if they're on outside or backwards days. I have arrived at briefing with almost every article of clothing on inside out and/or backwards at least once, luckily never all at once. On nights when I am really tired, I usually don't bother to take anything except my pants off to sleep, knowing that an equally tired 5 AM will make dressing a disaster. Nomex clothing on a fire can be exchanged for standard issue stuff at supply, rather than washing it, but if you buy the fancy designer Nomex, it's up to you to keep it clean. My new favorite hobby is visiting supply to see if anyone accidentally turned in some name brand Nomex, and have completely overcome both my pride and my fear of poison oak in digging through the bin of turned in dirties - dumpster diving ala Wildland Fire. This tactic won me 8 old school Nomex shirts last year, the vintage, smooth ones that are WAY more comfortable. This year I stumbled across a pair of Kevlar pants in almost my exact size! $200, y'all. My partner, Lee, was both impressed and envious, so we went back the next day, just to see, and I scavenged another pair, in almost his exact size! We were a little giddy with our good luck and vowed to check supply morning and night for the duration of the assignment.


4. Eating. Everybody knows that we eat great on fires. 4000 calories a day, all you can eat salad bar, and lots of snacks. The dark side of fire-food is the mystery meat sandwiches for lunch, pastrami that is rainbow colored, mixed veggies for dinner that are a suspiciously high concentration of watery Lima beans, and really bad coffee. I will leave coffee it's own space and address the rest. Dinner is usually great. There's almost always something edible for dinner, if nothing else, the salad bar is often a safe fallback. I usually eat the meat that is the main course and salad. I've learned to skip the bread, and often the starch sides and cooked vegetables. I've even managed to avoid most deserts. Except for the strawberry shortcake last night. And milk. I drink a lot of milk at if camp. It's just tradition. After ten years in fire, I have finally come to the realization that I don't like fire lunches. I still get them so I can take the two granola bars, dried fruit and grandma's cookies home to the kids (or Husband), and eat the fritos, but I find little that I can really digest. As I mentioned, if you can identify the stack of meat in your sandwich, it will undoubtedly be translucent, at best, and usually technicolor. Survival techniques for this fire problem vary. Usually a run to the closest store for chips and bean dip do it for me, maybe stealing yogurt and cold cereal from the breakfast bar, some people I know save part of the giant portion of meat from dinner the night before. Any fire overhead personnel worth his mettle will be packing a Jetboil. The Jetboil is the line firefighter's mealtime salvation. In addition to making your own coffee (next section), e Jetboil is amazing for soups, frying salvageable parts of fire lunches (I.e. burritos, thin sliced ham, etc), and just giving you something to do if you are sitting on the line all day waiting for someone to have an emergency. Last year when it was late season and it was cold and I had a little bit of camp crud, i got some of the Bear Creeek soup mix and some crackers. I had the best little cheddar and brocolli picknick on my tailgate. Always pack snacks. Always. Unless you are me, and forget to, and whine for days.
5. Coffee is the single most important part of fire camp survival. Most food units make their giant vats of coffee with a coffee concentrate as opposed to grounds. It's pretty disgusting, unless you scald all of your taste buds off early into the fire because it's also much hotter that humanly reasonable. Our medical unit, and many of the other fringe overhead organizations, bring a coffee maker and "real" coffee to camp with them. Sometimes the secret leaks out and you find yourself waiting in line for the third pot because the entire overhead roster has come for a cup. My biggest issue personally is finding acceptable cream sources. I've often had to resort to powdered creamer, which I honestly prefer to the sickly-sweet, coffee mate flavored creamers which are available in great abundance and basically just a compound of poisons and sugar. This fire has almost real half and half, of the tiny cup, non-refrigerated variety, and since the coffee tastes bad, I've been adding a packet of honey. Later we will discuss honey. But it makes my coffee taste almost like a carmel latte. The ideal set up, especially for a line medic, is a Jetboil and a French press, or the available combination thereof. I'd prefer to have them separately, because ultimately, after seasons of unwashed use, the French Press is a robust and well seasoned shrine to good coffee, and I don't really want my broccoli cheese soup tasting like java. On my last assignment, I took a pint of heavy whipping cream, my coffee additive of hedonistic choice. The paper carton didn't hold up well in the cooler of ice though, so I am rethinking my approach. Probably a Rubbermaid bottle from home? A good buddy of mine packs Starbucks Via with her Jetboil, no press needed. I'm not in love with Via, or Starbucks in general, but it's better than coffee syrup coffee, by a long shot. **


6. Sleeping. One word: Benadryl. Until I get my own camper with a memory foam mattress, no configuration of stolen gray foam mats from supply, thermarests, sleeping bags and quilts from home can fend off the inevitable back spasm after several days of tossing and turning. This morning I woke up with a bruise in my left gluteal muscle, presumably from a flashlight or pair of socks or something that was easily mistaken for part of the "bed".The best approach to sleeping in fire camp involves identifying and avoiding floodlights, smoking areas, cell phone reception pockets, and poison oak, taking a Benadryl and not remembering the night at all. NyQuil is another camp favorite, but may be harder to talk the resident EMT into handing out, depending on how benevolent they're feeling. An EMT who has fixed a lot of BooBoos in a day is usually feeling pretty high on their protocol administration, and is likely more pliable than a bored camp EMT who hasn't had a chance to flex their medical knowledge for the day and is dying to tell you why they can't give you NyQuil. So always look for the dirtiest medic in the unit. Which will very likely be me.


7. Socialization is another key factor in this microcosm. Learning where it is important to make friends will get you a long way. Some of the most important people to buddy up to included communications (you'll never have to beg for batteries), medical (dibs on the rare Green Gold Bond?), And supply (vintage Nomex and unlimited duct tape and glow sticks). Food is also a good place to have friends, you can get a preview of meals which can determine a detour through town for a quick stop. It never hurts to have the Incident Commander and a few assorted operational bigwigs on your side, in case of unruly bosses, ordering up friends and/spouses or snagging primo spots on the line. "we need medic Weston for this float assignment on the Rogue River." "I'd like Medic Weston to fly the fire with me for some strategic medical planning." Friends in high places, y'all. See guideline 1.

I'm always looking for new tricks and interesting fire-coping mechanisms. Feedback welcome!
*I am in search of a reasonably cool and not-itchy Denver Broncos beanie. **Dutch Bros should come out with an instant coffee, y'all.

I only smile after 0900.

Rules and General Guidelines

You guys, I suck. As a general rule, I am kind of terrible at hearing/following/adhering to the rules. Which is to say, I am not good at general guidelines either. I happen to be working in a capacity at this time that is largely about rules and general guidelines. You can imagine how well that is going. I am learning a lot about rewriting and redoing and re-listening and revisiting and pretty much re-everything in this role. Here is a working list of the guidelines I have broken on this fire assignment so far:

1) no open toed shoes in fire camp
2) remain at least 10 feet from open water without a personal flotation device
3) don't use the word "monitor"
4) don't use the word "watch"
5) don't use the words f*** s*** d*** or b*****
6) sleep within fire camp perimeter
7) don't take food out of the kitchen area
8) don't throw food scraps into the bushes
9) don't feed the animals
10) don't scare the public
11) practice good hygiene
12) be nice to people


I would like to say how sorry I am for my transgressions and offer proliferating regret, but since I am working on self-love and self-acceptance, Ima just roll with it and accept the occasional hand slap and look of profound exasperation from my immediate supervisors.

Not following guidelines has garnished me a whole collection of rejections from several places where I submitted writing samples in the hopes of a payoff. Part of me wants to blame my homeschooled renegade background, but really, I am just more excited about what I have to say than I am about instructions. It could be that I am resisting the hardcore overdose of rules that I grew up under, but even then I was pretty intolerant of being corralled between the lines, as my parents will attest.

Maybe guideline follower is one of those things that I have never been and I should work on, but sometimes then I feel like I would just be like all of the other lemmings marching toward the cliff of conformity without ever asking why.

Guidelines are created by and for a litigious world, where individuals refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, i.e. wearing flip flops in fire camp. Everybody wants somebody else to pay the price for their poor choices. But if there are rules, then nobody else can be blamed, right? I don't see that working very well. Humans are messy animals that will find a rule that has not been made yet, break it, and cost others so much that it will demand the recourse of a new guideline the rest of us are stuck with. Too many rules are just a symptom of a much bigger problem, I think Ima keep bucking them, and working to solve it.

Marcus Squirrelius likes Skinny Pop

On Making Good Impressions in Fire Camp

I've learned a few things on this fire assignment. Like, for instance, the importance of maintaining composure in the face of The Ultimate Arachnid Violation, or how to best wear side dishes as an accessory. I even had a swift lesson in the effect of slope degree on streams of pee. It's been informative, and in addition to bringing home a decent paycheck, I'd like to think I've also invested in personal growth and development in the areas of humility and avoidance of human contact.


In the interest of stymying ego growth, I've employed tactics that stretch creatively beyond the garden variety fire camp faux pas. No dirty underwear stuck to Nomex Velcro or toilet paper on the boots at briefing. Not even an old toothpaste stain on my shirt. Nope, I've been exploring outside the old standbys.

Today there was a spider on me.


A huge. Brown. Fuzzy. Spider.


It was very difficult for me. Every lesson in self control for my WHOLE LIFE went flashing before my eyes.
No big deal. I just flicked him off of my nomex. Onto my belt. Then under my shirt. And into my pocket.
I didn't panic. I didn't cry. Very much. The very cool, very badass Task Force Leader that I've spent a week with didn't even laugh at me. Very much. I didn't even kill the spider. Or pass out. I tried to disguise the extra-high-pitched tone of my voice and my super sweaty palms. I'm not sure he bought it since he gave me a kind of amused Knowing Look. But I was very brave. Considering.


I will never sleep again.


Which is probably for the best, since three nights ago I was sleeping fitfully in my rig, as always, trying to find a way to accommodate a forever aching shoulder, and something possessed me at about one AM to wake up and unplug my phone where it was charging next to me. I have no idea why, but it seemed necessary at that exact moment.


Apparently it seemed necessary at that exact moment for the semi-truck parked perpendicular to me to fire up his diesel engine and shine his bright headlights into my car as well. In my delirium, all I could think was that in unplugging my phone I had somehow triggered the activation of the truck so I quickly and apologetically plugged my phone back in. It didn't work and the truck kept running. For.Ev.Er. So uncool. I'm just glad the weird communications guy in the tiny green tent that keeps getting closer to my rig wasn't looking in my windows to witness my totally illogical reflex. That I know of.


I can't understand what his attraction to me could be after the other evening when I wore a decent sized bit of tater-tot casserole around on my shirt for hours. I mean, some food is sexy, but tater-tot casserole on your left boob is a stretch. Explain to me How I could not notice a solid ounce of casserole on my chest, but I can still feel the "massive" spider weighing less than a microgram, crawling All. Over. My. Body.
In the hours since the Spider Incident, I have quelled recurrent panic attacks by imaging him a friendly, curious little fellow who wants to be a firefighter. Either he's the same spider I saw crawling up the Safety Officer's leg earlier, or there's an entire army of the bulbous brown monsters in this dust bowl where I sit. For my own sanity I have to believe he is a hardy and determined individual. Only one. I'm totally writing a children's book. Nevermind that the illustrations will give me night terrors.


I'm all about finding new and glorious ways to make sure that 300 burly firefighters know with all certainty what a complete dork I am. It's taken me a minute or two to realize that at some point in the last decade working on fires that I have transitioned from the Cute Girl in fire camp to the Frumpy Mom in fire camp. It's a tough pill to swallow when the blue eyed faller in the Stihl ball cap is actually flirting with the red headed engine boss next to me, and doesn't even know I exist. Curses. Of course it takes a few unacknowledged witty comebacks before I realize that he doesn't hear a thing I'm saying because Pippi Longstalking is redoing her braids. #heartbreak


That's ok. I'm older and wiser now, and most of my self esteem doesn't stem from the opinions of bad ass twenty something hot shots and their comrades. I'm not sure where it stems from, or some days if it stems at all, but I'll concede the fight. I'm just happy to be out here, making a fool of myself and a few bucks.

Author's note: commo guy is actually very nice, and hasn't ever looked in my windows. That I know of. (In case KP ever stumbles across this blog)


Firefighter’s dilemma

by Hal Glanville

A man with a Pulaski is tough

And agile in his boots

He’s driven to be so

From where he shared his roots

But I am not a man

And neither are my sisters or my mother

We carry the same tools and wear the same soot

On the hill are stone houses

much like old stone castles

We are the the modern medieval

and the people are the vassals

Their taxes fuel our tromping feet

and the rev of our motors

Our battle with the flightless dragon

and the spin of our rotors

We carry on for them and paid fair

like the knights of old

By the cutting edge and swing of an axe our stories are told

By the trees that lay fallen

and sliced through by our chain

By the beast that lay still

and corralled but not slain

But we do not want it dead

like those that feed us do

There’s is good in that dragon

and all that it chews

Humans corrupted her

but still they blame and bemoan

Then why can’t every house

be made of stone?

 

The Goliath

The best part about working on a fire is when the smell of crackle-burning wood settles into camp and permeates all the clothes that you've packed, and your whole bedroll smells like a woodstove. It's an inescapable aroma, and while we always joke that it smells like money, to me it smells more like fierce power and unharnessed freedom.

We're silly for thinking that we can fight fire... more like we just herd it a little and encourage it the direction that we hope it will go. If it was a real fight, then no doubt we would lose. Like a tiny child swinging windmill fists at a raging giant. Maybe it's the mercy of the giant that sways it away from its course of destruction, or maybe the little splashes of water we throw on the inferno are just enough to discourage it from its rampage. Little splashes in the form of thousands of gallons of pond-sludge, murky brown and smelling like the life that it left behind, fueled by millions of dollars of airpower and the best that the small child of humanity has to throw at it.

But hour after hour, day after day, the misshapen boots trudge up the hills and down the slopes, stumbling through rock screes and slipping on retardant dumps, ash and oil and pitch and soot-filled snot staining the pants in a few key shades of green. Road-line yellow shirts, blackened by smoke-soaked sweat, conformed to the bent bodies and frayed pack straps clinging to the fire-soldiers like they were all one continuous piece of being. Mile after mile, winding trails, scrambling up cliff sides, digging in heels and toes and Pulaskis and rhinos and leaving the tell-tale trace of salvation that will be gone with the next spring's growing green.

 

A chicken scratch line in the dirt tells the angry, impetuous beast of fire that He Shall Not Pass. Like an imaginary wall of nothing that the inferno cannot consume, with his will crushed but his appetite far from staved, he turns and moves on, and the troops with him, to meet him at the next pass and cut him off once more, tell him where he Cannot Go, and hope that he gives up so there's time to scratch underneath their sock and wolf down a bite of anything.

They sleep under stars that are swirled in clouds and smoke, curled up in the combined smell of themselves and the fire-beast, wearing the sweat and ashes that they have earned like the arms of a hard-won lover. If dreams come in the child-like sleep coma, they are wild and ferocious, like the animal that they have chased all day. Everything that these fire-soldiers do is fierce. Their work is fierce, their sleep is fierce, their love is fierce, and their hate is fierce. They stand in the face of a 30-foot wall of burning trees with a whoop and a laugh, knowing the thrill of taming the beast that most of us would be terrified to encounter.

This Quixotic army fights the endless enemy that will continue devouring long after they are dead in their graves. The fire captivates and enthralls them, beckoning them to continue the dance through forests and towns and prairies and tundras, knowing well enough that the monster can't be killed, but might be contained with the right choreography. It is an eternal adventure, curtailed only by aging bodies and grown-up pressures of life. The stories of flame chasing live beyond the end of a shift or the hanging up of a saw. They are legend, like the men and women who live them.

 

On Getting Caught

I caught a cold. Well technically, it caught me, even though I was fleeing it aggressively in the form of hand washing and germ avoidance. In technical fire terms, we call this “camp crud” because everybody in camp has it, and every surface in camp is covered with it. I will take what's going around in lieu of the the gastrointestinal version of camp crud, though (give me a sinus headache over violent diarrhea any day). No yurt latch, outhouse door, or pair of tongs in the salad bar is safe. There isn't enough hand sanitizer in the world. The pervasive germ probably starts at someone’s house when a preschooler wipes snot-covered fingers across their soon-to-be-dispatched daddy’s face and the benevolent firefighter shares his family germs with the rest of his 20 man crew, who spread, from camp to camp, the viral love. It’s definitely epidemic, but luckily, nobody dies.

Or maybe not so lucky since I woke up this morning wishing I was dead. My head felt like it had railroad spikes driven into both temples and that little spot right between my lungs and throat was on fire. And it hurt to move. I started out slowly, trying to determine if I felt like I needed to Lie Perfectly Still Forever because the NyQuil I took hadn’t worn off by 05:28 AM or if I really was That Sick. Turns out I was. I knew when I handed Nyquil to a fever-stricken girl from the kitchen crew that I was doomed. Watching all of those grubby hands root through a box of cough drops on the table in the med unit gave me full body shudders before I was even running a temp.

The beauty of getting a virus like this is that it seems like the rest of my body calls a truce from the inflammatory onslaught that is a daily occurrence. It’s as if the torn labrums in all four quadrants are like “all hail the coronavirus!” and bow down in deference to full-body aches. The bug has removed all guilt I usually feel for not getting out of my truck to do daily exercises, as any movement right now makes the whole world spin viciously like I am at a rave and on way too many hallucinogens.

I would like to offer my sincere appreciation at this time for whomever it is that developed guaifenesin as a cold remedy. I am seriously in love with Mucinex and today, specifically, the kind with dextromethorphan built it. Also a quick shout out to REAL Sudafed. I’d be lost without you, baby. All that phenylephrine crap can get lost.

One of my favorite parts about working in the medical tent at fire camp is coming up with the most effective cold remedy “cocktails” for other firefighters, and traditionally once a year, myself as well. In Oregon, you can’t get real pseudoephedrine without a prescription which is cruel and unusual punishment for all head cold sufferers and one more reason to hate the whole meth culture. The best daytime cold cocktail is real Sudafed, Tylenol or ibuprofen (depending on your preference) and Mucinex. At night, I am all about the NyQuil and Mucinex - and if I am REALLY bad, I will add more Sudafed too, unless I am in Oregon and am forced to suffer without. We usually are able to get the generic versions of all of this stuff in fire camp and have a steady supply, which is awesome. If you have to suffer, you might as well do it well armed.

Anyway, if you have any questions about how to get sick in fire camp and/or what to do for it, I’m your girl. In the meantime, I will be here in Division Zulu hacking out the inner lining of my lungs and trying not to infect the three people in camp who have thus far miraculously escaped exposure. It’s only a matter of time though…

PS, Speaking of getting caught, I wonder if I will get in trouble for writing about this fire, even though I didn't name names or use current pictures? Oh well. Getting caught for blogging can't be any worse than getting caught by a cold, right?

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On Guidelines

You guys, I suck. As a general rule, I am kind of terrible at hearing/following/adhering to guidelines. Which is to say, I am not good at general rules. I happen to be working in a capacity at this time that is largely about guidelines and general rules. You can imagine how well that is going. I am learning a lot about rewriting and redoing and relistening and revisiting and pretty much re-everything in this role. Here is a working list of the guidelines I have broken on this fire assignment so far:

1) no open toed shoes in fire camp
2) remain at least 10 feet from open water without a personal flotation device
3) don't use the word "monitor"
4) don't use the word "watch"
5) don't use the words f*** s*** d*** or b*****
6) sleep within fire camp perimeter
7) don't take food out of the kitchen area
8) don't throw food scraps into the bushes
9) don't feed the animals
10) don't scare the public
11) practice good hygiene
12) be nice to people

We're not gonna talk about which rules I am breaking out here...


I would like to say how sorry I am for my transgressions and offer proliferating regret, but since I am working on self-love and self-acceptance, Ima just roll with it and accept the occasional hand slap and look of profound exasperation from my immediate supervisors.

Not following guidelines has garnished me a whole collection of rejections from several places where I submitted writing samples in the hopes of a payoff. Part of me wants to blame my homeschooled renegade background, but really, I am just more excited about what I have to say than I am about instructions. It could be that I am resisting the hardcore overdose of rules that I grew up under, but even then I was pretty intolerant of being corralled between the lines, as my parents will attest.

Maybe guideline follower is one of those things that I have never been and I should work on, but sometimes then I feel like I would just be like all of the other lemmings marching toward the cliff of conformity without ever asking why.

Guidelines are created by and for a litigious world, where individuals refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, i.e. wearing flip flops in fire camp. Everybody wants somebody else to pay the price for their poor choices. But if there are rules, then nobody else can be blamed, right? I don't see that working very well. Humans are messy animals that will find a rule that has not been made yet, break it, and cost others so much that it will demand the recourse of a new guideline the rest of us are stuck with. Too many rules are just a symptom of a much bigger problem, I think Ima keep bucking them, and working to solve it.

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Filed Under: Why Me?

Coming home from a fire is like the best/worst thing in the world. It's exactly the same as going to a fire, but the opposite. All of the idealistic anticipation about how Wonderful Everything Will Be when you get to where you're going meets the relief of leaving all of the chaos and hardships of where you're coming from behind and it's like this bittersweet mingling of excitement and a Still Small Voice telling you not to be disappointed when it's not as awesome as you had planned. Because inevitably, when you get home, the bathroom will look like a troll habitat, the dog will have pooped in the dining room and Someone has definitely been sleeping in your bed.

Coming home from this last fire was a lot like all of the other homecomings and firegoings, but since it had been a 21 day assignment I was extra excited/full of dread. The dread was definitely offset by the anticipation of getting into my own bed, dirty sheets or not, after sleeping in the back seat of a crew cab for two weeks at spike camp. I didn't INTEND to sleep in the back seat for two weeks, but they kept telling me that I was only staying at spike for two days, so I never put my tent up, even after 7 different 2 day stints. It was probably a divine set-up to make me appreciate my bed all the more.

Anyway, on the way home, after 21 days, I decided to stop at Costco. Mostly because A) I knew we were undoubtedly out of dog food again and B) I wanted to see how much more stuff I could squish into my already loaded down SUV, so Costco seemed like the logical place to stop. Obviously I bought everything. All the things that Costco sells. One of each. I was feeling all perky and energetic and productive - as sleep deprived people with Lots of Caffeine on board often do, plus it was only mid afternoon and I was almost home. I crammed EVERY of the Costco items into the back of my car, even taking the time to shove the cold stuff in my cooler, which for some silly reason has "return to fire cache" stenciled on the lid. With All the Things tucked nicely away, floor to ceiling, in the back of my rig, I careened merrily out of the parking lot at Costco, right into that busy side street just before the light.

Some hideous crashing, crunching, grinding, popping noise happened behind me, and to my horror I looked in the rear view mirror and realized that the back hatch of my fire-mobile had flown open mid-careen into the street. A trail that involved the entire inventory of Costco Wholesale was strewn across the street behind me, along with a few well placed fire items. I watched as my two pack of milk gallons tumbled down the street nine times and three minivans full of screaming homeschoolers swerved around them. It was amazing. Somehow, I found my emergency flashers, which always seem to go missing from the dashboard in the event of a real crisis. I had locked up my brakes and watched helplessly as several Angry Faced City Drivers who were nearly killed by swerving minivans made their way around my entire pantry and assorted socks and underwear.

Out of nowhere, or at least the office building on the corner, three of The Nicest People In America came sprinting into the street, gathering up butter, cheese, commercial sized boxes of tampons and six jars of Nutella at a dead run. One of them was barefoot. I was much too concentrated on my salvage efforts to remember to ask her why she had no shoes on, but maybe she was Buddhist or something, but judging by her leopard print toenails, probably not. These Lunch Hour Angels even loaded my cold stuff back into the cooler and insisted on doing a two-man lift with me to get it into the back of my car (after we had pried it out from under the rear bumper where it had tumbled and wedged). I alternately apologized to and thanked my heroes profusely as I tucked my rank-smelling dirty fire laundry farther behind the dog food and toilet paper. Really they were so nice I almost cried. Miraculously, nothing was damaged. Not the milk, not the bread, not the 6 pack of romaine hearts. Nothing broken or lost - I have no idea how in the world that is possible, other than the cushion of my fire bedroll breaking some of the fall.

I drove home in mortal fear of a repeat event, starting out from every stop at the slowest imaginable pace, pissing off a whole new wave of minivans and Angry Faced City Drivers at every light. Thankfully, the rest of the trip was mostly uneventful, and I made it home with out airing any more of my dirty laundry - on the street at least.

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Things That Won't Kill You (Or Make You Stronger

My underwear are inside out. I just discovered that when I made my first of what will be many forays into the ceanothus bushes on the side of the road today. In my defense it was dark and cold in my truck when I put them on, and also in my defense, at least they are clean. This fire assignment has been one of the ones where I break all of the rules, that, as a mother, are the cardinal guardians of health and propriety. Rules like:

Change your underwear

Don’t sleep in your clothes

Brush your hair

Take a shower

Call your mother

Wash your face

Put on clean clothes

Broken. All of them. I think of myself scolding Halle about her fire showering habits, and at ten o'clock at night as I stare at the line of grubbier-than-me firefighters waiting for one of the five shower stalls in spike camp, I decide that it’s just not worth it. I have deodorant. I have hardly broken a sweat in the last two weeks, except when I had that teensy-weensy fever the other day. I have been wearing the same shirt and pants for two weeks. I have changed my underwear, more than once, as well as my socks. We will leave it at that and allow you to extrapolate the worst. I have had three total showers since I got here 15 days ago. You do the math. And at night, when it’s dropping into the mid 30s and I know I will be waking up to sub-freezing temps, I crawl into my brand-new down sleeping bag in my two-week-old dirty clothes and drift off into a NyQuil induced coma, knowing I don’t have to wake up and struggle into freezing clothes in the morning.

This fire is also a little unusual in that I have absolutely no contact with the outside world. Apparently people in this neck of the woods have never heard of AT&T. I am a cellular outcast, watching with longing as The Others run up to lookout hilltops to call their loved ones and check Facebook on their Verizon devices. I had access to wifi at the incident command post when I would walk All The Way across camp (it’s far) and stand awkwardly in a hallway in the way of all the important ICP people doing important ICP things. But now I am at Spike Camp, where the only cellular activity is the faint hiss-pop of brain cells exploding after constant contact with ambient smoke for days on end.

I got a head cold from a Division supervisor who got it from a crew of unshowered snot bags on the line - one of which might have been my own daughter. It’s like a mosaic of viruses out here, a pretty technicolor blend of upper respiratory and intestinal symptoms that swirl in harmonic cadence to the rhythm of a dry cough. I have been in a sinus-smogged haze for a few days, thinking everyday it is a little better and then waking up with razor blades in my throat or dizzy spells that convince me it is not. Luckily I am part of the medical unit and have All The Drugs to fix what ails me. But not. For the record, DayQuil is garbage. What I need is real sudafed and apparently in Oregon, that’s a prescription drug. So I suffer in semi-silence.

Being The Worst Mother In The World, I also missed my kid’s first day of school. I have been entertained with arguments against myself about whether making enough money to pay all the bills is more important than big landmarks like that, and so far both sides are winning, so it’s safe to say my guilt mechanisms are alive and well. I have gotten used to talking to myself - a habit that comes in handy for a line EMT who sits alone, with no cell service, at a drop point for 14 hours a day. All of the things I think I need to tell The Whole World become trivial information I feed to myself. Also I have read 17 books. That’s a lot.


I am living proof that neither dirty underwear, lack of connectivity, parenting badly or a virus pot-luck can kill you. I am reluctant to assure you that any of the aforementioned will make you stronger, although I can feel my immune system rallying in the form of thick yellow mucus every day.

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On Fire Camp

This is my tenth season in wildland fire. You'd think by now that I would have it figured out, surviving this mini-world with its own rules, but I am still learning. For my fire and non fire friends, I'd like to share with you some of the survival techniques I have adopted.
Fire Camp Survival Guidelines

1. In a wildland fire setting, the more smiley and friendly you are, the farther it will get you. Being cute helps, but isn't entirely necessary. I have heard that this approach works well all hours of the day, but because of personal handicaps, I can only vouch for the hours of the day beginning at about 9 AM.
2. Personal hygiene is a highly subjective and easily justified area of compromise in the wild land fire world. The necessity and frequency of showering, with or without shower unit availability, is hotly debated and widely considered to be of a personal nature, except when you share a crew rig with one or more other people. At this point, it must be decided as a collective whether bathing is a requirement, an option, or strictly forbidden. Thank heavens most Hotshot crews are moving away from the idea that a shower is a sign of weakness, but we still have some paradigms to overthrow. I, personally am of the every-other-day school of thought, any more would seem indulgent, any less, assuming you have showers at you disposal, would just be unnecessarily gross. In the event that showers are not available, dry shampoo does serve a purpose other than decorating the inside of Paris Hilton's overnight bag. Also hats. Hats are good.*
3. Getting dressed. This continues to be one of the Great Challenges of life in fire. For those of you who sleep in tents occasionally for "fun", it is readily apparent that standing to dress can be problematic for any adult of an ordinary size, unless your tent is the Taj Mahal of outdoor lodging, which I would frankly be too embarrassed to unfurl at a fire camp. The Taj Mahals are here, and widely mocked by hotshots who still insist that people who are not weak sleep sans-tent on any not-flame-engulfed piece of ground. But a reasonable tent of the 1-3 man variety still leaves room to be desired (literally) when one goes to get dressed in the dark, cold, early mornings. Over the years I have learned to dress myself in a laying position. This is pretty easy, except for the Bra, which as we saw in recent stories, becomes a day long issue at times. The other danger in this lying down approach to dressing, is the risk of catching something in the Velcro of your nomex pants without noticing. This could be something innocent, like a sock, or one of the many hats that are placed strategically around the tent for quick retrieval. More often than not, the thing stuck to your Velcro will be a pair of dirty underwear. Dirty underwear on a fire are different than regular dirty underwear at home. Whether this is because of the generally understood rule of 4 (inside, outside, front and back, gets you four days of "clean" underwear out of one pair), or because squatting to pee in the ash results in a gray/black dusty effect regardless of the color they started as, dirty fire undies are just embarrassing. Especially when you wear them to the morning briefing in the Velcro of your Nomex pockets. So always check your Velcro. Also zippers. Zippers on Nomex pants are notorious for refusing to go up, stay up, or close without catching the yellow tail of your Nomex shirt. The standard fire fighter finger sweep of the zipper fly is at least an hourly occurrence, and can be pulled of deftly, as if one was just reaching casually for one's pocket - but making sure the zipper pull is exactly where it is supposed to be for maximum modesty. Again, no one wants to see fire undies. Especially if they're on outside or backwards days. I have arrived at briefing with almost every article of clothing on inside out and/or backwards at least once, luckily never all at once. On nights when I am really tired, I usually don't bother to take anything except my pants off to sleep, knowing that an equally tired 5 AM will make dressing a disaster. Nomex clothing on a fire can be exchanged for standard issue stuff at supply, rather than washing it, but if you buy the fancy designer Nomex, it's up to you to keep it clean. My new favorite hobby is visiting supply to see if anyone accidentally turned in some name brand Nomex, and have completely overcome both my pride and my fear of poison oak in digging through the bin of turned in dirties - dumpster diving ala Wildland Fire. This tactic won me 8 old school Nomex shirts last year, the vintage, smooth ones that are WAY more comfortable. This year I stumbled across a pair of Kevlar pants in almost my exact size! $200, y'all. My partner, Lee, was both impressed and envious, so we went back the next day, just to see, and I scavenged another pair, in almost his exact size! We were a little giddy with our good luck and vowed to check supply morning and night for the duration of the assignment.
4. Eating. Everybody knows that we eat great on fires. 4000 calories a day, all you can eat salad bar, and lots of snacks. The dark side of fire-food is the mystery meat sandwiches for lunch, pastrami that is rainbow colored, mixed veggies for dinner that are a suspiciously high concentration of watery Lima beans, and really bad coffee. I will leave coffee it's own space and address the rest. Dinner is usually great. There's almost always something edible for dinner, if nothing else, the salad bar is often a safe fallback. I usually eat the meat that is the main course and salad. I've learned to skip the bread, and often the starch sides and cooked vegetables. I've even managed to avoid most deserts. Except for the strawberry shortcake last night. And milk. I drink a lot of milk at if camp. It's just tradition. After ten years in fire, I have finally come to the realization that I don't like fire lunches. I still get them so I can take the two granola bars, dried fruit and grandma's cookies home to the kids (or Husband), and eat the fritos, but I find little that I can really digest. As I mentioned, if you can identify the stack of meat in your sandwich, it will undoubtedly be translucent, at best, and usually technicolor. Survival techniques for this fire problem vary. Usually a run to the closest store for chips and bean dip do it for me, maybe stealing yogurt and cold cereal from the breakfast bar, some people I know save part of the giant portion of meat from dinner the night before. Any fire overhead personnel worth his mettle will be packing a Jetboil. The Jetboil is the line firefighter's mealtime salvation. In addition to making your own coffee (next section), e Jetboil is amazing for soups, frying salvageable parts of fire lunches (I.e. burritos, thin sliced ham, etc), and just giving you something to do if you are sitting on the line all day waiting for someone to have an emergency. Last year when it was late season and it was cold and I had a little bit of camp crud, i got some of the Bear Creeek soup mix and some crackers. I had the best little cheddar and brocolli picknick on my tailgate. Always pack snacks. Always. Unless you are me, and forget to, and whine for days.
5. Coffee is the single most important part of fire camp survival. Most food units make their giant vats of coffee with a coffee concentrate as opposed to grounds. It's pretty disgusting, unless you scald all of your taste buds off early into the fire because it's also much hotter that humanly reasonable. Our medical unit, and many of the other fringe overhead organizations, bring a coffee maker and "real" coffee to camp with them. Sometimes the secret leaks out and you find yourself waiting in line for the third pot because the entire overhead roster has come for a cup. My biggest issue personally is finding acceptable cream sources. I've often had to resort to powdered creamer, which I honestly prefer to the sickly-sweet, coffee mate flavored creamers which are available in great abundance and basically just a compound of poisons and sugar. This fire has almost real half and half, of the tiny cup, non-refrigerated variety, and since the coffee tastes bad, I've been adding a packet of honey. Later we will discuss honey. But it makes my coffee taste almost like a carmel latte. The ideal set up, especially for a line medic, is a Jetboil and a French press, or the available combination thereof. I'd prefer to have them separately, because ultimately, after seasons of unwashed use, the French Press is a robust and well seasoned shrine to good coffee, and I don't really want my broccoli cheese soup tasting like java. On my last assignment, I took a pint of heavy whipping cream, my coffee additive of hedonistic choice. The paper carton didn't hold up well in the cooler of ice though, so I am rethinking my approach. Probably a Rubbermaid bottle from home? A good buddy of mine packs Starbucks Via with her Jetboil, no press needed. I'm not in love with Via, or Starbucks in general, but it's better than coffee syrup coffee, by a long shot. **
6. Sleeping. One word: Benadryl. Until I get my own camper with a memory foam mattress, no configuration of stolen gray foam mats from supply, thermarests, sleeping bags and quilts from home can fend off the inevitable back spasm after several days of tossing and turning. This morning I woke up with a bruise in my left gluteal muscle, presumably from a flashlight or pair of socks or something that was easily mistaken for part of the "bed".The best approach to sleeping in fire camp involves identifying and avoiding floodlights, smoking areas, cell phone reception pockets, and poison oak, taking a Benadryl and not remembering the night at all. NyQuil is another camp favorite, but may be harder to talk the resident EMT into handing out, depending on how benevolent they're feeling. An EMT who has fixed a lot of BooBoos in a day is usually feeling pretty high on their protocol administration, and is likely more pliable than a bored camp EMT who hasn't had a chance to flex their medical knowledge for the day and is dying to tell you why they can't give you NyQuil. So always look for the dirtiest medic in the unit. Which will very likely be me.
7. Socialization is another key factor in this microcosm. Learning where it is important to make friends will get you a long way. Some of the most important people to buddy up to included communications (you'll never have to beg for batteries), medical (dibs on the rare Green Gold Bond?), And supply (vintage Nomex and unlimited duct tape and glow sticks). Food is also a good place to have friends, you can get a preview of meals which can determine a detour through town for a quick stop. It never hurts to have the Incident Commander and a few assorted operational bigwigs on your side, in case of unruly bosses, ordering up friends and/spouses or snagging primo spots on the line. "we need medic Weston for this float assignment on the Rogue River." "I'd like Medic Weston to fly the fire with me for some strategic medical planning." Friends in high places, y'all. See guideline 1.

I'm always looking for new tricks and interesting fire-coping mechanisms. Feedback welcome!
*I am in search of a reasonably cool and not-itchy Denver Broncos beanie. **Dutch Bros should come out with an instant coffee, y'all.


On Old Men

I love old men. I just do. And old ladies too. But old men can tell stories like no other. For clarification, by old I mean over 70. They've lived life. No more games, fear of consequences. Just say it like it is, old men. If I could encapsulate every old man I have ever met in a colorful story book, I think that I would be pretty happy with myself. Theirs are stories worth telling, and worth hearing.

This week I worked with a man named Jim. He's 74, and he's out here, running a skidgeon. Or a squidgeon, if you're like Some People, and easily confused by words. For anyone who doesn’t know, a skidgeon is a cross between a log skidder and an engine. It can dig and cut and drag and squirt and drench. It's pretty cool. And when you run it, you get tossed about the cab like a bobble head, breathing dust and smoke like crazy, especially when you have a home-made number like Jim's skidgeon, with an open screen, welded cab. Most skidgeon operators are of a certain age, and deaf. It's that disregard for consequence I think. The nothing-left-to-lose and what's-a-few-bumps-and-aches-and-pains. I think it makes them feel young and useful and alive.

Jim told me a story about his family. He's been married to Betty for 54 years. They had two daughters. One is a roller operator for a road constructions crew and the other he said, got into "drugs and bullshit", and well, it finally killed her. The heavy equipment operator daughter lost all of her fingers and a good chunk of her left hand working at the mill, but she still has her thumb so she manages just fine driving. The other daughter, Bobbi, got married to a local boy named Blue, who turned out to be no good. The story goes thusly:

About 27 or so years ago, Blue took his refer truck out to Kansas, with Bobbi in tow, leaving their two week old baby back in Oregon with family. They set out to make some money, but after bouncing from state to state fruitlessly, Blue finally saw what he wanted somewhere in central Kansas. He set Bobbi up driving the refer truck and he hid in the sleeping compartment. He told her to hail another trucker pulling a load of cattle. She talked the other driver into pulling over for a joint, and when he the sucker climbed into the cab of the refer, Blue shot him twice and killed him dead. He bundled up the body in the back of the refer trailer, which he left on the side of e desolate road, then he hooked his cab up to that beef and hauled it back to Oregon and sold it. Bobbi watched in horror as he cleaned up the blood that streamed down the side of the truck, and as he got a neighbor to dig a put to bury some of the steers that had died in their overlong and miserable transport. Blue told the neighbor to leave the pit for some other trash, and went back to Kansas to get his refer, complete with dead body. He wrapped that body up and threw it in the mass cattle grave and dumped it in, covering it before he had the neighbor come and bury the whole damn pile.


It took two years for Bobbi to tell Jim and Betty what her husband had done, after Blue had run off with a dingbat hairdresser. Jim went straight to a lawyer friend and they got Bobbi's statement all done up. Sure enough, the guy that Blue had killed had a warrant out for HIS arrest for stealing the cattle in the first place, so the only people looking for him were the Kansas police. Bobbie took them out to the property where the body was, where the sheriffs, looking for all of the world like neighborhood rednecks in their cowboy hats (cause that's how they do it out there in Mitchell, Oregon), lured Blue out of that trailer and arrested him right there in front of that dingy hairdresser. They found the body, sure enough, and when they got Blue down to the police station and upstairs towards the interrogation room, the guy wrestled away from the cops in his handcuffs and jumped out of a second story window. As you can imagine, he didn't get very far, and after a week long trial in Topeka, he was sentenced to 25 years. After that, he sent love letters to his dingbat hairdresser girlfriend who had just inherited a good bunch of money and had moved to Kansas to be close to her jailbird boyfriend. After buttering her up with lots of mushy stuff, he told her to hire somebody to go out to Oregon, get Bobbi hooked on drugs, get her to recant her statement, and then overdose her. Blue told the dingbat to destroy the letters, which had all of these instructions in detail, but she kept them, because they were sweet. The hairdresser paid $3000 to one druggie to go out and take care of business, but, surprisingly, he disappeared with the cash. Then she gave a convicted felon $1200 to carry out the deed, who took the money and copies of the letters to the police. Something about those letters made it so that Blue managed to stay in prison past his 25 year sentence, but Bobbi didn't make it that long. Her own bad habits got the better of her. Her daughter, Heather, stayed with Jim and Betty until her delinquent father tried to weasel his way into her good graces for help with a parole hearing. Lucky she was smart enough to know better, and she'd read the death sentence letters about her mother. Heather is an ultrasound tech now, with three kids, and another one on the way.


Jim has more stories to tell, about how Betty is as smart and talented as they come, but prefers to sit around on the computer. She had a run in with "female cancer" last year and she's doing ok now, but she'd gotten pretty heavy and one day, Jim took her by the shoulders, looked her in the eye, and said "you know that I love you dearly, but if you don't lose some weight, you'll be in a wheel chair inside of two years." Betty started walking, taking some pills, and lost 120 pounds. He says she could do petty much anything she wants, but she kind of likes to do nothing. After 54 years, if someone can criticize me with that much affection in his eyes, I'd be ok with it.


Then there was Steve. Another heavy equipment operator of the appropriate age, who had suffered a Aaortic Anuerysm two years before I met him on the Cub Complex in northern California. He had missed the last fire season, he said, because he had been in a coma for about 6 months due to the massive loss of blood and shock to his system. He said it wouldn't have been so bad except the doctors didn't take him seriously on his first two ER visits. They gave him heartburn pills and sent him home. The third time, he said, he had to lapse into a coma right in front of them to get dome attention. Anyone who works in the medical field, and many other people, understand that an unattended, undiagnosed Aaortic aneurysm is ALWAYS fatal. The chance of surviving one that is caught right away is slim. Steve is nothing more than a CAT driving miracle.


One of my favorite old men of all time is Larry. I worked with Larry for the better part of two summers. He taught me how to ride ATVs, mostly by letting me crash, and groom trails, and dig holes, build signs and drive really fast on washboard roads. Larry was adamant about the legality of the "basic rule,” which was some addendum to state speeding laws that said if it was safer to go faster than the speed limit, it was ok. I looked it up, and sure enough, there was some little loophole that could be stretched just far enough to prevent Larry from ever getting a speeding ticket. I could never get over watching Larry run a Stihl 66 for 8 hours a day, with gnarled, arthritic Hands and a habitual hunch in his back, which I can imagine once was broad and strong, back when he was a city firefighter for Bend, and the big brick fire station with the brass poles was't a series of hipster bars that couldn't stay in business. I can see him picking up cleverly on the pretty receptionist that passed the station, and marrying her up right quick with her two kids and all, because Joanne was all that and a bag of chips. I hear that Joanne had a bout with cancer last year, and it wasn't looking good. I need to call Larry.


Then there was the old navy vet with MRSA in his lungs that I rode with in the back of the ambulance to Spokane. He taught me how to say "lint of the belly button" in Italian, which had been his mother's favorite obscenity. I wish I could remember that silly phrase. I swore I'd never forget it.

I honestly look forward to being married to an old man someday - somebody with absolutely nothing to prove to anyone and lots of nose and ear hairs. I look forward to rolling my eyes at his stories and backing him up when our great grandkids respond in disbelief. An old man of the best variety. One with all of the best and most amazing stories. Stories that we're living right now.

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