In baseball, if a pitcher makes quick work of every batter he faces, the opposing team will invariably say, “Sometimes you just have to tip your cap.”
That’s how I feel pretty much every time I watch firefighters do their thing.
I say this without snark or hyperbole. Watching firefighters work is humbling because A) they know 10 times more than the rest of us about how to get things done, and B) they’re wicked brave and stuff.
“Firefighters run toward trouble as the rest of us run away,” goes that old chestnut, and how true is that? These are men and women doing battle with one of nature’s most powerful forces. Fire is the ultimate boogeyman, and firefighters are the only ones brave enough to reach under the bed to slay it.
Or something.
When I was living in Virginia, I decided to pop some popcorn before going down to the pool for bloody marys. A simple thing, popcorn. Pour in oil, dump in the kernels and let it fly.
I may have been watching a pretty neighbor frolic in the pool below when the stove went up in flames. It wasn’t much of a fire — the grease overheated while I was gawking and POOF! A neat circle of flames contained pretty much to the burning pan. I probably could have smothered it with a towel, but no. I went for the sink nozzle and tried to kill the boogeyman with a jet of water.
I know, right? Everybody understands that you don’t throw water at a grease fire. Stop sending that damn Dalmation to my house to educate me. I get it now.
What happened in my Virginia kitchen was a wicked blast of fire that rose up like a dragon’s breath. It singed my eyebrows and warmed my face like a sunburn. It toasted the cupboards and blackened the ceilings in less than a single second.
I tell you now, with only a wee bit of shame, that my very first impulse was to flee. When the flames roared up around my face, the voice that screamed inside my head said only one word: RUN! Which is what fire wants every human in the world to do so it can be about wreaking its blazing havoc.
Fire is a compassionless beast that wants to eat everything in its path. Being close to a really big one is hypnotic and fascinating, but no matter how mesmerized you become, there is always that voice, as ancient as the oldest lizard, demanding that you flee.
When I see a firefighter, 100 feet in the air and leaning into a mountain of flames, I think two things. Wow, is that dude brave, is one of them. The other is the persistent idea that you have to be half-mad to want to cross swords with an enemy that will leap down your throat and blast your lungs if you give it only half a chance.
They climb onto the roofs of blazing buildings with chain saws buzzing in their hands. They bust through doors and into the mouths of hell to save the lives of strangers or — more often than not — the strangers’ possessions.
They’ll go toe to toe with a 2,000-degree monster whether it’s in a mansion up on the hill or in a leaning tenement with boards over the windows. They’ll haul your butt out of hell without first questioning what kind of person you are or whether you’re worth saving. They risk their own hide to save yours whether you’re young or old, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly.
But I tell you, it’s more than just the Hollywood-style heroics. On the prosaic calls, the ones that don’t make headlines, fire guys are no less amazing.
If you’re trapped inside the mangled metal fist of a car wreck, they know how to get you out. If your kid gets his head caught between banister railings for the third time in his young life, a firefighter knows how to extricate him.
Cats stuck in sewer drains, gloved hands caught in snowblowers, hysterical people entombed in a stalled elevator? No sweat. The fire people go into their little huddles, work up a plan and put that plan into motion. They find solutions for problems that baffle most of us.
And they deal day after day with idiots. Idiots like me with my Kitchen Sink Nozzle of Death. Idiots who like to crowd around the firetrucks gawking while fire crews are trying to get to the flames. Idiots who use their fire escapes for storage and then lean screaming from a window as their building burns and there’s no way to get out.
After 9/11, firefighters were celebrated, and rightfully so, during our long period of rage and mourning. Who in the hell but one of those guys is going to run uninhibited into a 1,700-foot building that’s raining fire, jet fuel, steel beams and bodies?
Brave with a touch of crazy, that’s our men in red (or yellow, I suppose) on a day-to-day basis. Whether they’re lugging you out of a blazing hotel or plucking Uncle Joe from the chimney (every year he gets drunk and tries to play Santa Claus), we ought to remember what they do and how deftly they do it.
This, as it turns out, is National Fire Prevention Week. The best way to honor a firefighter is to refrain from doing something stupid in the first place. Don’t stick your hand in a snowblower, don’t light your barbecue with gasoline and don’t pour water on a grease fire, you big dope.
But I guess everyone knows that.
Mark “The Flame” LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer and a big dope. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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