"As long as you can breathe you can survive"...

Opening shot from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

He smelled like Captain Black: There is a story that goes like this: A little boy had a kind old grandfather who brought him gifts and smelled of pipe tobacco. The boy's name is inconsequential, his grandfather was Fred, but the boy called him Gran-pa...

Yellow-green skies and brown-grey pipe smoke: The boy has a memory of running into the yellow-green-skied tropical winds of his backyard during Hurricane David's run up the east coast while Gran-pa watched on from the shelter of a side porch. It's a strange memory to have and might be corrupt*, but in it the sky was so weird, the wind powerful enough to knock the boy down, and the pipe-smoking kind-smiling leather-skinned Gran-pa, so calm. It's a suspicious memory that might be a hybrid with ties to two or more separate side porch moments, perhaps even spanning two homes and multiple days in the late 70s; but it is a powerful recollection, nonetheless, for a seven year-old contrasting exciting yellow-green danger with calm brown-grey pipe smoke...

He was a great man: Gran-pa, at one point in his life, had been a mayor of a small town that surely had white picket fenced houses, a candy store on the corner, and a gazebo/band-stand at the center of town across from the soda fountain/diner. He was married to a woman who was elegant and had one child who fit right-in on the fall-harvest float in the town parade. Gran-pa had also been a volunteer firefighter in his time; and he had a kind smile. Gran-pa died when the boy was seven of emphysema. Everytime anyone spoke to the boy about his grandfather, they said things like, "He was a great man. He was a firefighter, you know." The little boy always heard, "Your grandfather was a great man, BECAUSE he was a firefighter." And so he always thought firefighters were great men (and women)...

Life imitating fiction imitating life: The boy visited the local firehouse in North Baltimore throughout his youth, and eagerly watched any movie or show that featured firefighting as he grew older:

• Emergency (1972-1977) - TV
• Towering Inferno (1974) - Movie
• Code Red (1981-1982) - TV
• Backdraft (1991) - Movie
• Firestorm (1998) - Movie
• Third Watch (1999-2005) - TV
• 9/11 (2002) - Movie
• Ladder 49 (2004) - Movie
• Rescue Me (2004-2011) - TV
• Chicago Fire (2012-present) - TV

The quality of some of these cinematic depictions of firefighting is suspect, as is the acting and plot in places. Director of Backdraft Ron Howard has commented on how hard it is to film fire well, but makes it exciting in Backdraft, and the fire in Jay Russell's Ladder 49 is near perfect. What is captured consistently in each of these shows and films is the camaraderie of the firefighters themselves as they do the work they are trained to do and rely on each other as soldiers must in any conflict...

And so the boy decided one day to be a firefighter and perhaps be a great man like Gran-pa...

4/4/12

"If this ain’t the greatest job in the world, I don’t know what is.": Many events from my childhood, along with relocation to my own small town with picket fences and volunteer firefighters, and ultimately the events of 9/11 (2001) moved me to join the local fire department and train to be a firefighter. God, I love my jobs! Both interior firefighting and wildland firefighting are a mix of exciting yellow-green danger with calm brown-grey pipe smoke... We don't run into buildings or forests on fire, spazzy and uncontrolled; we walk in, find the beast, look it in the eye, and kick its ass. The chaos of an interior fire and limitations of equipment on light-hearted communication makes fighting structure-fires acute and exciting, but lacks the slow buddy-building that fighting a fire in the woods might. Wildland firefighting is its own beast, and requires different gear and training than interior work; it yields a different sort of camaraderie, not better or worse, just different. Walking into the woods at dawn with your crew to resume battle on a fire that has been resting all night but ready to spring back to life is an amazing feeling...

2013 events fictionalized in 2017: On October 20, Columbia Pictures will release Only the Brave, a movie based upon the story of hotshots battling the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire of Arizona. Although the director, Joseph Kosinski, is reasonably unproven, the trailer for this film has me very excited nonetheless. "We’re only seconds away, it’s going to feel like the end of the world. As long as you can breathe you can survive"...

* I called my mother after writing this and found some facts. Oh, how memories can be corrupted by time. We lived on Midherst until Summer '78. The porch there had steps leading into the back yard. Fred loved that porch. He visited Overhill before he died and loved the porch there as well, but it does not have stairs leading to the back yard. Hurricane David did not land in Maryland until Fall '79, several months after Fred had died. Memories of green skies and brown grey pipe smoke are just the mind of a boy grasping at wisps of his beginnings it seems...