After the fire-safety lecture, we sent the kids on their way with a plastic bag full of goodies—pencils, a ruler, a coloring book, brochures for their parents. Thus armed with cultural interdiction, they climbed aboard their yellow buses and left for home. One of the little boys—I remember helping him down the ladder, he had a cast on his arm—went straight to his backyard and lit a fire in the leaves. Then he stomped on the fire, trying to put it out. His socks caught on fire, badly burning his legs. He stopped, dropped, and rolled, until the fire was out. It was what the firefighters had told him to do, he told the adults who came running.
6
RUNNING THE LOOP
I ONCE RAN A MILE in four minutes and forty-eight seconds. I was a high-schooler then, a New Auburn Trojan. My senior year, I was the only boy on the track team. The picture is there in the 1983 yearbook—just me, up against the wall, grinning, over the caption, “Boys Track Team—Mike Perry.” I trained alone, and my coach drove me to meets in his little red car. I enjoyed racing, but dreaded the gut-churning buildup to the starting gun. I spent a lot of time in the Porta-Potty. I ran solitary warm-up laps, and I was always meeting packs of grinning sprinters. I envied them the speed and brevity of their events. Win or lose, they were done in a matter of seconds. Me, on the other hand, I stood there at the start line of the two-mile with quaking bowels and the full knowledge that I was in for a minimum ten minutes of anoxia and rib stitches. The sprinters were brash and cocky. They ran their warm-up laps against the flow. Invariably one of them would leer at the emblem on my singlet: “Woo-hoo! I used my Trojan last night!”
I still do a little running. I have this loop, 3.9 miles, a few hills and slow rises, just enough to burn your legs and lug the engine some. I try to run it four or five times a week. The loop is laid out in a rectangle, with a bite out of one corner where Highway Q curves up and over the four-lane. To run the loop is to trace an off-kilter frame around my hometown. I think of myself taking a lap inside a living zoetrope, moving past images presented in collage and linked by constantly shifting associations, overlapping and bleeding through to form a dynamic composition of history, place and event. I run the loop, and I get perspective.
I usually lift weights first. Something to get the blood moving, prepare the lungs. I rank the joys of weight lifting somewhere between dish washing and dentistry. And lifting weights in a town where most men swing hammers or run shovels or wrassle logs feels absurd and ersatz. But a guy will not maintain tone through typing alone. So I strap in and commit myself to the process, which amounts to a series of grunts accreted in tedium. Only my compulsive counting affliction keeps me going. I am always counting: the number of twists it takes to run the can opener around a tuna tin, the number of chops it takes to dice a leek, the number of turns required to retrieve the arrow on my carp-shooting rig. Ticking off each weight-lifting repetition and arranging them in twelve-rep sets (in my head, they accumulate in neat, soothing rows) feeds the compulsion. And music helps. In particular, the group Venison and their 1996 opus HATE! Twelve tracks of cando rage and post-industrial stoicism. Diesel-grade rock. Just the sort of propulsion required for pointless hoisting. “In Wisconsin,” roars front man Rick Fuller, referencing our state motto, “we say, ‘Forward!’”
After the last set of reps, I’m ready to run. At least when you run, you cover some ground. I leave the house and head up Main Street. Up being east. Past Tugg’s Bar, past Snook’s store, past the meat market, up to where Main Street forms a T with East Street, a block and a half from my front door. Fourteen addresses, counting homes and businesses and both sides of the street. Since I joined the department five years ago, I have made calls to half of them. Guy across the street hurt his back. One of the Goshen girls had a seizure in front of the store. Some kids pitched a smoke bomb in the storage shed behind the meat market and it caught fire. I nearly keeled over in the heat of that one. An old man in the little white house next to Ward Southern’s was digging a pit in his yard when he began to have chest pain. When I heard the address, I just grabbed the emergency kit from the trunk of my car and ran up the street. His wife called to me through the screen. The man up at East Street and Main dials 911 when his lungs seize up. We’ve been there four or five times. Tuff at the bar, his heart has been kicking in and out lately, and we’ve given him oxygen in the back room some mornings.
If you go straight at the T, keep running east, you’ll wind up in Herbie Gravunder’s barn. His farm sits right off the end of Main Street. Herbie’s gone now, and the real estate agents are beginning to chunk up his land, divvy it out in lots. He died a year ago, at the age of eighty-seven, after a nasty fall led to a terminal stretch in the nursing home. Herbie cussed the nursing home. Toward the end, he used to phone his cousin Delmar, try to get sprung. Delmar is seventy-nine years old now. He and Herbie used to run together. Tooled around the Mud Brook back roads on motorcycles. Delmar had a Honda 350, Herbie had a Harley Davidson Sprint. Delmar says you had to pay attention, you’d hit a patch of gravel and pack sand up your snoot. Herbie came up on a herd of cows once and had to lay the Harley down. Delmar says he shot right under a Holstein.
Herbie was stone deaf. A result, ironically or not, of the years he spent running a rock crusher for the county. And Delmar says in the old days they always pulled the mufflers off their tractors, figuring the louder the engine the more power it had. Herbie always had little tufts of cotton sticking out his ears, but then so did most of the old farmers I remember from my childhood. Anyway, what with the deafness, and the cotton, and the flannel earflapper cap he wore most of the time, Herbie lived in a muffled world. He drove this little red pickup, and sometimes he’d have his foot on the accelerator when he started it, and it would just roar. Oblivious, he’d hit the starter again, and the sound was like a sidewinder grinder chewing through sheet metal. My brother John worked behind the parts counter at the implement store for a while, and Herbie used to come in regular. He’d wander into the shop area and cuss in disbelief at the size of tractors these days. Herbie was one of your heartfelt cussers. Every other word, pretty much. He left this little trail of blue smoke, my brother used to say. Once I told Delmar, “Ol’ Herbie had quite a vocabulary!” Delmar crinkled his eyes. “Yeah? Well it ain’t in the dictionary.”
Herbie was a worker. He’d get up at four A.M. to milk his cows, then run a school bus route, return home for chores, and reverse the process after lunch. He drove milk truck back when you slung the milk aboard in 100-pound steel cans and when there were so many farms in the country that the milk truck doubled as the snow plow. He drove the truck that oiled the country roads, and he put up light poles for the Rural Electrification Administration. In 1934, Herbie bought the local blacksmith shop. He did general repairs and welding, and sold gas until the new highway drained the traffic out of town. He went to the blacksmith shop most every morning, right up to the last. I’d see him putt down Main Street, never much over fifteen miles an hour. Herbie couldn’t be rushed. I went for a bicycle ride on Highway M one afternoon, caught him on the double yellow with traffic coming, and had to dawdle behind him for a quarter mile until he turned off at Delmar’s farm. Delmar says Herbie always arrived with a line of cars behind him.
Herbie wasn’t always averse to speed. There were the motorcycles, and sometime in the ’70s he bought a used hovercraft. He tricked it out with running lights, a sonorous Model T horn, and—in a reversal of the noise equals power theory—a pair of chromed motorcycle tailpipes. He replaced the steering mechanism with an airplane yoke. Delmar says the hovercraft never quite worked right because the skirt was torn and Herbie removed it, not understanding that you can’t get any lift without the skirt. Herbie called Delmar one night after chores and they took the hovercraft out to Loon Lake for a test run. Without the skirt, it wouldn’t do much. Delmar says they sat side by side out in the water—neither one could swim—and Herbie ginned the engine up. The hovercraft began to rise, and they had their hopes up there for a little bit, but then
a giant air bubble rolled out from beneath the craft and they plopped back down. Delmar says that was about it. They just sat there and blew big ploppy bubbles. Come winter, Herbie had a brainstorm. He bolted a steel frame to the bottom of the hovercraft and welded three snowmobile skis to it. Then he called Delmar. (Delmar is spare and soft-spoken. Farmed all his life. You get the image of him as the loyal, if sometimes terrified, sidekick. He used to grumble about Herbie calling him all the time, interrupting his chores, but now he says he sure misses him.) This time Herbie and Delmar went out to Long Lake, which was a lot longer than Loon Lake, and took a test run. The steel skis and frame were awful heavy, and Delmar says Herbie had to flat pour the cobs to’er before they started to inch forward. Tailpipes or not, the noise was astounding. Carfuls of spectators began to accumulate on the road at the far end of the lake. Herbie kept his foot in it, and pretty soon they were shooting over the ice. The fixed skis made it almost impossible to steer, and Delmar’s crow’s feet wrinkle when he tells about how they fought to turn the thing as the shore approached. They had a good day, though, Delmar says, rocketing back and forth across the lake with all those people watching.
And Herbie loved airplanes. If you knew anything about flying he would talk your ear off. He used to bum flights from local pilots. He never got a license himself, but somewhere along the line he bought an airplane that had been in a crash. The wings were damaged, and it wouldn’t fly, but the engine ran, and the prop was intact. Herbie used to fire it up and taxi around his hayfield, happy as a clam. If you wanted, he’d give you a ride. In the winter he outfitted it with skis. He went to visit the neighbors once, and the ski tips got caught under the snow crust. Herbie climbed out of the cockpit and was kicking the skis free when he leaned forward and the prop snicked that earflapper cap right off his head. He loved to tell that one.
We never saw them, but Herbie’s hoverless hovercraft and flightless plane were part of local legend when my brothers and I were growing up. We used to speculate on them with the fascination young boys have for things that roar and fly. Rumor had it the hovercraft was hidden in the blacksmith shop somewhere, buried under the heaps of junk and steel that gradually overtook the space in Herbie’s later years.
It got to where Herbie was falling a lot. I was out of town the last time Herbie fell and he had to be taken away in the ambulance. He never did make it back home. I turn right at the T and head south down East Street, along the edge of Herbie’s cow pasture, now hosting the two newest houses in town.
East Street dips at Elm Street, and drops to cross a swale. During the spring melt, water rushes through the culvert at the center of the swale, then cuts across the wide green swathe of the Lions Club Park. Last I checked, the New Auburn Lions Club consisted of five members, and they weren’t getting along. After a period of neglect and decline, the park is being spruced up again. Volunteers have torn down the dilapidated old fair barn, put in new volleyball courts, upgraded the softball field, and raised money to put a footbridge over the spillway in the swale. A lot of the drive to improve the park is coming from my generation. They want their children to be able to play Little League ball and get a few carnival rides in during Jamboree Days. Like the old days, in 1975.
Straight across from the park is the village trailer court. The trailers are tightly packed, and arranged along a gentle up-slope. Right beside the road, there’s a rectangle of dirt where a trailer is missing. It burned last winter. We got the call at midnight. Jack Most and I were there first, with the attack pumper. Fire can shoot through a trailer in less than two minutes, and flames were already rolling out the roof on the upwind end, so I grabbed a hand line and bulled through the thigh-deep snow while Jack fired the pump. My idea was to get to the door situated roughly midway between either end of the trailer and try to cut the fire off, keep it contained to one end. Time and the wind were against me. By the time I hit the flimsy steel steps, Jack had fed me water, so I got low, and forearmed the door open. Peering through my face shield, I could see the interior was filled with smoke, and the flames were already past the doorway. The water punched a hole in the flames, but I was overmatched. I heard the sirens of Pumper One and the other trucks arriving. Someone ran up and said the residents were unaccounted for. We huddled quickly and figured if someone was still in the trailer—someone of whom there was any hope at all of saving—he or she would be in the bedroom, which was on the downwind end. The chief sent someone around the exterior of the trailer to scout for a second point of entry. A couple of us slung on air packs and tugged our masks on. “Packing up,” we call it. You practice over and over so you can pack up without a hitch in moments just like these, but the cold and the snow and the darkness and spinning lights make it tough. Sometime your hands go numb and stiffen with cold. Sometimes you get it all on and then you’re hung up with something silly, like maybe you can’t find a glove. You bend at the waist and peer around at the ground like a myopic robot. When the tank is on my back and the straps are all tight and the mask is sealed and locked, I wave at Brianna, the firefighter who is lining up the extra air tanks. She gives me a quick once-over. She checks for any gaps between the fireproof Nomex hood and my mask, adjusts and refastens the Velcro collar tab that forms a protective wrap around my throat. It’s critical, what she’s doing. Leave any skin exposed and at some point it will be fried or frozen.
The scout is back. He has located a small porch attached to the rear of the trailer, alongside the bedroom area. We’ll make an attack from there. A new guy drove Pumper One, and he missed the drive and backed into the ditch. There’ll be an award in that. The headlights are pointing at the stars, but the crew has still managed to lay and charge the two-and-a-halfs and set up gated wyes (devices that split one large hose into two smaller hoses), so we’ve got plenty of water and hose. Armed with a charged line and a heavy flashlight, three of us head in through the porch. Two other firefighters stay just outside the door to feed and retrieve hose. I’m on the nozzle. Lisa, a firefighter who got her training in the military, is right behind me, one hand gripping the cuff of my bunkers, the way we practiced in class. They used to teach us to hang on to each other’s boots, but this often results in getting your boot yanked off. Actually, our instructor told us it was safest to hang on to the strap of your partner’s air pack, but then you wind up right on top of him. The cuff is a compromise.
We crawl through the porch, and off to the right I can feel a door. Try before you pry, our instructor used to say, and so I turn the knob and sure enough the aluminum storm door swings out and the interior door swings in. I can tell we are in a hallway, but that’s it. The flashlight is no help. As soon as it hits the smoke, the light turns into a white pillar. We’ve only just received our thermal imager, and someone back at the truck is still setting it up. Flames are advancing down the hallway. I sweep the nozzle back and forth across the ceiling, pushing the fire back. The flames disappear, and we can feel the heat of the steam through our Nomex hoods. We advance a little more. Muffled behind her mask, Lisa hollers at me to check for heat on the floor. If the fire is working underneath, we could break through and become trapped. Good point. I pull off a glove and feel the floor. It’s an inch deep with warm water, but isn’t hot. Later I wonder how smart it was to pull off a glove in there.
Four feet inside the door, we’re at a dead end. As good as blind in the smoke, we can’t find a way into the bedroom. And the flames keep coming back, flashing down the hallway and over our heads. We repel them, and they return. We’re still fighting time and wind. I keep having this vision of a body in the bedroom. Once, the fire drives us back out to the little porch, and the storm door latches. Flames shimmy behind the glass. I twist the nozzle to fog stream, swing it like a baseball bat, smash the glass, then stuff the nozzle inside and whirl it around and around until we can fight our way back in. We gain, and get the door open again, and make another charge. I knee-walk up the hallway, holding the hose waist-high, like an Uzi, and blast away. We knock the fire clear
back to the living room. I get caught up in the battle, and like some Backdraft! wannabe, give out with a “Wooo-hooo!” Smoke and steam close in all around us.
Someone finally hands up the thermal imager, and when I swing it around, I see I might have spared myself the woo-hoos. There are flames above me. There are flames to the right of me. The black-and-white screen reveals the outline of the bedroom door—behind us, it turns out, our access blocked by the porch door—and it frames a dancing shock of flames. None of this was visible without the imager. The smoke and steam obscure everything. I scan as much of the bedroom as I can, looking for a body, which should show on the screen as a glowing white lump. Nothing. We have to retreat again. This time, while we’re kneeling on the porch steps, regrouping, someone hollers into my mask. They’ve located the family. Someone has them on the phone, they’re out of town. The battle plan is redrawn. The vinyl siding on the adjacent trailer has begun to ruffle in the heat. We go from trying to save lives to saving property. I’m glad we went in, though. It’s good to look at Lisa or Matt or Jack, or any of the others who took their turns, and know they’ve proven themselves. If they had made it in, and pulled someone out, they would be heroes. I don’t care to think of myself in terms of heroism—it’s distasteful and presumptuous (previous performance does not guarantee future results), and frankly, you do a lot of this stuff without thinking and against training and better judgment—but I am intrigued by the idea that the recognition of heroism requires your being caught at it. Under the supposition that someone is trapped in the bedroom, fighting your way into what turns out to be an empty house is no more or less heroic than fighting your way into one harboring a victim. The difference is one of result, not intent. But until courage meets circumstance, there are no heroes.
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