When the Tones Go Off
One map of my world...
I heard the tones go off on the scanner about dinner time last Sunday night. I sighed and listened, trying to decide if I needed to go cover it for a news story. The page was for a fire in Melcher-Dallas, about a 25-minute drive away. I had settled in for the evening and was writing at the kitchen table. I have an office, but I like to sit at the kitchen table to be closer to Annie and the kids when they are home. I wanted to write, and besides, I was ready for a beer.
Sometimes a fire call is a serious fire that I need to cover, but sometimes it’s nothing--a pan of burning food on the stove or a fire alarm going off because the battery needed changing. Nothing that I need to cover for a news story.
But more tones went off. Knoxville Township Fire, Knoxville Fire and Rescue, Indiana Township Fire and Rescue, Pleasantville Emergency Services, and maybe other agencies were paged to assist Melcher-Dallas Fire. In the old days, it would have been called a five-alarm fire. Given that we have a declining number of first responders in our rural communities, nearly every fire of note is a five-alarm fire. The phrase is worthless in rural America.
So I pulled on my boots, coat, and hat, and got into my old pickup, and drove. Radio tuned down, scanner turned up. Annie calls me a “second-responder.”
We all have a map of our world in our heads. Actually, we all have many maps. While it seems that we live in the same cities, towns, and communities that others do, we don’t. Each of us lives in a unique world, and we all have different maps.
While these maps are ostensibly of places and things, they are also maps of emotions and memory. Where our first kiss was, where we once flew kites, where the best sledding hills are, maybe a map of where we were hurt or even abused.
When I drive to an emergency scene, oftentimes one of the maps my brain pulls up is a map of misery. I pass locations where a car crash killed four on their way to work. Where a semi hauling hogs wrecked, and the screams of dying hogs were punctuated by the sounds of gunshots as deputies put the hogs down. Where a semi hauling cattle wrecked, and the screams of dying cattle were punctuated by the sounds of gunshots as deputies put the cattle down. Where friends, acquaintances, and strangers killed themselves. Thousands of traffic collisions, hundreds of fires, maybe half a dozen murder scenes and drownings, a couple of train derailments, and two plane crashes. This map of mine is rich with death, destruction, and misery.
As I drove to Melcher-Dallas last Sunday, this map included a wide asphalt corner where a middle-aged man thinking he was still young, missed a curve on his Harley on a beautiful spring day. I directed traffic as a deputy tried to comfort him until the ambulance arrived. I passed through a town that had maybe a dozen homes destroyed by a tornado, where an old couple’s trailer was tossed in the air like a sock in a clothes dryer. One woman woke up underwater, the tornado having lifted her home off its slab and dropped it into the pond behind her house. She swam to what was left of her son’s room and pulled him to shore and safety. She found her other son about 100 yards away, hanging from a fence, okay but for a broken collarbone. I passed a murder scene where two men argued over a woman, and one shot and killed the other with a shotgun. I passed a large shop that caught fire, and an old man had to jump out of an upper-story window to survive. He hit the ground, and his bones shattered like glass before his body bounced a couple of times, leaving splotches of blood in the dirt. Up the road at another fire call years ago, a firefighter politely asked me to quit filming for a moment as the crew passed by with a dead man covered by a white sheet on a stretcher. An old man who couldn’t walk had been left alone upstairs.
I drove past a home where a gender reveal party went horribly wrong. Inadvertently, party planners had constructed a homemade pipe bomb filled with pink or blue powder and Tannerite, and the explosion killed grandma while everyone was still eating cake and ice cream.
I’ve worked long enough in the news business that my map is cluttered with misery, which is nothing compared to what our first responders carry in the maps in their heads. Absolutely nothing.
Here is what the scene looked like when I arrived. The building was some kind of shop. Apparently, someone had a fire going outside, and it spread to the building. There were reports of a couple of explosions. Big ones. One often hears small explosions, more like “pops” in fires. Most people have ammunition in their homes, and those pops are the gunpowder going off. Firefighters don’t seem to worry about them too much, as there is no barrel in a box of shells or bullets to give it direction and channel the force.
I know most of the firefighters and ambulance crews. While I don’t know the Trooper to the left, I chat with the deputy at emergency scenes frequently. The firefighter to the left is my mechanic. He changed the oil in my truck Thursday.
Most of these men and women are volunteers.
Where there is no fire hydrant, crews use tanker trucks to fill pools of water to draw from.
While I have a map of misery, I also have a much bigger and better map. It’s a map first of struggle, then of relief, and finally of joy. A map of places where I’ve seen first responders save countless lives, pulling people from burning cars and buildings, resuscitating people, and doing chest compressions in the middle of a highway until the patient breathed again. Countless times I’ve seen them saving property. I’ve seen them rescue people from drowning. I’ve seen them load people onto helicopters to be flown to Des Moines dozens of times. On the scanner, I’ve heard them save children from choking, help old people get out of bathtubs or off the floor when they were stranded, rushed people to hospitals, loaded them onto helicopters to be flown to Des Moines, and on and on. It’s endless.
I’ve even seen them put oxygen masks on dogs and cats after they saved them from burning buildings.
Last Sunday was one of those successful times. No one was hurt, and adjacent buildings were saved. A good job all around. Another dot on the map of the first responder’s infinite dots of success.
These first responders respond to the call as needed. They miss birthday parties, graduations, their kid’s concerts and games, and so much more. And they do it 24/7/365.
If you haven’t thanked a first responder in a while, please consider doing so.
When the tones go off, most of the time, I’d rather sit, drink a beer, write, or do something else, but I feel compelled to go. There’s a story out there I don’t want to miss. For if I and thousands of other reporters like me didn’t go, the stories of these brave men and women would never get told, and no one would ever know of their sacrifices, commitment, and courage, except for their families.
All for us, and our communities.
And any good reporter I know would tell you it’s an honor to tell their stories. Like now.
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This is a great reminder of how many people we depend on for our communities to thrive. As a parent with young children, I've felt spread too thin to serve in this capacity myself, though your essay makes me want to do it now that I have more flexibility. On a different note, I believe that teachers are often first responders in this way, only not to emergencies so much as the daily nurturing that our children and young adults need. I have always appreciated your interest in telling those stories, too. You're good at making people feel valued, Bob. We need more of that in the world.
Our daughter and her spouse are both volunteer firefighters/EMT's. They put in many hours training, and even more time responding to calls. Some are simple, but many are not. And they have witnessed many heartbreaking events. I am so very proud of them!