Fire Fighting Tales from Rural Maine: "When do we do anything alone?"

During our most recent training weekend at Fire Academy, we arrived before 7 a.m. and spent a long time standing in the cold as the cars were prepared for our extrication lesson. I was sick and I kept having to take off my gloves to blow my nose, exposing them to the well-below-freezing air. I was standing with a group of my classmates, fellow firefighters, and I was actually growing concerned about the intensity of the pain in my fingers and toes. I shifted and stamped and scrunched my fingers and toes trying to get them warm.

One of the firefighters noticed, and the next thing I knew, he was taking off his gloves and telling me to put my hands inside them. They were warm with moist heat and toasty! (Like the inside of a Ton Ton?!) And then another firefighter told me to give him my gloves and he put his warm fingers inside of them, so that when I gave back the first firefighter's gloves, my newly warmed fingers could go inside warm gloves. My hands stayed warm for the rest of the day. Neither of these men are in my company.

On the day when I got most beat up, the second day of our most grueling weekend, when my knees were bruised to the bone and the rest of me was smashed to bits and I was reeling from the trauma of having gotten trapped in a confined space (wedged between wall studs and tangled up so badly my helmet and mask slipped off while people screamed at me to go faster--twice!), and it wasn't even lunch time yet, I stumbled out of the building looking for all the world like what I was--a woman in shock and about to pass out--a firefighter spotted me and immediately asked if it would be okay if he helped me. He himself has two bum knees, but with respectful kindness he slipped an arm around me and helped steady my gait. We made it to the staging area and as I focused on keeping all the black spots in my vision from swarming together and dragging me down, he went for help. While he was gone and I swayed stubbornly on my hands and knees, refusing to pass out, but unable to do more than that, another firefighter noticed me and brought me water. And two minutes later, after I had been checked out and was back on my feet again, another firefighter offered to change my bottle for me. Again, none of those men were in my company, which means that they had no necessary obligation to notice or to care how I was--and yet they did; they noticed, they cared, they took swift and effective action on my behalf.

On Thursday night, Orland Fire responded in mutual aid to a fatal motor vehicle accident. So far two firefighters from my class have checked in on me, because we have been taught that is important to ask someone if they are okay after a night like that.

I had to do the confined spaces maze two times in one day on our second weekend at Academy. When it was time for the second trip through, I was so exhausted and overwhelmed and borderline hysterical with fear just at the thought of going blindfolded back into that terrible, relentlessly small space that I (embarrassingly) started crying--and not just a little. I was crumpled faced and sobbing. I could't stop; my defenses were broken and I was leaking fear. I didn't want to go back in. But my lead instructor told me, firmly, that if I didn't get back in there (NOW) then I wouldn't graduate. And I want to graduate...so I gathered what was left of my inner resolve, I climbed back into that dark maze and my lead instructor came behind me, barking at my heels.

The second time through was harder. I was more tired. More scared. My vision and breathing were more obstructed. I was carrying a heavy axe and had to sound the floor constantly as I crawled and felt my way through the tunnels and turns. They threw more unexpected and terrifying obstacles at me--snagged my bottle and held me down--and I completely lost my shit twice. Once I even begged to be let out.

But they didn't let me out. Eventually I stopped screaming and I overcame all the obstacles and I got myself out. But it was not pretty. And I assumed that I had failed. I was devastated.

That night I barely slept. I had night terrors about the maze all night, and shame and grief about my failure. At the end of the next day, I asked my lead instructor when I would have to try the maze again. Tears sprang to my eyes and my chest constricted in panic just to think of it. But I swallowed that fear, determined to graduate.

"You don't have to do it again," he said.

"But...I didn't do it...?" I said. I was very confused.

"You did do it," he said.

"But...but I cried? And I panicked," I said.

"You overcame some big fears yesterday," he said. "You're too hard on yourself."

"But...you mean I passed? I don't have to do it again?"

"That's right," he said. "You demonstrated adequate proficiency."

I was still very confused. "But...I didn't do it alone...?"

He looked me in my eyes and he asked, "When do we ever do anything alone?"

My eyes teared up again and I swallowed a little sob. "Never," I said. "We never do anything alone."

Beyond any of the hundreds of important skills we are learning--like how to tie a life safety knot or bail out of a burning building on a charged hose line or throw a ladder--it is these other moments that will stay with me forever. As much as I love knowing how to rescue someone down a ladder or how to tie a clove hitch or how to put water on a fire, of all the things I am learning about myself and being a firefighter, these lessons about what it really means to be a firefighter are the most profound.

As a volunteer firefighter in a very small, rural town, I will most likely never use most of what I am learning. I will probably never rescue an unconscious firefighter from a burning basement or be the one to deploy the roof ladder. And I expect after my end test I will promptly forget the names of all the different sprinkler heads.

On its face, of course, firefighting is about putting out fires. But at its heart, firefighting is about so much more than that. Our biggest promise is not that we will put out a fire, it is that Everyone Goes Home. And the only way we can accomplish that is to understand that we are, in each and every moment, from fatal car crashes to training exercises to explosive conflagrations...never doing anything alone.