Hey Line.
I've taken a brief (briefly long) leave of absence from you.
I'm sorry about that.
(Did you imagine me saying that in a really creepy way? 'Cuz you should have. It's only natural.)
like I said.
and with me I've brought you some fresh content.
there's more.
It's not the usual relationship advice.
This is a little broader.
and knowing it's ok to be scared.
It's a non-fiction narrative short.
You should be.
Here it is.
Most people assume calling 911 is only for emergencies;
while I admire their integrity, there are many others with a less
discerning dial finger. In five years as a professional firefighter
I’ve been called to a parrot “stuck” in a tree he flew into, rescued
ducklings from a storm drain three separate times, responded to a
“parachutist drowning in a river” that was a kite boarder, and moved a
couch at a retirement home. And while calls as ridiculous as these are
few and far between, there’s one specific type just as non-emergent, and
far more common.
Whether a sprinkler pipe bursts in a warehouse, a kid pulls
the alarm handle in a store, or a residential fire alarm is activated
by burnt pop-tarts, it’s safe to count on at least one false alarm per
shift. You show up prepared for the world to be on fire, half expecting
to see a blushing mother and her toddler at an alarm pull station, walk
around looking serious, and try not to knock anything over with your
air-pack or look winded carrying 100 pounds of gear. In the end you
reset the alarm that started blaring before you got there and give
everyone an understanding smile as you leave. These are some of the
most benign calls we respond to, so of course, it had to be a false
alarm that became the self-effacing career moment I can never decide to
laugh at, or blush over.
The setting was perfect to the point of cliché: middle of October,
thick cloud cover, dim moon; I feel like there may have been a black cat
walking past the station. I was curled up (literally, because it’s not
possible to sprawl out on a twin bed) in Station 84 after a long day of
nonsense when the tones sounded around 2:30 am. I clicked on along
with the lights, stumbled into the bays and slipped into my gear. We
were soon out the door and heading to an alarm in a residence, reported
by a neighbor, and from the moment the officer hit the on scene button,
the house before us terrified me.
This was the house where Saw was filmed, where Charles Manson lived, and
where the Masons performed their annual blood sacrifice. I can’t
support any of that, but those were the vibes; something was very wrong
with this structure. For one thing, it was literally the creepy old
house on the block. This house stood decades before the introduction of
subdivisions, and years before modern builders attempted to integrate
it into their cookie-cutter community. Their attempt didn’t work so
well, and the whitewashed plantation style structure puffed its
clapboard chest out in defiance against the new construction. The lawn
was untrimmed, of course, and the few trees in the yard waved their arms
in warning. I don’t want to say the apple tree by the front gate was
laden with poison apples, but at the same time; I think the apple tree
out front grew poison apples.
The house was abandoned, classic, and not in the “someone
packed up and moved on to the next stage of life” sort of way. This
house was abandoned in the “oh shit, let’s get outta here, forget the
dresser” kind of way. Still in the engine, I could see rotting
furniture on the porch, tipped over and broken, and debris in the
backyard. I could also hear the smoke detectors sounding, and not the
normal polite yet stern kind of alarm, these alarms had a piercing
quality that made my nasal cavity hurt. Right now you’re thinking, “I
didn’t know smoke detectors made different noises.” Well, neither did
I.
Because I was getting paid to do a job, I tried to go about business
as usual. I gathered my tools and met the officer at his door with
feigned composure. The good news was the lack of obvious fire meant
Hell was still being suppressed by the floorboards. The bad news was,
because the alarm was sounding, someone would have to go inside to
investigate.
We shined our flashlights into the windows, seeing nothing more than
abandoned furniture, peeling wallpaper, and broken light fixtures, and
tried all the doors. Each one was locked, and the hair on my neck stood
up as we walked through the back yard. When we reached the fourth side
of the house I saw the object that sealed my fate, sent my heart to my
throat, and the pit of my stomach to my toes; on the second story was an
ajar single window. Did it have thin white lacy curtains, eerily
floating in the wind with fraying edges? Of course it did.
I knew what was coming before the officer said a word, and a minute
later I was putting my tools away and grabbing a ladder so I alone could
climb through the window, walk through the house, and open the front
door so we could investigate and reset the alarm. And no, I don’t get
paid nearly enough for that.
I want to say I didn’t dawdle, or fumble with the ladder hoping someone
else would volunteer, but I can’t. I imagine they were both breathing
sighs of relief knowing they were off the hook, and I cursed them for
being cowards (under my breath) as I placed my boots on the metal rungs.
I got my first unobstructed view inside at the top of the
ladder, but because this was the concentrated darkness of all the
world’s evil, the beam of my flashlight was little help. All I could
make out was a long hallway of peeling wallpaper with three rooms on
either side, ending in a spiral staircase. This is when I realized the
likelihood of Jack Nicholson popping out of a doorway and axe murdering
me, either that or a zombie; and to think I left my axe in the engine.
The piercing alarm stung the back of my teeth and magnified the pulse
in my temples as I leaned into the window, feet still firm on the
ladder. Then, with a final deep breath, maybe a quick prayer, I climbed
in. And in the modified pushup position that resulted from entering
headfirst, I learned that terror smells like cat piss and wet carpet. I
tried to push the smell to the back of my mind, stood up, and descended
the hallway in slow steps of false composure, throat dry, heart
thumping, and legs shivering inside sweaty turnouts. In the darkness,
as the floorboards creaked under my boots, the smell of rancid stagnance
consumed my nostrils, and the stinging noise of the detector grew, I
may have started to whistle.
I passed the first room, and looked in to see a moldy twin
bed with no sheets next to some dismembered furniture. I walked a
little quicker.
I passed the second room, and it was empty except for some
broken wood and a shattered closet mirror. The pieces threw my
flashlight’s beam across the room at a thousand untrue angles, and I
walked a little quicker.
The alarm grew louder, it’s sting filling the empty space
between decaying walls, and the third doorway revealed another vacant
room, in which the offending detector hung by its wires, swinging in the
emptiness.
A broken smoke detector moving for an unknown reason must
be exactly what it takes to break my tough guy façade. I quit
whistling, pointed my flashlight forward, and ran, fully anticipating
something lethal, or at least horrible, to jump out of the remaining
rooms. I grabbed the stairway’s center banister, half swung half jumped
to the first floor, found the entrance, fumbled with the lock, and
pushed out on the inward swinging door. I stumbled into the cool air
flushed, sweaty, and never happier to see the lights of my engine.
My
crew met me on the porch with, “Wow that was fast,” and “Why the hell
are you sweating?”
Cowards.
We stomped around the house for the next few minutes looking for
signs of smoke or fire, and I stayed closest to the door making sure it
didn’t spontaneously combust, or even worse, close. The standard
procedure for alarms is to look for any signs of fire, smoldering or
extinguished, and check the walls, floor space, and attic space for
concealed heat with a thermal imaging camera (TIC).
After the TIC yielded no heat, and there were no signs of
smoke, we pulled the wires and batteries from the alarm and prepared to
exit. With a deep exhale I slammed the door a little too hard, maybe to
show the house who was boss, and made a comment about how creepy it
was, my voice full of masculine composure now that I was out and we were
leaving.
The officer stopped me.
“What are you doing?”
I looked around.
“Uhh, taking my gear off so we can get out of here and never come back?”
“Someone has to lock the door.”
This was the second time my stomach dropped.
“Wut.”
“We can’t leave the door unlocked. You gotta’ go lock it from the inside and climb out the window.”
I protested once on the grounds that it was abandoned and B
shift could lock it in the daylight, but they don’t pay hosers like me
to protest. The officer said they would wait for me to butt the ladder,
and as I dropped my helmet in a microtantrum, I realized how much I
hated his big stupid firefighter mustache.
Alone at the front door, I strategized as my crew walked to the
ladder side of the building. I felt my pulse pounding in my wrists and
the plan became simple: forget being a tough guy and run as fast as I
could. Still standing on the porch with the door open, I reached in and
put a hand on the deadbolt, practicing turning it a few times to
maximize efficiency. By my calculations, I could be halfway up the
stairs within four seconds of the lock clicking, and out the window (if I
made it out) in another fifteen. With a final deep breath, and a
glance over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching: the race
began. I slid past the door and turned the lock as my feet hit the
first steps. My boots clomping filled the house and halfway up I
started talking to myself.
It sounded something like this: “Shit, shit,
shit, shit!”
At the top of the stairway I swung around the bannister and
saw the vacant hallway; my voice rose. If I was gonna’ get axe
murdered, captured by a bad guy, or eaten by that thing from Alien Vs.
Predator, it would happen in the hallway. My eyes set on the nearest
doorway as I ran, once I had passed it they focused on the next. The
window on the end wall shrank, moving further away with each step, and
the light from my flashlight bounced and threw shadows onto every
surface.
I reached the window as a blur of gear, and using the rapid
evacuation technique reserved for emergencies, dove out headfirst,
grabbing a rung with each hand and swinging my legs down until my feet
found lower rungs. When the training officer had said “emergencies” he
had meant backdraft, structural collapse, and flashover. In this
instance, I used my own interpretation to include probable monster
attacks and didn’t think twice.
I slammed the window shut with the same zealous I shut the
front door with, and made it to the bottom of the ladder, sweaty,
flushed, and out of breath. The officer stared at me, squinted, started
to ask “Wh-,” but then just shook his head and started to the engine.
Resuming my façade, as though it wasn’t a bit late in the game for
that, I unzipped my coat and returned the ladder to its rack on the
engine. At the station, I took a shower to wash away the smell of fear
and body odor, and watched TV with the light on until it was time to go
home at 6 am.
A few weeks later I found myself giving a tour to a group
of six year olds visiting our station. An important element of such a
tour is to teach them what firefighters in full gear look like, the
rationale being if they recognize us, they won’t hide or run deeper into
a burning building when we search for them. The gear adds substantial
bulk, and the mask creates breath sounds similar to Darth Vader. A few
of them are inevitably terrified.
In past tours I’d never spared much empathy on this fear-based
reaction, accepting it as a routine part of the tour, and I’m sure my
consolations were formal and empty. But since the night of the fire
alarm, the night I found myself running from nothing and yelling in an
empty hallway, I had a more appreciative perspective.
I knew there was
fresh validity in my tone as I told them: “It’s ok guys, firefighters
get scared too sometimes.”
