Walking through fire

Trees burned like Roman candles, exploding , hissing, roaring off to my right. In front of me shadows split the air and turned on the tip of a wing – owls escaping the fire. Four squad members dressed in yellow Nomex (fireproof) shirts and green pants moved ahead of me gathering in the clearing. Behind me, six more firefighters pickaxes shouldered, two with chainsaws, another with a backfire unit. To our left fire crept through the underbrush.

A log the size of a tractor trailer burned purple from the center out. Above us the night air was bright with the sparks of embers, not stars.  Smoke wafted up from the valley, feeding the frenzy in front of us. Behind us the roar and clank of bulldozers could be heard widening the trail they gouged as they moved up the mountain.

“Everyone here?” The squad leader called out. A quick head count.

“This okay?” he asked. I nodded.

“Get as close as you can,” I urged. He grinned.

“Not a problem.” He motioned to the men.

Ten men moved down to the trees – now 80 and 100 foot walls of flame. I could feel the breeze from the weather the fire was creating.

Side-by-side they lined up and arms around each other, equipment on the ground they smiled for the camera, a group photo. One for the folks back home. A snag fell, crashing through the wall and hitting the ground in a shower of sparks.

“Can you get all the flames in?” one asked, looking over his shoulder at the noise. I nodded.

10 more poses, two rolls of 36 exposures done.

I nodded. They picked up their gear and walked back up to the path. Behind us the headlights of the bulldozer split the smoke. I finished the roll of film and picked up my own Pulaski (fire ax) and headed off down the path.

*****

It was the summer of 1989 or 90. I forget now. But thousands of the 1.7 million acres of the Malheur National Forest in Eastern Oregon were burning and the Strawberry Mountain range was the staging area for thousands of firefighters. As a reporter I was assigned to cover the fire – and as a member of the crew I would also fight it. To be on the fire insurance regulations required I be certified to fight the fire. To be on the crew I had to fight the fire. I could take photos but would have to write about it during the four to six free hours a day I had to eat, sleep and shower. As a member of a night squad we tackled the mountain in pitch blackness, the trail often lit only by a dim flashlight or the edges of the flame. The ground itself burned and if you wanted to sit, you sat on rocks. It was the remarkable experience I’ve ever had. One word – surreal.

a hand up, not a hand-out

90 degrees feels more like 120 when you’re sitting on a concrete median strip dividing a four-lane highway. Dion, slumped in his wheelchair, had an umbrella, but you could see the sweat rolling down his ebony skin from 30 feet away. His hand lettered cardboard sign said what I expected it to, “Homeless,” but there was more. I squinted. “Homeless but not helpless. Ice-cold bottle water $2.”

Next to him was a cooler and a coffee can on a stick. My car window was already down so I motioned to him, holding up one finger as I dug for two dollars. He picked up the stick and lifted it towards me. I dropped the money in the can and glanced at the traffic light. Dion’s stiff hands pulled the bills out and he smiled and nodded back at me before lifting the cooler lid to pull out a bottle of water. Into the coffee can went the bottle and he extended the can and bottle to me. Innovation at its best. He couldn’t get up and getting out of the car at a traffic light was iffy and dangerous at best.

I snagged the bottle as it bounced and circled in his unsteady grasp.

“Thank you!” I called out. He nodded and touched his hat.  The light was still red so I called out, “How’s business?”

“Oh it’s pretty good. Specially on days like this,” he said. “People’s real nice. Real nice.”

He smiled as the sweat rolled off his face.

“Where’s your bottle?” I asked, tipping my water up.

“Oh, I can’t be drinking all my profits up,” he laughed. We chatted a few more minutes and I motioned for the can again. I tossed in a $5 bill, got my second bottle and waved off the change.

“Great idea,” I said as the light flicked to green. He nodded.

Some people hold up a sign saying they’ll work for food, some actually do.

judgments have endings. stories do not…

On July 28, 1976 I left Tennessee to drive to Denver, Colorado to meet friends in The Big Thompson Canyon for a camping trip. I decided to drive straight through, enabling me to arrive in Denver in about 30 hours. That’s good! my friends said. It’ll give us an extra day in the canyon before we head to Banff.

On July 29 the engine overheats, forcing me to spend the night somewhere in Kansas, delaying my trip. That’s bad, my friends said.

On July 31 I pull into Denver and head towards The Big Thompson Canyon. I’ll get us a spot and you meet me up here when you get off work, I say. Great! my friends say. That’s good.

Later that evening as I drive up The Big Thompson Canyon the rain is pouring. It’s cold, miserable, muddy. That’s bad, I think.

I’m driving back to Denver. It’s too wet and cold to camp out tonight I explain. That’s too bad, my friends say.

The next day dawns  sunny  and clear. We head up to the canyon only to be met by road blocks. There’s been some bad flooding and the road is washed away, we hear. That’s bad. We can’t get up into the canyon and have to drive four hours around. If we’d only been here last night….I say. That’s bad.

On July 31, 1976, a violent rainstorm set off the most massive flash flood in a century and sent a rampaging wall of water through Big Thompson Canyon, wiping out homes, moving boulders the size of office buildings for miles downstream and destroying roads the length of the canyon. The massive millennial flood killed 144 residents and visitors at one of Colorado’s most popular destinations. Bodies continued to wash up days after the flood, some in the fields of farmers downstream. Some were found in cars. Some were never found.

Looking back on the sequence of events we labeled “good” and “bad” I realized had any of the bad things not happened the good things – our ultimately NOT being in the canyon that night as we originally planned, would not have happened. Is something good? Or is it bad? It’s hard to tell at the time. When Steve Jobs was fired from his job at Apple or when Oprah Winfrey was moved to another station (fired from her reporting job and “stuck” into a talk show job) things looked bad. But looking back, they say it was the very thing they thought so “bad” at the time that turned out to be the best thing that happened to them. Look back over your life. When has that happened to you? Are you so sure it’s not happening again now? Judgments have an ending. Stories do not. Let the story play out – whether it takes days, months or years.

the value of worthless

My first job on a construction site in college wasn’t what I imagined it would be. Rather than strapping on a tool-belt and getting to work framing walls like I expected I was handed a push-broom and shown where to dump the wood chips, the rubbish and the trash left behind by the carpenters, painters and crews as they moved through a house.

At first I felt worthless, seeing myself as a glorified janitor. I mentioned that to one of the foremen one day at lunch. He thought for a minute and then leaned over and picked up a wood chip.

“How valuable do you think this is?” he asked. I shrugged.

“Pretty worthless,” I said. “I throw those away all the time.”

He nodded, finished the last of his baloney sandwich and beckoned me over to a window.

“See those shims? They’re chips of wood with a purpose.” He pulled his hammer out of its holster and lifted the window up. A double-hung window, the weights to keep it in place hadn’t been adjusted yet and it quickly slammed shut when he let it go. He lifted the window up again and this time put the wood chip in the rail between window and frame and lightly tapped it into place. The window stayed open.

He turned to look at me.

“There’s no such thing as worthless. There’s just stuff that hasn’t found the place where it’s needed. And that goes for people too,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not so obvious but keep looking.”

I nodded. He pulled the chip out of the rail and handed it to me.

“Just a reminder,” he said.

Over the next week or so I kept that chip in my pocket. I used it to level a wobbly table, to wedge a door open while I moved a piece of furniture into my apartment and then finally gave it to one of the finish carpenters to shim a piece of cove molding with. I hated to see it go, but I learned the lesson. None of us, no matter how insignificant we may feel or think we are, are worthless.

Then the work ethic my father had hammered into me kicked in. I decided to be the best janitor ever – and soon the job site was clean, picked up, trash free, lumber piled in one place, tools organized, extension cords coiled. Over time I realized what a difference my efforts made. Crews were able to pile supplies, access tools, move faster and safer and finish tasks without having to dig through the debris of the day.

Eventually they noticed the difference too. That’s when they began showing me to do things and talking to me at lunch. I learned how to tape a room for painting, how to hang drywall, and how to cope molding. I had found where I was needed and fulfilled a purpose. And that made all the difference.

We all have a place, a purpose and a value. Some times it just takes a while to find it.