Let’s call it a N.E.W. day
by Doc Gurley

Imagine the entire chain of human activity. The firefighters who drove straight toward the blaze, even as the tower rose higher and higher to engulf the very sky, knowing this was something no one with a hose and a truck could stop or even contain. The sweat and the sizzle as you run from one paint-bubbling house to the next, imagining the screams of children as you knock and yell and draw an X on one house, only to sprint, heart pounding, to the next. Flames flicker and lick and you think, “God, let the other rigs come.” And then they do – rigs from other counties, people who were supposed to be sitting down to supper, firefighters who’ve never even driven these streets. Sixty-seven trucks came. Just think about that for a moment. No ego, no jurisdictional posturing, no hemming and hawing about budgets or how the assignment ought go to someone else, someone closer. All those teams, all those men and women, strapping on heavy gloves and helmets and feeling the claustrophobia and vertigo of wind whipping past as you accelerate onto a freeway in an open firetruck, the straining rumble of the screaming RPMs making your stomach shake. Then you hit the ground and ask, “what can I do?” and you join in, the sprint, the yell, the heavy lifting and the search, the endless search even now, the day after, through embers, dreading what you might find, what will give you nightmares for decades to come. And when you get home, and wipe the ash from your neck, you cough up soot and look at it, hoping your lungs are tougher than average because you’ve been in this, you’ll stay in this, for the long haul.