Ancient roads etch the landscape of the Harrington property. Stonewalls bound acres once planted. The ruins of a house rest quietly in the brambles. In the brief walk from my childhood home through the marsh, over a well-worn esker and down to these ancient roads, I would seek treasures. Treasures included the rusted carcass of an automobile from the 1920s, fresh water springs, footprints of raccoon and pheasant tail feathers.

One early discovery still brings awe. At the first ages of my education, I saw, I felt connected to distant people of our history. Boundaries between then and now fade in this wood. Those names, and words, of history live. They breathed in these woods,. They breathe still. Just as their boots, wagon wheels, tractors and horseshoes compacted the roads I see below me; their ideas can be heard in the rustle of oak leaves, sniffed in the warm smell of decay, felt by fingers playing in the lichen growing on the granite at my thigh.

Here, I became a swinger of birch, a neighbor to many over a good wall. I became the self-appointed steward of all that surrounds. I am not Longfellow, Frost, Thoreau. I owned these thoughts. I say this not with hubris, not with a sense of property but with an understanding of the mystery of thought. A thought, like an old sweater of a loved one, or the baseball cap of a local team transforms the wearer. Yet, I am free to say their words, think their thoughts, walk their steps on lands they knew well. I argue with Jefferson as Adams did. I chuckle with Old Man Flint at the odd-fellow Thoreau come once to speak of an experiment. I hold the head of an injured farmer in my lap as his hand relaxes on the hunting musket. A musket taken in haste from the mantle as the British soldiers fled to Boston. I hear the greetings our militia shouted to Concord militiamen when they met behind a stone wall not three miles distant from my own hand. At a touch, a thought passes through time just as genes pass traits from then to now. I learnt in my wood that a thought is not a lone entity; cold, distant then set in sepulchral stone. A thought lives as a virus lives. History remains greater than a votive note on a page making commentary of one who passed by—to reader days later.

I am not the first to burst a puff-ball beneath my foot, not the first to break early ice on a muddy puddle. I am not the first to elect a path by its wear. Old worn thoughts haunt these now treed fields; thoughts awaiting the next generation to live anew.

History lives. At the youngest age, kings, barons, and knights were stuff of stories and play-things upon our parlor floor. Soldiers were plastic forms. Science was the stuff of men who revealed truths. Presidents were distant gray men drawn in cross-hatched lines. Industry was far, far away.

And yet on the school grounds were the heirs to land granted by kings, the off-spring of long dead nobles. School mates I now know to be the children of children of children of early presidents. The son of the former police chief told his father’s stories of a world war in Europe. The son of a photographer told his father’s stories of revolution in Chile. Another child told the story of his parent’s flight from China during a war never mentioned in our school books. I heard stories from a family who viewed the stars through a radio telescope, measuring the distances of space, and the age of our universe. I met parents who were pioneers of today’s technology. There was no first family among us; certainly, no stratification in our kickball games nor on the jungle-gym. Stories of humble homes told with the bravado of eight-year olds—nothing more.

Later, as I came to learn of the Great Depression, I see my rusted automobile with a new understanding. I tell myself it is a Model T. My story of this car is simple. I know that one of the people who touched that car in the 1920s was a child of the previous century. He drank local milk, harvested local eggs, picked peas from a nearby kitchen garden. As a youth, my unknown hero sat on the lap of an elder, listening to the stories of one who lived while Grant was president. Two hands bind two centuries.

A thought is incapable of leaving a footprint, incapable of returning a rock to its niche. Yet, a single thought may cleave a nation. Like the conundrums of modern physics, a thought is an object without mass; a force that cannot be measured in its native form. Thought doesn’t obey temporal rules. Thoughts may be given, received, and held captive. A thought may remain tied to land. A thought may travel with generations. A thought may be visited with a soft smell, or the feel of an acorn held on a fall afternoon.

This acorn, a small treasure of warmth and texture, will shade another on this path in the next century. I cannot imagine the hand will touch that future oak. Across the pond to my right works a man who holds the deed to this soil, to this rock, to this acorn. This deed has been passed through generations beyond my counting.

In these woods, walking along the path, I can live in each age from the 1700s through today: from ox to tractor, from horse to car, from woodland to farm land and back to woodland. Each of us who walk here, who borrow freely from the thoughts of those before us, leave something indelible. No one could have known that to my left, across the road from the ruin of the house lays the very spot my mother first showed me a lady slipper. In another season, another forest orchid will appear. Another will find it. Similar words of respect will be said. Another will see the path cradled peacefully in the wider colonial roadbed abandoned a century ago.

I believe I leave these woods without a print. Resting again, I spy well above my head a metal disk nailed to a tree. Too high for most to note, too rusted to contrast against the tree, I recognize a once-new red marker that guided my nocturnal skiing adventures of thirty-years ago.

The pheasant may be gone, future treasures unknown. Another child will come to this intersection and hide behind the rock wall. He, or she, will hold an imaginary musket and blast away at the evil tyranny that the Red Coats represented. Later as steward, the welfare of squirrels will be paramount. A birch will be climbed and that young birch will ease earthward with a youth’s dangling toes inches above the ground just as I did. Old thoughts woven from rock and branch, woven between the dewy moss of June to the crusty snow of February, invisible threads of an ancient web. One cannot escape the caress of frayed ends. Each touch transferring distant joys, fears, and hopes—a touch on a cheek where a tear will drop and a smile will break. A touch on a hand where a lost mitten will appear, only to fade again—the touch of the land.

-End-

I’ll publish a “Behind the Scenes” on this story on 01JUL2026. The image attribution belongs to one of the cartoonists from the Boston Globe in the early-mid 1970s. My father was an editor there and the cartoonists would give my father the occasional original when it was relevant. That’s my profile at what ever age that is. Oddly, I still have a little queue, but my hair is fully gray.

-christina aiken

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I wrote this story with/for my mother in 2003.

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Most of you know that I publish a short story near the opening of each month and you’ll get one for June!

Right now, a bit of a brag. Kahlil’s Wall is a fictional short story about peace during war. In 2006, a queer military intelligence officer builds a wall in Tikrit Iraq while exploring beloved poetry.

The story won in the Inspirational Category which makes me proud because (1) the core elements of the story draw on Robert Frost’s poem Mending a Wall (2) the only religious references are Islamic in that I wrote within the context of living, working, and collaborating with Iraqis.

After these guys publish the story, the story will also be here on substack with the audio available wherever you listen to podcasts.

I get notes from you guys out there once in a while.

One of you suggested I apply for a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. I did and I am now in Residence there during their “Vermont Week”, a week reserved for Vermont artists. What amazing group.

One of you asked how to follow along with short stories better. Substack can be odd and Google does a poor job of showing our content during searches. He also related to me the real names of baddies in my last novel “Stolen Mountain”. That’s super cool. My message back was: try searching for “Aiken Trowbridge Dispatch” at your favorite podcast site. When a “stacker(?)” publishes a series of audio works on Substack, Substack automatically publishes them on the most common podcast sites.

I love reading aloud to you, my readers, but I never know who’s listening.

Since this entry is more like a newsletter than my normal efforts, here’s the recent activity.

1. Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries and a Story of Love - is now speeding towards production. Covers approved and marketing efforts to the behind the scenes stuff started. Working on getting book reviews.

2. I’ll be at the New England Independent Booksellers Association in September, just about the time of the “pub date” for that novel.

3. I finished a novella this spring. We may see that next spring if my publisher/publishing team determine it is ok enough.

4. I promise to get around to more bookstores this year. I fell through a roof the weeks before the last novel dropped. I couldn’t drive for six months. I did so very little to support the last novel, “Stolen Mountain”. Several of the VT bookstores recognized it as a Vermont story by a Vermont author and propped it up nicely and sold a few copies.

In Closing, I’ll share a market blurb by my friends at Catalyst Press. They were doing 2 minute pitches to national book sales people. I would not have written “decorated” and I had to read the closing twice. First time through I thought I might have been a “civil war veteran.” I re-read it. I am not that old.

“Our next title is CAPTAIN HENRY by I.M. Aiken — adult literary fiction in the anti-war realist tradition. The most politically charged title in our catalog. Pitch it honestly to the right accounts.

Here’s the author. I.M. Aiken served in Iraq as a civilian member of the U.S. military campaign and earned multiple military awards for that service. She is also short-listed for the 2026 Next Gen Short Story Awards for “Kahlil’s [kah-LEEL] Wall.” This is not her first novel. This is not a tourist’s view of war — this is a decorated participant writing literary fiction.

And this is not just a novel. It’s built on two real archives: her ancestor’s Reconstruction-era papers and her own Iraq journals. Pitch it as a novel and a semi-fictionalized memoir.

Here are the comps that do all the work. CATCH-22. M*A*S*H [Mash — like the TV show, but the novel by Richard Hooker]. Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker. Anti-war literary fiction written by people who lived inside the war and saw all aspects of its crazy reality. CAPTAIN HENRY belongs to that tradition. Less absurdist and more realist, but a direct descendant non-the-less.

What it is NOT: I talked to the author. It is not Jack Carr. Reps need to be clear about that — opposite end of military fiction. Not heroic thriller. Anti-war, literary, realist, queer.

Two timelines. 1870: eighteen-year-old Henry McDonald enlists in the U.S. military and is sent into Reconstruction Georgia, hunting Ku Kluxers through a landscape of lynching and guerrilla violence. He earns the nickname “Private Trouble.” 2006: Lieutenant Sam Musgrave is on her second tour in Baghdad — queer, competent, losing faith in her government — while her partner Brighid Doran traces an archival thread back to Private Trouble himself.

The book is dedicated to Capitol Police officers from January 6, 2021. References to a possible war with Iran read as prescient. None of this is incidental — it is the book’s argument.

Here is one way to pitch it: a Catch-22 for our forever wars, by a decorated civilian war veteran. That’s CAPTAIN HENRY.

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Friends, I often use this once-a-month forum for fictional stories in an effort to promote my novels. This story is mine and not fiction.

Stacy from M.E.

I’ve written of Stacy in my Substack posts before. I texted her via Signal a while back. Her response: “RUNNING FOR BUNKER.” Most civilian humans would explore private thoughts of hope and fear. My internal response was: “Bunkers? We never had no stinkin’ bunkers.” I am glad she’s got bunkers.

Learning to sit still in a dining facility during a mortar or rocket attack takes (1) resignation; (2) some stupidity; (3) the ability to curb nature’s urge to flee. I once watched mortar and rocket attacks using the childhood technique of counting the interval between flash and bang to gauge the distance between the lights just-over-there and my own ass. I would have loved a bunker. The lesson came as: “If no place is safe, then you do not run toward safety.”

Stacy became my friend and battle-buddy in 1995. In the name of others and with the spirit of adventure, we did stuff and bonded. A decade plus later, when she asked me to be a reference for her juicy DOD clearance, I said of course. I already did all that nonsense, with investigators interviewing me at my kitchen table and knocking on neighbors’ doors. When she disappeared into military posts in central Alaska that I once knew well, I understood (without asking) her mission. She pinged me after novel #1 with only the signature of “Stacy from M.E.” I knew all with nothing more said.

Because that is what a partner is.

Lessons of a Youth Given to Public Service

Over 40 years ago, I donned my first uniform. The dark blue polyester of our ambulance service matched the city’s police force. Early lessons involved how to knock on doors (and live); how to enter apartments and homes (and live); how to approach folks injured in melees (and live); how to restrain and transport emotional disturbed folks threatening violence to self or others (and live). Your successes and your joy came from the partnership you formed with the other human in your ambulance. In the fire service, the famed statement of “two in/two out” reflects this experience. In military operations, it is your “battle buddy” who serves to double your senses and protect your back (in the literal, by the way).

Another lesson of my youth, not codified until the 1990s, was “PST,” or Primary, Secondary, Tertiary. Every plan needs an alternate plan. Every set of plans requires an extraction plan. “Oh, that went wrong” is often met with humor in the field. The laughter gives way to fear, dread, and a full zing of sympathetic nervous systems responses we mammals get: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I learned: plan to fail. Critically, I learned to never go anywhere without an exit plan and the ability to hunker, hide, and survive.

I wrote of my first great partner in the character of Aaron in The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County. Like each of us, partners come in 32 flavors, such as my EMT partner, who was in the USAF as a firefighter but screamed in the face of a grass fire started by a catalytic converter (“pull, squeeze, sweep” I offered ironically after I put it out). One of my partners brought a VHS tape of his operations as a medic in Granada. One partner was the mechanic for the local musician J. Giles, who loved car racing. My fictional Aaron was based on a Vietnam combat medic who decided to attend nursing school a decade after returning from overseas. The real Aaron, like the fictional one, had been shot down from three medevac Hueys.

Offered without statistical proof, I have observed that—both at home in civilian uniforms and overseas in combat zones—EMTs/paramedics, firefighters, and cops often do both. This group serves at home and with a military unit at some point. The crossover is significant.

Partnerships formed thus last lifetimes, even when the bonds stretch and the phone line falls silent.

In the decades since, we’ve expanded the definition of “partner” and “partnership.” In this entry, I refer to the historical and (typically) non-sexual aspects. When discounting sleep, one may spend more time talking with and adventuring with your on-duty partner than the spousal-like entity in your bed at home. In many of our lives, both roles exist separately. Each with their own intimacy, rules, boundaries, and fidelity.

I explored this a bit in my short story, “Murmuration.” With a great partner, you develop non-verbal communication and a sixth-sense of movement, thoughts, and plans. Like watching wolves hunt quietly, it takes but a look to define risks, sight objectives, and then say: “Go.”

This brings me to Stacy: my queer, wiry, amazing friend. In 1995, when we met, I recognized a human who was like me. For years, she was my battle-buddy. I mention queer only because, once, while clicking through one of the miserable streaming services, the original Lara Croft movie glided past. We two snuck away from our respective homes and families to enjoy the sexy, campy, quazi-porn flick. Cuz we could. We never dated. That’s not us.

I privately hung the blue service flag in my office to honor Stacy. A war with invisible regional boundaries, no objectives, no plans, and leadership with limited experience in armed conflict.

Blue Star Service Banner

For years, the cars in my family mounted and removed the Blue Star Service Banner. The marine we raised deployed before me, I think twice, each for three months. The flag on the car (or front window of a house) says: “I have a family member putting their life on the line for fellow Americans.” I got deployed for a year that excluded months before and months after the time in Iraq. I think the flag flew from departure to return. We hung it again with the marine deployed for the last time. His HUMVEE got blowed up on an IED, killing most of his squad and leaving our marine with a significant TBI. The injury essentially ended his active-duty career as a special-operations-qualified marine. He was medicaled out at eighteen years with 100% benefits, and full VA care.

The Gold/Blue star flags give recognition to families of those who serve. This silent statement affirms that some part of my heart and soul is given to an American warrior, sent forward on orders of national will and political need.

I’m here, but I am also there. I am there because part of me is there.

The Gold/Blue star flags show how one place can be connected to distant conflicts. This illustrates that leaders in one city adversely impact the families, lives, and plans of Americans hidden in the hills, living on city blocks, housed on military posts, or tucked into suburban homes. Congress recognized this privilege with 36 U.S.C. § 901.

War is Different with an Empty Chair at the Table

Having just come through the holy week, I was, again, reminded of the empty chair and open door reminding us to welcome Elijah. That gold star, that blue star, says that my table has a place set for someone who is not with me. With Gold Star Families, that chair shall remain unoccupied forever. For Blue Star Families, we live daily hoping that the door hinges creak and the empty chair gets warmed by a living and loving human.

When the direct impact of war comes to a community transported by emptiness and loss, we must not view far-away videos with the perverse curiosity of video games and ugly memes.

Veteran Families, Gold Star Families, and Blue Star Families get to ask the tough questions, often with tears: why are you sending my family there?

Some Part of All of Us

I am proud that so many veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars have been standing for elections. They get to ask the tough questions. They get to demand answers. I wish someone would remind us of how long the Iraq War actually lasted. Statements made this week may have been legally accurate, but misrepresented the truth:

· Iraq War: 2003-2011 (“8 years, 8 months, and 28 days”)

· Iraqi Insurgency: 2011-2013

· War in Iraq: 2013-2017

· Islamic State Insurgency in Iraq (2017-present)

The U.S. and Iran have been engaged in proxy wars in Iraq since 2014. In short, the Iraq war has not ended, the borders have simply expanded. One must never be contemptuous or dishonest about the cost of war.

We have been at war in Iraq for 23 years —yes, longer than Vietnam.

The human cost to American families (2003-2011):

• Wounded

  • 32,000 uniform military

  • 44,000 civilian contractors

• Injured/Disease/Other medical

  • 45,000 uniform military

  • Unknown civilian contractors

• Killed

  • 4,508 uniform military

  • 3,650 civilian contractors

With rounding and including allied forces, that was 27,000 dead and 120,000 wounded/injured/ill in the first eight years.

When these families are your neighbors, or when you are a Gold Star/Blue Star Family, you know this deep in your soul. You shop with them. You see them around town. You see the flag sticker in the window of the car or house.

The rent in my heart, the empty chair at my table, and the Blue Star flag hanging quietly in my office is for all of the Stacys, Aarons, Andys, Jacobs, and others who stood.

The irony with my deployment is that I was in complete political opposition to the war when I was asked to join. Unlike most, my letter from Uncle was not legally binding, I had the right to say, “No,” and not report. I said, “Yes,” because I believe that democracy requires participation. I went.

Stacy is there because she is an expert at that thing she does and because she continues to make the voluntary decision to remain.

In fact, 100% of our military volunteered to undertake these missions. 100% of them swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution to stand and fight for Americans in the name of America. And for 23 years, Americans have been actively engaged in combat operations in places many cannot point to on a map.

My Favorite Stacy Story

In the late 1990s, I worked for the Indian Health Service, a part of the U.S. Public Health Service while living in Anchorage, Alaska. One winter, I was tasked with delivering a replacement medical device to the native health clinic in Valdez Alaska (yes, that Valdez). I asked my battle-buddy to join me on the three-plus day car trip.

For those of you who have driven the Glenn Highway in the summer months, the winter version of this same road is different. The road is isolated, lonely, quiet, and most road-side services close up ‘till the snow goes. Through the Thompson Pass, you may encounter walls of snow at the edge of the road that are higher than ten or fifteen feet. The state uses a turbine to blow and lift the feet of snow.

There are names you know along this road: Matanuska River, Willow and Palmer, Alaska.

After the right at Glennallen, you drive south towards Valdez. Climb and climb glaciated mountains, come to Thompson Pass. I hadn’t had a chance to pee. Getting desperate, I decided to stop on the two-lane highway. Explaining my plan to Stacy, I rammed the truck’s bumper into the wall of snow several times to cut a hole. I then dropped trou, hovered my butt over the hole in the wall, and took care of bidness. No flushing needed. The next plow run would freshen it up.

Stacy kept a bag of salted sunflower seeds on the dash. I’d grab one or two, suck the salt, and cough. We spit shells into empty water bottles like so many folks using chaw. She yelled at me for coughing. “Why eat them if, every time, you cough?” I still don’t know.

As we rode the last hour past the switchbacks down toward the coast and sea level, I put on Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony. As I sung loudly, I drove faster and faster. The music got louder and louder.

I knew that if we had trouble on the road, or had to camp in the snow, or prep a meal, or find a way to stay warm during a delay, this partner was for me. Together, we could survive (nearly) anything.

You plan a three-day winter mission in the Chugach Mountains with the right gear, the skills, contingencies, and a person by your side who can haul your ass from the shit and laugh about it while spitting sunflower shells.

As an aside to my aside, there are numerous stories of the Alaska National Air Guard parajumpers (PJs) flying out to save all sorts of U.S. military special ops teams who have had it all go wrong. A nice brag for the hometown team. When Seal Team 6 gets in trouble in the Chugach, who do they call? Alaska PJs.

Get your ass home (all of the Stacys).

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I.M. Aiken author & narrator

• “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” (2024)

• “Stolen Mountain” (2025)

• “Trowbridge Dispatch” - fictional short stories/podcast

• “Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries, and a story of Love” (2026)

Follow along at:

• TrowbridgeDispatch.IamAiken.com

• IamAiken.org

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I.M. Aiken spent 2006 as member of a military unit in Iraq as a government civilian. She has a new novel releasing this summer/fall that incorporate her journal entries and ties them to ancestral stories of a soldier during the Reconstruction Period that followed the American Civil War. This story is a revised chapter from that upcoming novel. Links to current events will pop for you. This journal entry is from precisely 20 years ago this month, the author (me) seems to pleading for a description of the end game. Not different from March of 2026. And actually, not too different from 1898 and 1871 America, either, a theme in the upcoming novel. Note that in fictionalizing the journals, the roll of the storyteller morphed from the author to a fictional soldier, and made it a letter home.

Brighid:

Your ancestor, Captain Henry, relates to Killeen, Texas. How’s that for an odd link across a century and a quarter? Your young Henry served as a private soldier near Chattanooga, Tennessee just after the American Civil War. There is a creek near Chattanooga called the Chickamauga. Confederate General Hood originally trained and served in the U.S. Army before rebelling against the United States. He lost his leg near Chickamauga in a battle against the United States Army. Earlier at Gettysburg, he lost the function of an arm. Adding insult to injury, Hood lost most of his battles. He violated his oath, fought against the United States, and proved to be a poor leader. In an effort to appease southern politicians, we named the Army post in Texas after this guy. Fort Hood. You’ve been there with me. One of our nation’s largest Army posts is named for a general of a rebellious army, and a treasonous criminal.

As you research this period of our history, you might keep your eyes open for names that seem heroic and honored, but are actually a hint of old political battles within our country. While fighting here in Iraq, my thoughts explore the closure and healing process that follows civil war.

At the end of our one-year tour here, these soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Division garrisoned at Fort Hood will move to Fort Carson in Colorado. These soldiers, who have been on the go since the wars began, have already been presented with a choice. If a soldier remains with the Fourth Infantry Division, they will return from combat to Texas and immediately move to Colorado. If a soldier decides that Texas and Fort Hood is their forever home, then the soldier must transfer to a different unit. But most of the units at Fort Hood who did not deploy this year will deploy to Iraq next year.

We’ve given our soldiers a Hobson’s Choice. They must decide to move to Colorado or return to combat nearly immediately. Many of the soldiers have already decided to use their mid-tour break to pack up their lives and their families.

If a soldier decides to remain with the Fourth Infantry Division, then they move to Colorado, then they will return to these battlefields within eighteen months. The only relief is retirement, injury, schooling, or end of service. And yet, there are hundreds of serving soldiers here who have already retired or have found themselves in active units during their supposed “terminal leave,” or trapped by stop-loss programs. The Army holds on to skilled and experienced soldiers. I am here with a lot of overweight soldiers, soldiers who have applied to separate from service, and soldiers who filed for retirement more than a year ago. Some do not expect to be released for yet another year.

Since 2003, our government has mobilized this division from Texas to Iraq then back to Texas then back to Iraq. From Baghdad, they will return to Texas, move to Colorado, unpack, then deployed again to Iraq or Afghanistan. I am counting the evolutions on my fingers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. That will be seven complete moves of a heavy infantry division in under a decade. A division is approximately fifteen thousand soldiers. Add family, support staff, vehicles, office equipment, households, and sundry… the number of humans involved ranges between sixty and one hundred thousand. In addition to the people, their households, and offices, the moves include artillery, hundreds of M1A1 Abrams tanks weighing between sixty and eighty tons, thousands of Humvees, and thousands of shipping containers.

Young soldiers in our ranks, people my age, have experienced combat action in two countries and have been in a theater of combat for most of their very short careers. When command offers a young soldier a coin or a written statement of praise, they do not appear to care much. Young soldiers, young privates already awarded a Silver or Bronze Star, roll their eyes at being made soldier of the month from their own company. They have already seen multiple combat tours. Tired soldiers seeing years of combat operations in front of them. Letters of recognition fail to instill motivation like they once did.

With Iran in the news with such frequency, and the increasing violence in Iraq, I hope that our government does not expect that this Army to walk into Iran to solve the problems with Iraq. Iran and Iraq battled for a decade in the 1980s. The result was 1,000,000 people dead and a scared battlefield. Back then, Iraq was our friend and Iran held American hostages. Imagine the day when our elected officials announce that we are adding another battlefield. Such a decision will crush the souls and families of this generation of American soldiery.

Four of us got posted to tiny Camp Falcon. It is a short distance from my normal base. All of my stuff remains behind at divisional HQ. I live from my ruck, rotating between two uniforms and a handful of underwear and socks that I either launder in a sink or simply wear into the shower. I wash them with shampoo. I wring them out, then hang them during the night. The following morning, they are dry. Regrettably, my undies hold the shape of whatever I hung them on; they are just that stiff.

I barely sleep at night. I had been excited to have this small building to myself, with its walls and door; I did not feel welcome with the enlisted females as I am the only female officer on this base, and the rules state that I cannot rack out with my own squad because they are all dudes. I failed to understand that dozens of Chinook helicopters come in most nights. Chinooks date back to the Vietnam war. They have two sets of rotors and a loading ramp like a cargo plane. We fly them at night now because they are vulnerable to ground attacks during the day. They are heavy, slow, loud, and explain why this small building remained uninhabited by the soldiers serving here. Nobody wants to sleep in the landing path of Chinooks. Except me, I guess?

Most soldiers rack out in two-story buildings. These two-story buildings are dressed in the khaki-colored stucco that matches our equipment and the soil. The ground story of the building has a layer of tall concrete barriers—called either Texas barriers or Alaska barriers—which resemble the Jersey barriers of highways back home, except they stand three meters tall. Each window on the ground floor has three layers of sandbags. Ringing the buildings between the ground floor and the top floor is an exterior concrete trough that carries basic utilities. Our troops use this trough to carry communications wires and stack sandbags. The second story windows also have three layers of sandbags unless there is an air conditioning unit.

The roof deck of the building is flat and made of concrete tiles on a concrete base. Antenna masts and antenna dishes are weighted down with sandbags. Additionally, one can observe the ghosts of former sandbags. Regrettably, a lot of the bags we have used for making sandbags had been manufactured out of nylon or plastics. The sun destroys these plastics within a few months. The sandbags get bleached, then corrode in the sun. The result is leaking and spilling sand. The dense sand remains in its neat, round pile while the plastic fabric fades to dust. Thereby creating ghosts of former sandbags.

One layer of sandbags slows a bullet, reducing its lethality, but the dust and dirt from the sandbag enters a soldier’s wound which can introduce evil infections. Three layers of sandbags stack with greater stability and stop normal bullets and most shrapnel from IEDs, mortars, rockets, and grenades. As many urban kids know, before joining the Army, sleeping on the floor provides greater protection from bullets.

During my first tour into Iraq, a female master sergeant provided an informal class to female soldiers. One of the lessons was called feet-first. Before dressing, take care of your feet and treat for fungus. Then put on clean, dry socks. Do this before putting on underwear. The little bugs can’t jump through your socks. The little beasties from the feet have a more difficult time traveling to the nether regions covered by the underwear. Listen to the infantry. Another lesson involved urinating into a plastic bottle. She showed us how to make an oblique cut on a plastic water bottle, which, when completed, makes an anatomical match. Stand or squad, she said. Pee, then pour the contents into a bottle with a screw on top. Toss. With the lesson, we joined the world of those who can pee standing up. It makes peeing on a C-130 Hercules, peeing when doing surveillance, and peeing with a small squad of male soldiers just that much easier. It also makes peeing at night easier, too.

Camp Falcon occupies a few city blocks. It has three-story walls, made from Iraqi brick. It already had guard towers, so I assume that this facility was once an Iraqi military post. This is an urban base. The sounds of Baghdad remain constant and close.

The nightly body count in Baghdad approximates fifty citizens. That’s fifty Baghdadi folks, not U.S. troops; Iraqis killing Iraqis. We seem further from an end that we did when I got here. We appear to be traveling backwards, away from peace, the longer we are here. In the summer of 2003, when I deployed here for a few months as a sergeant, I believed we approached the end of the war. Instead, peace keeps retreating from Iraq.

I acknowledge that my foul attitude is due, in part, to living in quarters that would be condemned in any U.S. city. In Iraq, I call it home-for-now. I have made a nest in the corner. I fight with mice, ants, bugs, and spiders to defend my crappy piece of this room.

I noticed a dramatic down-tick in my emotional state when I read about a man in Afghanistan who converted to Christianity. I read that the government of Afghanistan now wants to execute him because of his conversion. In a country where we committed U.S. soldiers, we are faced with a government that wants to execute someone because of a religious preference. I am incensed by this. My stack is blown—as in, remains blown. Aren’t we here to defend freedom? Freedoms of religion and of the press, freedom from unwarranted searches, freedom to vote?

The fact that I carry the Constitution and Bill of Rights with me, even in this miserable place, expresses my desire to stand for these values. I do not wish to have American soldiers fighting to restore power to a government that completely eschews our soldier’s oath.

I know I am in Iraq, but the fluidity between Iraq and Afghanistan amazes me. Between Iraq and Afghanistan is the nation of Iran. Presently, Iraq and Afghanistan are two different battlefields against two different enemies being fought for two different reasons. Yet it is the same few Americans that deploy into, then out of, these two wars. Most Americans do not know the difference. Most Americans cannot point to either of these nations on a map.

I read what I can about Afghanistan. If I am not going there next, I’ll return here. I am certain I will see Afghanistan at least once.

At this moment, NATO is taking over forces in Afghanistan. Our troops are about to fight under a British general for the first time since World War II. At the same time, we are in a diplomatic fracas with the Mayor of Kabul (oh, I mean the “President of Afghanistan,” forgive me). Under Karzai, opium production is better than it has been in decades. Their constitution does not provide for a distinction between state and church, nor does it provide itself the ability to supersede traditional Islamic law. Under the new rulers, Afghans can return to lopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women.

The Taliban’s strict enforcement of Islamic law inspired the destruction of the ancient Buddhist sculptures carved into the mountain side. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were considered idolatry and sacrilegious by these religious zealots. Therefore, the Taliban—then standing as the Afghanistan government—blew them up. They filmed it. They filmed the process of destroying artifacts created in the sixth century. One stood thirty-eight meters tall, the other fifty-five. “One should not let idols stand,” said the nation’s boss, so they blew them up.

Let’s admit that part of the Islamic code remains as rigid and archaic as Leviticus. Imagine a nation run by the rules of Leviticus? If someone decided that America must be a truly Christian nation and follow the teachings of the Christian Bible, where would we be? Yet the U.S. government seems to be stumbling around with our proverbial knickers at our ankles. We must stand for real religious freedom; instead, we support a government that has outlawed converting to Christianity. We plea for a life sentence or an insane asylum in lieu of death. We are negotiating with the government we installed, the government presumed to be more liberal than the Taliban.

Let’s observe that we negotiate the sentence whilst ignoring the underlying law. We have put American soldiers into the line of fire so that this new government can codify laws that limit religious preference. None of this follows the tenants of my oath—our oaths—nor the words written in that slim document in my breast pocket. What is the difference between the Taliban or this new Afghanistan government if they both use the same laws and tactics?

Soldiers express shock, anger, and dismay over this issue. Things heated up on the anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. Many here thought that Afghanistan was a model for success, a model that demonstrated to all of us how this war in Iraq could come to a good end. Victory by U.S. forces can never, ever tolerate religious persecution. That is the first of our amendments. 1791, the same year Vermont joined the union, the following words were written and accepted as law:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; of abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The authors found that freedom of speech and religion where exactly that important. We do not drain our blood, our credibility, our nation’s bank account, and destroy American families so that some damn government can just lock up—or kill—a guy with a Bible, a Koran, a Torah, a Bhagavad Ghita, or any other document. That is not in the bargain. We serve to support our values and our Constitution. We shall not yield the life of a single American soldier to support a government that would execute or imprison a citizen for his religious beliefs.

Reporters in Afghanistan tend to focus on the military as the story: The bodies, the tactics, the weapons. The news has not yet made an issue out of the limitations of the laws in Afghanistan. The reporters, and politicians, need to see past the Humvees and the patrols.

But you have to be here to see beyond. Footage of the most recent bombing is the same here as any other place: flashing lights, a reporter yelling into a mic while wearing a blue flak vest, a bloom of smoke over his shoulder and bits of car and debris all over the place. We’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. It is not news.

We should be reporting on stories that matter. Let me offer several. I mean, no one is listening, are they? But if I could research and write stories, I may start with one of the following.

Story option one for the world press:

When I was flying last week, I traveled repeatedly over the major roads that go from Baghdad to Karbala. I wish I knew the original Iraqi names for these roads; we’ve renamed them all for our own purposes. I think of this highway as I-95 running north to south through the major cities. Hundreds of thousands marched from their homes to Karbala. They marched in a way we could never know. Old ladies marched alone in their black clothing. Kids marched. Everyone marched. For days, they marched towards Karbala. No packs, no bags, no cars. Every few kilometers, there was a waystation with food and water. These waystations had been built from ancient trucks or mule-carts or upturned crates. Anything that could host food and water. I traveled almost one hundred kilometers in two days by Blackhawk. We flew up and down I-95 from mission to mission. I was amazed. I was in awe.

How did all of this get organized? Who did this? How did the people know? How did the people know to trust their neighbors and that there would be food, water, and bedding along the way? How does this happen?

That’s a story. It highlights a change since Saddam. It documents a means of communication unique to this area. It illustrates how people can simply walk a highway with trust. The pilgrims were rewarded with kindness, food, water, and shelter. I saw no violence. I would know more if someone in the media researched it then reported on it. It illustrates new religious freedoms.

Another story option for the world press:

Why are the counter-Iraqi forces winning at the PsyOps game? PsyOps is Army-speak for Psychological Operations. The U.S. is prohibited by law from doing propaganda. So, we call it PsyOps instead. We do it. They do it.

Only, they do it more effectively.

The enemy is a bad guy. His tactics work. These bad guys stand for a type of totalitarianism and religious regime governed by Islamic law. They may not win hearts and minds, but they do control the community with fear.

The Bad Guys capture people and torture them. They film this, then burn the images to DVDs. They then duplicate the DVDs and distribute them throughout neighborhoods. The Bad Guys will kidnap the family of another fellow and repeat the process with the filming and the DVDs and the midnight distribution process.

If a Good Guy lives in the community and wants the nation to progress towards democracy, then this Good Guy finds his family held captive by a Bad Guy. The Good Guy becomes compliant. So do his neighbors. The DVDs show images of people who had once served tea as friends and countrymen, now acting with unbelievable violence towards these same friends and countrymen.

This technique is highly effective. It sends a strong message. And given the electronic nature of the message, it is untraceable. They scrub the location and equipment metadata from the video feeds, then reproduce with inexpensive DVD cloning machines. There is no internet address to chase. It is a brilliant application of technology.

A third story for the press to explore:

Let’s write an article, or create a short documentary, about our enemy. I’d like to know who he is. Who is the enemy? Are we fighting bin-Ladenism? Are we fighting an Islamic reactionary force? Are we fighting against a backdrop of traditional tribal war? Are we fighting foreign insurgents from Iran, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, all of whom have interests in controlling this region?

Turkey is afraid of the Kurds gaining autonomy. The Iranians seem to be supporting an Iranian-esque Shi’ah Islamic government. And the states to the west are likely to support the Sunni with an Islamic government. There is an American soldier in Iraq who would like to know the answer to these questions.

Many Iraqi I meet state some folks just want “The Chair.” They simply want power. They want to be rulers of their part of the land. “The Chair” seems to be a local term for throne or seat of power. They simply say, “The Chair.” Here, “The Chair” means power, and that means wealth, corruption, and respect. All of the above.

I offer a fourth story that the media could tell me:

I am a soldier on the ground, eating Iraqi dust, while wearing underwear that I can wag in the air like a stick. Please define success for me. What does the end –of this war look like to me and to the Iraqi people? What would they consider a natural state? What are their priorities? In my conversations, all I hear is security. With security comes all: utilities, benzene (gasoline), economy, family, growth, politics, and everything else. Without security, there is nothing.

I recognized my definition of the end when I thought through the question today. This conflict is over when I can walk out of Forward Operating Base Falcon and walk back to the division headquarters. I can see the hill next to the Z-shaped lake when I stand on a roof here. Imagine that I could step out of these gates, dressed in either my uniform or civilian clothing, then walk back to headquarters. If I could stop at an Iraqi bodega for water and a snack, greet people on the street, and make it the other side of my journey safely, that would be an accomplishment. I would accept that as an improvement in security.

Instead, I listen to frequent gunfire around me. In the morning briefings, we are informed of fifty dead Iraqis, or some other dreadful number. The evidence of kidnapping, torture, and street-based executions can be found in the DVDs we gather.

Blue fingers and elections don’t matter. Especially when the election can still result in the death of a man because he changed religions.

There are other stories like these that aren’t being investigated, that aren’t being told. And someone must. We’ve been at war since March 2003 in Iraq. It is March 2006. Therefore, we have entered the fourth year of this war. Where are the checks-and-balances in our culture to examine the situation? Like why fifty percent of our “fighting” force is contractors? How do we explain to U.S. citizens that a reduction in military presence here will be countered by an increase in U.S. contractors, filling roles traditionally held by uniformed military personnel?

If you do bump into any answers, please provide them to a dusty and tired soldier. Someday, I can sleep in a comfortable bed, then, in the morning, dress in soft underwear that doesn’t feel like cardboard.

Recently, when the daily death count of Iraqis killed by Iraqis escalated, we started describing our battlefield as a civil war. Our coalition forces stand on this same battlefield. All sides attempt to leverage us. They come to us with a whisper, an accusation, and sometimes proof. “Hey, old Freddy here, he was the one that mortared your base three days ago. He bought some weapons from the Iranians that came from China. I can show you.” We investigate. Do we arrest Freddy? In the early weeks, we did. We’d bang down doors, zip-tie or kill folks in Freddy’s building. We have wised up a bit. Maybe Freddy was set up. Maybe Freddy and Barney had a falling out. Maybe Barney is the real Bad Guy. We lost track.

Right now, we don’t know. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

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We did not necessarily understand we stood in a civil war. We took intelligence from people we knew and trusted and had served good intelligence before. This environment can be like drug wars in U.S. cities, where one rival gang provides information to the cops about another gang. The result is that the gang making the reports gains territory and trust with the police. The police earn recognition for seizing drugs and making high-profile arrests. If the police side with one gang or the other, they escalate the violence and corruption. But if the police do not act on intelligence, they fail to curb the violence and movement of drugs. We find ourselves in that situation here today. The bosses have not yet said: “This is a civil war.” The politicians have not said it either. The dead bodies on the streets tell their own story. The gunfire at night tells its own story.

I came to Camp Falcon because a counterintelligence team found a metric ton of anhydrous nitrogen. While this liquid product is used by farmers as a fertilizer, we believe that this stash was to be used for improvised explosives. Certainly, we have thousands of local farms growing dates and other fruits. They would love to get their hands on this fertilizer for their fields. Yet, the manner of storage and the location of the find indicates that someone planned on making hundreds of bombs from this material. To make a bomb from this anhydrous nitrogen, we need a trigger and a detonation source.

One of the dining facilities I have visited during my travels displays the makings of various improved explosive devices (IEDs). Someone mounted the wiring and detonation system for IEDs on a sheet of powder-blue plywood. A black marker described the components and how they work. I remember one that used an egg timer; one that used a Nokia mobile phone; one that used the timer from an electric clothes dryer. We stood in line for our meals studying these diagrams. I learned and memorized more from these boards than I had in classrooms. Reinforcing these lessons was the knowledge that these bits of wires, timers, and diagrams had been picked from IEDs that exploded near the base. The soldiers who made these displays used crime scene evidence to make functional diagrams of explosive devices. Soldiers waited in line for breakfast learning how to either make one, or, more importantly, how to recognize one.

A ton of explosive fertilizer, a small battery, a timer or trigger, then an ignition source… that’s all a bomb maker needs. When investigating a ton of explosive material, I tend to ask myself: “What did we miss?” I am working with Jim and Kyle, members of a human intelligence support team, or HST. Jim pays the guy who pays the guy who pays the guy who gets the information on shipments of bad-stuff and the location of these explosives. Kyle tends to write reports, analyze the data, and talk with bosses. Jim and Kyle created a team of two that has proven effective, even in this bizarre battlespace. They seem to be savvy enough to avoid the obvious attempts at passing on sectarian-based—or revenge-based—data. At the edge of this world, where spies do not call themselves spies, Jim and Kyle spy.

I look forward to yielding my corner back to the rats and bugs from whom I stole the space. I hate this hooch and do not feel very safe at Forward Operating Base Falcon. I never thought I would look fondly on a room that occupies one-third of an aluminum trailer. But back at that base, contractors do my laundry. I drop it one day, skip a day, then fetch my laundry. That’s the counter in my head: drop, skip, get. The clothing returns clean and with a hint of fluffiness. Life is better when dressing in soft underwear and a properly cleaned uniform. When I walk into the D-fac for my breakfast, the fellows at the griddle know my order and treat me well. I know I have it good, nestled in with the division headquarters staff. It is not Vermont, and I see them pour eggs from a carton. My morning egg comes from a shelf-stable egg-like product that pours from a box. In Vermont, eggs come from a chicken that scratched the dirt near someone’s home. In the ranking of good-better-best, Vermont remains at the top of the list, and it is best because it is my home. The divisional headquarters ranks as good. I acknowledge it as the best of all possible options when in Iraq. Camp Falcon is still better than sleeping rough and better than the conditions in which a lot of our soldiers live.

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FOB Falcon greeted me with two familiar insignias. First, the four green ivy leaves of the Fourth Infantry Division. Second, an artist painted the shoulder patch of the 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101^st Airborne Division. During World War II, it was known as the 506^th PIR. The shoulder patch displays six white parachutes in a blue sky near a green hill. Below the image is the word “Currahee.” The HBO series Band of Brothers followed the men of “E,” or Easy Company, of the 506^th PIR through World War II. This unit is now here in Baghdad with us. Many soldiers serve anonymously and quietly. We do take pride in our efforts, and the heritage of our units. The men of the 506^th landed during D-Day, parachuted into the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden, slept in the snow during the Battle of the Bulge. In the spring of 2006, the men and women of the 506^th display their colors at this urban outpost in Baghdad.

I shan’t complain about stiff underwear I wash in the shower, because I have access to a shower. So many do not. I shan’t complain about a morning egg that pours from a carton, given we often have to rely on ready-to-eat meals. I shan’t complain about displacing rats and bugs to create my own nest on a floor, because it is better than sleeping outdoors or in a tent. But maybe I should wonder about invading a nation without much of a plan for either building the nation’s government or the possibility of creating a civil war in our own battlefield. This month, I know of one ton of explosives that will not be used to kill hundreds of Iraqis. Regrettably, if there was another ton of explosives a kilometer away, I would not know.

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I.M. Aiken

• Author & narrator

• “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” (2024)

• “Stolen Mountain” (2025)

• “Trowbridge Dispatch” - fictional short stories/podcast

• “Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries and a Story of Love”

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I.M. Aiken

• Author & narrator

• “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” (2024)

• “Stolen Mountain” (2025)

• “Trowbridge Dispatch” - fictional short stories/podcast

• “Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries and a Story of Love”

A five am 911 call means: woke up dead or super sick. Whatever lays ahead, this morning offers the frigid beauty of a Vermont morning. Peeing, prepping before rushing into deep cold, I admire the monster-sized full moon approaching the horizon. I am again awed by the sparkling cascade of clear-sky snow that floats on days like these.

“Dispatch, 14RC1 acknowledging call for Trowbridge. En route shortly.” No, you cannot go from sound, warm, lovely sleep into a -5 degree dawn. At this age, I need the obvious bio stop and time to layer on socks and long underwear below proper warm clothes.

My phone buzzes with a message from Regina: “Pick me up. I’ll be at end of my drive on the road.”

I text back: “3 min and I’ll be in truck.”

Regina leaps up and in. Together now, we speed-ish down her hill and away from acres and acres of hayfields buried in feet of snow. My emergency lights reveal every crystal of ice that dances over the road and in the woods that close in around us. The snowbanks on the left and right stand taller than the hood of my truck.

I think—aloud, I guess—“The boys will wing that back today.” As if that is an obvious and stupid observation. With a clear, cold day between weekend storms, I envision the town road crew plowing with the wing extensions set high. They will trim the snowbanks down while spraying the top half deeper into the woods. Snowbank maintenance. Given we work, drive, and respond over rural Vermont 3-rod roads, when snow tumbles back onto the road, the pathway narrows as if the snow wishes to reclaim it all.

I slam on the breaks.

Regina exclaims (shrieks): “What the fuck?”

“Was that a flying reindeer? Are we in a Santa Claus movie?”

Now fully stopped, I get out of the truck. I hear Regina open, then shut, her door. I circle the truck sunwise and she circles the other way. We meet and continue. The routine reminds me of silliness from high school when we would evacuate a car at a red light, run circles, dance like fools, then jump back in before the light turned green and horns cussed at us for being kids.

My heart has immediately accelerated to 120 beats per minute. My eyes dilate. In fact, my entire sympathetic nervous system reinforces that we nearly collided with a flying (or leaping) deer. Climbing into the warming truck, we babble like civilian humans who saw something that threatened to kill. The deer made it over the truck and landed on the opposing bank. We both witnessed the track marks. He was gone. No blood, no fur, nothing but hoof prints on plow-packed snow.

As we drive towards the emergency, we both breathe to control the massive hit of adrenaline we loaded into our bloodstream. We are professional paramedics. We are cool and calm. We stride onto a scene with a plan and authority that tends to soothe others at emergencies. If we show up wired and sparking with fear, then we will (and have) infected everyone else at the scene.

We are not allowed to be afraid. That admitted, let me confirm that every one of us has blown our cool. Somehow, someday, some setting, we have each keyed the mic with some variant of “oh shit, send me everything.” Because on that day, we are too small, too weak, too overwhelmed to fully assess and report what is in front of us. The 200-car pile-up in an ice fog on the interstate where the first car has mom holding the decapitated head of her husband while the infant in the back falls silent while you fail to understand that this is only the first car you looked at. Or that day when I said “priapism” over the radio because I saw a lad curling into a decorticate posture and an erection often associated with strangulation, hanging, or massive neuro-trauma. The right and professional words evaporate as you key the mic. You can’t be cool while squeaking sterile medical terms into a radio.

You’re first. You’re trained. Breathe, see the facts as they are, invent some stupid plan, then communicate your needs calmly and smoothly over the radio. It doesn’t always happen, does it? Sometime in every rescuer’s career, you want your radio to have an “oh shit” knob.

Hitting a flying deer on a brilliantly dark January morning feels like “oh shit” to the body. But it isn’t. No damage to truck or deer or humans. And yet, a few more miles to travel, hoping now not to meet a town plow coming north on this same road. We breathe. We both actively engage in calming.

I flip the radio knob to the town frequency: “Hey guys, RC1. We’re flyin’ south.”

“Alex, we heard you go out. All clear. We’re still in the barn. Call us if you need help.”

“Thanks, Pete.” They will plow a driveway for us, unstick the ambulance, or make whatever magic we need in the snow.

As one might expect, the best I could do was push Regina and all of our kit out onto the drive while I backed a hundred meters to the road. I parked my running truck with lights telling all who came next which drive and dropping the hint to not come up it. The drive is too narrow for traffic.

“Dispatch, 14RC1 establishing Trowbridge command. Inform the ambulance that my truck marks the drive. Tell them the drive is plowed, but no turn around. They should back up. It is flat, straight, and clear.”

See, that is appropriate and professional communication.

I shuffle up the drive, listening to the snow squeak beneath each footfall. The lights of the house and my headlamp illuminate the falling snow. It is like being in an old-time cartoon, stars dancing around the head of an injured duck or coyote. The snow sparkles and flutters.

At the door, I get the standard urgent greeting: “Hey, my mother is in the downstairs bedroom. She’s having a stroke. Your partner is already in there.”

Every action must communicate: calm, control, confidence. I offer hope. “Strokes are not like they were when we were kids. There are fantastic treatments that often work.” I don’t need to worry about Regina. We, two, didn’t need a plan. I continue, “When did you last see her looking and acting normally?”

“Maybe last night.”

“Well, what time did you go to bed or last see her?”

“I dunno, nine, I guess,” answers the son.

As we say in the business, “Time is brain, meaning the faster we assess and move, the better the outcome for your mother will be. Can we sit for a sec? I need her name, date of birth, physician’s name, and all of her meds. Also, I need to write down her medical history.”

I use my voice to slow the pace down. My pen and index cards are poised to capture information that will round out Regina’s assessment and aid the hospital in locating records and planning their actions following our stroke alert.

With the front and back of my card filled, a fresh photo of the advanced directives that rested under a magnet on the side of the fridge, I slip into Mom’s bedroom. I touch Regina on the shoulder.

“Urinary Tract Infection,” she says softly.

I shrug.

“Problem is, this stupid stroke chart assumes symptoms fall on one side or the other. She’s pretty gorked.”

“Ambulance is en route. We’ve got time.” I see what she sees. Every rookie and most EMT-basics would not hesitate to identify this as a stroke and push the big red button called “Stroke Alert.” A stroke alert, made to the hospital via phone or relayed via dispatch, pushes the hospital into high gear. The guiding principle is that it is better to make the stroke alert than to be wrong. But Regina and I have decades of experience and thousands of hours of additional training.

“Wanna call medical control?” Give some overnight doc the data and take the decision from the hands of two medics in a small bedroom forty-five to sixty minutes from the nearest community hospital.

What happens when you call in a stroke alert to a community hospital? They may tell you that their CT machine is down or… or… In short, the hospital may tell you to go elsewhere. If the ambulance starts rolling, they may have to turn around to head west or head south. Because options don’t exist.

Regina dials the hospital from the home phone. She asks for medical control. In her hand, she holds a PDF version of the Vermont stroke protocol open. She identifies herself and asks for the doctor’s name, which comes across as Ted.

“Ted”—Regina looks at me, indicating that I am to write more notes—“What is your credential level? Are you a doc?”

“PA? Ok. I have an 86-year-old female exhibiting stroke-like symptoms. But I believe that she is deep in a UTI.”

Regina’s frustration flashes at me.

“Of course, I did a FAST assessment and checked her blood glucose and that is why I am calling. Her symptoms are bilaterial. She’s aphasic and not following commands well. Both arms drift. Her face doesn’t have a lot of tone, but appears symmetrical.”

“I understand that a paramedic can’t look into a brain. She scores a 5 on the FAST-ED.”

“Fine, then. Trowbridge command is calling in a stroke alert for…” She reads from my notecard, providing our patient’s name, date of birth, and key medical history.

“Ted, if we tell the ambulance to divert to Dartmouth, we will add at least ninety minutes, if not two hours, before this patient rolls through anyone’s door. Is this the best option?”

Regina holds her middle finger towards the phone for my benefit.

“Thank you, Ted.” She hangs up and looks at me.

“I’ll call Mass. I am NOT calling Dartmouth. The docs at Dartmouth will tell me to get an assessment locally.” She calls the next emergency department. Frankly, this ED is either the same distance or closer than our primary ED. “Hey, I’m a medic in Trowbridge, Vermont. Can you guys handle a stroke alert? Is the CT working? Got an MRI? Is your neuro telemed link working? All the things?”

“Nice, cool. Ok, I am calling in a stroke alert for an 86-year-old female. I honestly think she got a rippin’ UTI, but she ticks the boxes for a stroke. Also, I should add, she has that odor. Her symptoms are symmetrical and a bit sour smelling, if you get me.”

She listens. Then prattles off the history and demographic data as the ambulance’s backup alarm creeps closer.

It takes a few years to understand that, sometimes, a “stroke” can be treated with a course of antibiotics because the stroke isn’t a stroke.

We’re back in my truck as dawn starts showing, an hour before the sun will appear through the trees of our forest.

“You did fine.”

“I’m tryin’ tell a guy a thing and he’s not listening.”

“Shitty, huh?” I am not a great sympathetic listener, often too quick with solutions and advice.

“I’ve been thinking I am done.”

“Done, done? Like, not renewing? Like, giving up your license?” I ask.

“I think so,” she says with all the earnesty she can muster. “I work full time and been doing this for two decades. Then some runt tells me I haven’t run enough codes, or landed enough intubations, and I need remedial training in addition to all the other crap. Christ, I love dogs, but now I need to be fully trained and credentialed for treating police canines: IVs, intubations, meds. Only for Mass. Vermont not so much. Keeping my license in Mass and Vermont requires separate training and separate credentialling but they are both part of the national registry.”

“It feels like 100 hours of training per year.”

“Yeah, something like that. Oh, your Mass refresher missed this Vermont module, or God forbid I take a Vermont paramedic refresher and submit that in Mass. It was supposed to all be easier. Nope, I have to add one class in Mass because the modules don’t line up. Vermont doesn’t have Nero’s law mandating veterinary emergency care for dogs.”

“Your gran was a nurse, right?”

“Yeah, and she raised us.”

Regina pauses.

“What it really comes down to is I don’t want to manage the next big call. I don’t know that I need another dead kid, a teen suicide, to be my last call. Can’t I just quit on my terms? I am sixty-four years old. Am I doing this at seventy? Am I recerting so I can work until I am, what, sixty-six, or sixty-eight?”

“Pull the plug,” I offer, feeling much the same.

“But I am still doin’ good out there. I like being on a medic transfer truck. Tons of meds and pumps. I work my ass off. Then some f’n buck decides today is the day for a megacode refresher, and no matter what you do, he needs you to fail. He keeps changing parameters and yells elevating the emotional pressure. He feels he needs to add realism. Yet for a decade of doing codes, we whisper and use our eyes to coordinate. Why do I need that? Get through the human resusitation station, then queue up and wait for the dog station. I am so sick of it.”

She pauses. “It goes back to the old phrase: ‘if you can, then you must.’”

“Sure,” I answer. “That was the rule here. If you were between sixteen and eighty and able bodied and male, then you must be a member of the town militia. It isn’t the case anymore. That ethos died. It is better to drive an expensive car and bully first responders for being in your way.”

Silence.

“Just let it go. I am going let it go soon, too. It can be someone else’s turn. And if there is no one else, then someone younger, more energetic, and less pissed off can solve that problem. I’ve done tried.”

I say: “Regina, my friend, I think it is perfectly fine to acknowledge that not everyday has to involve a shot of adrenaline that comes with a life-or-death encounter.”

“Dispatch, Trowbridge Command terminated.” I say into radio’s mic with perfect professionalism. I wonder how many more times I can wake to the emergency tones then rush through dressing and peeing. How many more times do any of us have? From sleep to crisis in a millisecond. Then some young human buck decides that EMS training must resemble screaming, high-tension, combat operations. Or some deer buck decides that leaping from one snowbank to another over a red pickup truck makes good sense. Cortisol, the stress hormone, floods when the tones go off alerting us to a 911 medical call. Cortisol hits again after not hitting the deer. No doubt for Regina, another hit came when the PA at the local hospital ordered the patient to go direct, via road, to the trauma center in New Hampshire. At some point, done is done. Right?

It is ok to walk away, isn’t it?

She’ll miss it. I’ll miss her. At one moment, you are the one with the tools, and skills, and experience to make stuff better. You’re the hero. You save lives. You’re the person people want to see walking through the door. That’s a nice feeling.

“I don’t know.” She says as she gradually accepts that this maybe it.

I.M. Aiken is a Vermont-based novelist exploring the impact public service takes on us.

“The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” – September 2024

“Stolen Mountain” – October 2025

“Trowbridge Dispatch – Short stories” – an ongoing series of written and audio stories

“Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries, and a Story of Love” – September 2026

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This is not one of my short stories but in fact the truth. I fell from 12 feet onto a new concrete floor for a new garage. Entirely my own fault. And I landed within 4 feet of my roofing harness, which only reinforces the blame for my injuries. I fell on 11 October spent 11 days in the hospital, underwent two procedures, suffered a pretty severe concussion, and since being home just trying to get used to life again. It is hard to go from a mildly gamy leg to full on disability. Many days I was able to celebrate small accomplishments: getting new glasses, brushing my hair, brushing my own teeth, and even tying my own PJs up. Some days were just shit, sitting in a dark room with the shades drawn in the TV playing quietly.

I had thought that this might be a funny little story, but it isn’t, is it? This former paramedic did not play the role of patient well. I refused a C -coller and cleared my own C-spine. And I shouldn’t have. And apparently I objected to a medevac flight until I confirmed that I met the trauma transport criteria, as if I could evaluate better than the crew supporting me. I should’ve just kept my mouth shut.

I’m writing this on 18 November 2025, via Dragon speak dictation software (which doesn’t seem to like me swearing). Novel two came out nearly a month ago, on 21 October. I have been publishing short stories nearly monthly to keep you guys entertained and encourage you to buy my novels as they come out. So, at the moment book number two comes out, I was unable to communicate with my 10,000 followers. I have also been unable to sign books. I have a case behind me on the floor in my office. But with my hands I can’t even pick up the case. I can barely hold the book. In my signature is unrecognizable.

Thank you for your comments and follows during the last year and here is the announcement of novel number two. It is called “Stolen Mountain”. The tagline that the team at catalyst press came up with “nothing is as wicked or mean as massive small-town malfeasance.” You can find the novel as paperback, EPUB, and audiobook wherever you buy books. I of course encourage you to buy at your local bookshop, bookshop.org, and/or Libro.FM for Stolen Mountain.

Just do internet search for the title “Stolen Mountain” in my name “I.M.Aiken”. I started listening to the book last night and found myself chuckling. I have started to record the novel just about a year ago. Thank you

911 calls are both random and consistent. If the tones drop anytime between 0530 to 0800, you anticipate a long, slow, difficult call with little to do. It is the classic time for families to discover that Granny or Gump woke up dead. Nights and evenings: car wrecks. Wintertime: house fires. Springtime: chasing phantom barn fires while Vermonters boil sap.

When the tones drop from dispatch, I wake instantly. I need to pee, which I do whilst listening to dispatch. The next words are critical, though they will be said in uniformly professional tones with no particular emotion. All of this happens as I pee. Another adventure in my life that starts with, “No shit, there I was just minding my own business when...”

“Trowbridge Fire and Rescue, respond south of Nidoba Hill in Trowbridge for a report of a plane crash and possible wildland fire.”

Years from now, the squad will sit around a fire. Someone will say, “Remember the night when that plane crashed?” We’ll be slightly drunk, slightly stoned, and the story starts: “Remember…” Because we remember the unusual calls forever.

Things that don’t happen to a rescue squad covering forty square miles of forgotten mountains in Vermont include: bank robberies and planes falling from the sky. Things that do happen in Trowbridge include: excavators that roll over peoples’ legs, old people who die in bed, drunks who drive off of cliffs, houses that crush fingers, and the injuries and deaths associated with firearms.

Nidoba Hill is the hill that has been in Sam’s family since the Vermont Republic, and likely earlier.

Dispatch informs me that an airplane had just crashed on our land.

I wake Sam. It is her land, more than mine.

My mind explores the impact of a plane on our land and on our neighbors’. Jeez, shit, Marna’s house and barns would erupt in flames with the slightest spark.

“Stolen Mountain,” a novel that follows our Trowbridge crew through an adventure related to Vermont ski areas and bad guys doin’ bad things.

I begin my prep for a difficult night in the woods. First, I recognize that my normal routine of jumping into my truck and speeding off appears stupid. I am as close to the scene as possible. Second, without hopping into my truck, I don’t know what to do.

Our house sits on the shoulder of a hill. Below us is the village, with its church and church spire that stands about five degrees off from true vertical. Below us is a pasture that has hosted every critter from oxen to wild deer. To our west is the home field, more of a yard with gardens than pasture. The stone wall that holds the forest back sits about two hundred meters west of the office. You can easily see the foot trail that stretches from the gravel drive to the dark wall of trees (were it light out). The trailhead, marked by daffodils in the spring, opens like an archway. Our beloved landmarks such as the Douglas Tree, the Cellar Tree, and Lake Shore Drive interlace over Nidoba Hill.

Running on our property’s northern edge is an unpaved Trowbridge road.

We hop onto the side-by-side ATV, and then drive to the paved road. We wiggle south, easing off the crest of the hill. We can see the entire western aspect of Nidoba Hill.

“Dispatch 14RC5 establishing Trowbridge Command at Nidoba Hill.”

“Trowbridge Command established,” they answer me on the radio.

“Dispatch, Trowbridge,” I call out.

“Trowbridge, go.”

“Reporting nothing visual on the western and southern aspects of the terrain.”

Blessedly, the lands are brightening as the half-moon continues its ascent. We can see contours. We can see the outlines of northern white pines that stand proud of the forest’s canopy. We see no hints of smoke, of heat, of damage. Were the plane a Boeing, we’d see a rent torn across this landscape. Were the plane a small Cessna single engine, it would disappear into these forests with no visible scars.

“Command on two?”

“Command.”

“Hey, Brie,” I hear Al’s voice. “I am opposite you, south. I can see the backside of your hill. I can even see the lights of your house.” I can picture exactly where he sits in his truck. We occasionally see the flash of a headlight, especially in the winter after the trees drop their leaves.

“And?” I prompt him.

“Nothin.”

“Nothin-nothing?” I ask, doubting A-One.

“Nothin!”

“Want a dumb idea?”

“Sure,” Al answers.

“Stay there and watch from there. If something does break out, you are in a great spot.”

Sam mutters: “OP1.”

I question her with my eyes.

“OP1—observation post number 1.” Sam interjects standard military terms to my civilian rescue effort.

“Hey, A-One, you are designated OP1.”

“If you keep me here, I may run home to get some binos and a spotting scope.”

“Great.”

Sam is holding a lichen-encrusted lilac stick and has drawn lines and wavy circles deep into the driveway’s gravel. I recognize the conical shape of Nidoba Hill as if on a paper contour map. Straight lines represent our wiggly roads. She marks OP1 on the contour opposite us.

“14RC2 on tac 2 please.” I haven’t heard Harry on the radio yet. I know he is out there.

“2 on 2.”

“Harry, run to the top of Michelin Hill on the state highway. Take up a post looking south. Report from there.”

“Got it. I’ll stay on Tac 2.”

“Ok, you are OP2.”

That put a farmer on the tallest mountain over our mountain valley. His eyesight may not be what it was, but his eyes on that hill will safeguard us all.

Jay calls in from the east of us. “Brie, I got nothing.”

“Jay, do me this. Hold up at Hayes corner and set a perimeter there.”

I then ask Sam, “Why did I ask him to do that?”

“I don’t know, but it was perfect.” Sam marks her sand table with another X for Jay.

There is now a fire truck en route to our home. We hear the whine of the big diesel hit the bottom of the hill. I hear Thomas Reed shift down to first. I think about what to do with a truck loaded with a thousand gallons of water. I know that I am not qualified to organize a rescue or recovery mission following an airplane crash.

The moon climbs one finger of height for every fifteen minutes, or the fifteen-degree span of my hand stretched to the length of my arm each hour. It rises into the sky and shrinks in size, turning whiter and smaller.

“Hey, Chief, how about parking at the dry hydrant?”

Yap, we have a dry hydrant that includes a fire-truck-sized pull out. It also has a big pipe that connects the dry hydrant to our goose pond.

Alex arrives, stopping short of committing to our driveway. Instead, he pulls parallel to the stone wall, parking on our grass.

He looks down to Sam’s sand table. If the plane is not as big as a Boeing, then it is likely small, truck-sized, and the sort that can land on rural runways. You cannot readily find something as small as truck-sized in this forest without a lot of looking. There is a rusted 1930s pickup in a stream that has been found several times. There are rumors of Arthur’s Sword in a rock nearby that nobody has found. And as sad as the words sound, I hope a fire breaks out. Fire, heat, smoke would give us a location.

“Trowbridge Command.”

“Trowbridge answering,” I say after attempting to hand the mic to Alex. He may not be the fire chief, but he is the rescue chief.

“Status?”

“Dispatch, Trowbridge Command reports nothing found. We have established a visual and physical perimeter on the roads. We have at least a 270-degree view of Niboba Hill from observation posts at elevation.” I know that every firefighter and EMT who is awake is listening to my report across nearly one hundred towns in two, three states. They hang on my words.

“Do you have more information? Size of plane? Direction of travel? Any reports from the FAA or other callers?” I ask.

“Sorry, Trowbridge. A driver called from a mobile phone describing a massive orange glow that appeared suddenly at the crest of a hill in Trowbridge.”

“Do you have the lat/long? Did they say the name Nidoba Hill?” In a land of hills, who would know the specific name of that hill?

“Trowbridge, sorry. We used their phone’s reported position and located the car near the Musgrave property.” Do they know that I, as 14RC5, own that hill? Do they know that they are talking about a plane crash on our property? I cling to my professional objectivity and call them on my mobile instead.

“Hey, this is Brighid Doran Musgrave, 14RC5.”

“Hey, Brighid, what can we do for you?”

“Two things: first, can you play the 911 call for me? And second, can you tell me the time that the call came in? We live right here. This is our house and property. We heard nothing.”

“Call came in at 0023.” Meanwhile, I am waving hands and stomping feet to get Alex and Sam to join me on the phone.

“Huh, hold on. Let me put you on speaker.”

We three listen. The dispatcher plays the recording over the speakerphone: “I don’t know what I am looking at, but the trees at the crest of this hill just started glowing. It was really small at the start, then it grew. I’ve got to get home. I think either a plane crashed or there’s a really hot forest fire about to kick off. Sorry.” The call ended.

On the tactical frequency, I pass on the information. “Guys, the call came in at 23 past midnight. A driver reported a red-orange glow at the top of our hill here. Ask around. Did anyone else hear or see anything?”

I get a round-robin of guys keying mics and offering opinions from various hilltops, farm fields, and ridgeline roads.

Sam and Alex return to their map drawn in dirt. Drawing a map in soil or sand is a common military technique called forming a “sand table.” It is scaled to fit the width of the space between the grass and the gravel of the driveway. Sam drew it in the same orientation as the terrain, Harry’s OP looking south, A-One in his truck looking north.

I am listening to radios and thinking that except for being a landowner, I am the least qualified to be in command. I scan the fire truck to my north. I look through the night towards where Al is sitting in a truck. I look west toward the spine of the Appalachians. I turn slowly north again, thinking of Harry looking down over these hills.

Sam and Alex are standing on the northside of the sand table shoulder to shoulder over the map. Their arms raise in a slow point, each of them raising their separate index fingers towards the sky. They slowly point up, then drop their arms. They swap positions and execute the same dance-like maneuvers, tracing an arc in the sky with their hands.

“Hey, hon?” Sam calls to me.

“Yeah?”

“Come here a sec, will ya?”

I step away from my open truck door, the improv command post where I have electric power and multiple radios.

“Stand here.” Sam holds my shoulders, placing me. “There, that’s the road.” Sam points at the drawn road, then the real road. “That is Nidoba.” She points to the spot on the map. “You’re on the road here. Got it? It is twenty minutes past midnight, clear skies. Right?”

I am patient. I am on the path she’s laying out for me. I trust her.

“Look here.” She holds up Alex’s mobile phone. “According to the internet, the moon rose at 12:15 just here.” Alex had placed a round bit of white quartz on the ground, identifying the point where the moon appeared on an imaginary flat horizon. “Moonrise is measured from sea level, so it is a bit later up here. Where do you think the moon is at 12:20?”

I do exactly what they did. I point at the quartz pebble, then gradually raise my arm vertically while arcing southward.

“No shit?”

“A giant orange glow that is just past the halfway mark, as the moon glides through the lower atmosphere and hits the ridgeline.”

“It rose red orange, then as it climbed and marched southward, the color faded.” I see my finger pointing at a normal autumnal half-moon, small and white. There is enough light to give the land depth, but not enough spectrum to see colors except for blacks, blues, and purples.

“Really?” I ask of no one.

“This is tough to explain,” Sam says to me, “but I can see it happening. Give someone some edibles or whatever.”

“They’ll see what they see.”

I’ll call dispatch. At least I am not the one who reported it. I did spend an hour arranging rescue and recovery of a downed plane. The downed plan that wasn’t. Someone reported a fire-red moon rising over our home mountain.

Listen, you know-it-alls, we did the right things. We left a fire watch in place for another two hours. After dawn, we did all the possible search-and-rescue things with personal drones and a few ATVs. We spent the post-dawn morning searching our forest for evidence of a plane crash. We’re not complete idiots. We play the role of heroes. We are a rescue squad. And we rescue shit.

This should not be any more embarrassing than chasing barn fires during sugar season, except it will be. At some regional training center, someone will remember: “Trowbridge, eh? Weren’t you the squad that chased the moon and called it a plane crash?”

Ha-ha, asshole. What would you have done? Found it? You’re no different than me. Your squad is just like mine. But go ahead, laugh at Trowbridge. Oh, ha-ha, that was the night the moon crashed in Trowbridge, Vermont and every firefighter, medic, and EMT in the Connecticut River region knows it.

https://trowbridgedispatch.iamaiken.com/p/murmuration-audio

In a town this small, saying “that address is familiar” feels stupid. We’ve only got 70 miles of roads and a few hundred year-round residents. Paved road, steepish drive on the north side, opening to a small clearing that contains a beige double-wide home. Three steps up to the door centered on the building. I don’t know why, but the lady of the house fusses at me each time I show up. She’ll need a name because this story is about her, or it is about me, you’ll figure it out, I suppose, and tell me. We’ll call her Terri, a nice benign name. At squad meetings and when on the phone with Harry, I have explored my frustrations about Terri in the past.

Which means that when the tones drop telling us, the squad, we have a medical emergency, I can envision the driveway, the house lot, the home, and her, Terri, arms folded tight against her body at the door.

At my own door, I jump into my uniform, leaving linen skirt and shirt on the mudroom floor.

“Dispatch 14RC5 en route.”

In a minute, I hear “5, 2 on 2.” I flip my handheld to the dispatch frequency and tune my more powerful radio to the ground/tactical frequency number 2.

“5 on 2, 2?” Calling out to Harry, RC2, our assistant chief.

“B, I’m on my way. 20?”

“Just hit dirt. You?”

“Haley’s field.”

“Yeah, I thought you were hayin’”

“Call came when I was reloading twine.”

What we’re not saying over the rather public radio frequency is that by calling out landmarks we shall match arrival times without anyone noting that one of us might have slowed a touch. That’s the old rule we’re all taught: “Two in. Two out.” For Sam, my wife, it speaks more of Army battle buddies.

Two red trucks meet at the bottom of the drive, one from the east and one from the west. Harry’s truck carries echoes of Harvard Crimson. Mine is more whore’s lip red.

Hearing a call follows a cognitive process. First you catch the address and hopefully the nature of the call. I sometimes repeat it as the dispatcher provides the rest. Skills I learned before we had text- and app-based messaging to help. Skills I still need in a rural, hilly terrain where mobile phones often fail to find a tower. You hear the address, then you envision the address. Maybe it is a silent marker on the road near by: a neighbor’s house, the scene of an accident, a stone improbably balancing on its tip. If the house and family are known, then I do a run-through of the folks living there and who is the sickest and most probable patient. By now, I normally have pulled my EMS trousers up to the knees. Past treatments, past crises, medical histories, and social histories bubble forward.

The dread hits as I climb in the truck, starting it and waiting for the electronics to stabilize.

The dread.

Why I am walking out of my office? Why am I giving up hours of well-paid billable work to go get yelled at by some Terri? Why am I giving up income to volunteer, to deliberately walk, run, drive towards someone else’s shit?

Then they yell at you. Then they honk at you. Then they drive around barriers you erect.

Hearing Harry call for me on Tac 2 turned my mind from dread to joy.

I am here because he is here. He ran off of a hay field because I am en route to a call at 2 o’clock on a June Tuesday. Who is in Trowbridge, Vermont at 2 o’clock on a June Tuesday? Old folks, kids at the local school, their teachers and staff. The road crew and town clerk. Preschoolers and their guardians. Maybe someone sleeping off a night shift. At 2 o’clock on a Tuesday, I am often the only EMT in town.

Often, if I don’t go, no one else will. Game over.

Had Harry been on his tractor cutting or teddering or bailing, he would not have heard or felt the call. He’d be tucked in, Bluetooth headset on, listing to NPR stories while his fire/EMS pager buzzes invisibly against the vibrations caused by the blue Ford tractor.

One from a hilltop hayfield and one from a Scandinavian-inspired office overlooking a Vermont valley, two EMTs find each other at the bottom of a driveway at the same time. Each of us driving a red truck. Each of us with red-and-white emergency lights. Each of us with a long, whippy antenna, each of us with a nylon bag that carries our few tools.

Calm waves down my body the moment Harry says: “5, 2 on 2.” He says in the plainest possible language, Brighid, I love you and I am here for you, let’s do this together. Hands open on my steering wheel as I pace my landmarks against his. I drove up and right from the southwest. He approached from the northeast.

“Dispatch, 14RC2 on scene with 14RC5 establishing Trowbridge Command. Any word on an ambulance.”

“Trowbridge on scene, establishing command. No word from an ambulance.”

“Understood.” Yup, we all understand.

What’s-her-name meets us standing sentinel to her home, a few feet in front of the three steps that lead to the house. We each park for a quick exit, and to leave ample room for an ambulance to drive up, turn around, and also prepare for departure. Yeah, Terri, Right. That’s what I’m calling her this time. Terri.

I envisioned her arm position wrong. She stood akimbo, as a sentinel to her home.

I know she called us. She should be waving her arms at the end of the steep drive, no? Or standing aside briefing us in breathless speech. Or maybe deliberately leaving open the front door for us and greeting us with a yell of: “Hey, I’m back here!”

Terri dialed 911 asking for medical assistance then stood in front of the door like a guardian preventing entrance.

“Why is it that every time I dial 911 I get you two? I tell 911 to send anyone else. And I’ve told Langford Rescue to never come here again. They’ve nearly killed my husband with their bullshit.”

Harry believes himself to be a peacemaker. He’s lovely about it and sometimes misses the mark. I should be a natural peacemaker, but I kinda need to be in a better mindset. I can’t find peacemaker in the tool kit when one, I walked away from my afternoon’s income; two, I anticipated the hostility from my own dooryard; three, I’ve heard her do this before.

“How can we help? Did you call 911?” Let’s go back to basics.

“It is my niece. She’s not feeling well. She broke her leg the other day and had surgery. We just need a simple ride to the hospital. I called Starkville Ambulance directly, they are supposed to be coming.”

“Terri, I think Starkville forward the information to 911. We’re not in Starkville’s service area.”

“I don’t want you guys here. Can’t other people show up?”

Neither of us know how to answer this.

“How about we take some vital signs and help you get an ambulance here? That’s what our radios are for.”

She says neither “yes” nor “no.” She simply turns and walks into the house, leaving the door open. On our open-air stage, Harry and I look at each other, shrug theatrically, and step forward.

That wave of gratitude starts at my feet, crawls my spine, and finishes at my neck. I shake my head, thinking, at least Harry is with me. If I had written “caller prevented access to the scene” on my run report, I’d be just fine, because of the law. Landlord trespasses a visitor, and visitor must leave or be subject to arrest. If she tells me to go, I must go. But she dialed 911 because somebody needs help. Terri and I would have stood at an impasse.

Terri walks the narrow corridor and points to the small bedroom.

We enter and start talking with Niece.

“You’re not feeling well?” Harry asks, dropping his bag in the hallway.

My bag is behind me on the floor. I take Niece’s hand in my hand. Skin feels moist and cool. Skin doesn’t return to pink after I apply pressure. Pulse is too fast and too wimpy to be very effective.

In an instant, Harry and I both acknowledge, with deep dread, that this woman is sick. In the sick/not-sick assessment, the score and resultant needle point far, far into the sick column. We share a glance that lasts milliseconds. We each encode the silent message with the brevity of “5, 2 on 2.” I am low in a squat next to the bed. Harry is high near the door by the niece’s head. I toss a pulse ox on the finger. I scan her lower body. The leg is immobilized and has external fixators. The black fabric cast ends at the knee.

Harry asks about the basics: name, date of birth—he writes it on his glove in pen—allergies to meds, and then stalls out. He stalls because she stalls. She was answering in one-word or two-word phrases. She got her name out clearly. Date of birth took three breaths. Sometimes that is all you get.

Simultaneously, while I brace her up, grabbing knees, Harry grabs shoulders. In a grunt that sounds like “one,” we lift and pivot her to the bed. Harry shakes his head at me. I know this message too. In another grunt of “one,” we slide/lift/drop our patient to the floor. Then in symmetrical movements, we push the bed and all furniture to the wall giving us a small place on the floor to work in.

From his bag, Harry pulls a pony bottle of oxygen. From my hip, I pull my portable radio.

“Dispatch, Trowbridge Command.”

“Trowbridge?”

“Dispatch fire to the scene and please find us an ambulance forthwith.” I could have left the forthwith off. Even with a practiced cadence, and level tone, every dispatcher and listener on the frequency knows I just hit the “oh-shit” button.

They answer: “1434,” a banal reading of the current time.

Terri keeps yelling at us that Niece has a broken leg and is recovering from surgery. Yes, Terri, we know we need to be gentle or the leg won’t heal correctly.

“Jesus, What the fuck are you doing? Can’t you see she’s injured.”

I did just lift the lady from her knees and place her on the floor. Maybe you, Terri, should be looking up, where Harry is attaching oxygen to his BVM or Ambu bag. Terri is still yelling when Harry squeezes a breath down Niece’s trachea. I open a vein, laying in an IV with speed and precision.

“She only has a broken leg. Why are you doing all that?”

“Dispatch, Trowbridge. CPR started.”

“1435”

Harry looks at me. “EKG?”

“Alex, has it.”

Which is when Harry’s bag moves and we’re handed an EKG from the door from a bodiless hand.

In a second, I cut everything off the woman’s chest. Shirt, bra, and some thin necklace. We push our patient closer to the bed, watching as her off-side shoulder and hand go into the dark space. With an EKG, pads, a mechanical airway, and all the cardiac meds we have with us, we try.

Alex says: “1455.” A second clue that Alex silently arrived on scene. He’s called out the time hinting that we’ve done 20 minutes of CPR and thus hit the end of the protocol.

Harry and I make eye contact and stop.

“1455,” I say making the declaration of death official. “Alex, can you call it in?”

I hear him on the landline phone. First, to dispatch, cancelling the ambulance and requesting the police to the scene. Second, to the hospital for medical control where he recites each of our actions and our patient’s responses. Whereby the doctor decides that our patient is dead. A fact known by me and Harry for a goodly while now.

Terri had stopped yelling and recognizes the facts as they are. She attempts to loosen her grip on the facts she wants to believe. Terri steps around the mess in the corridor. Alex attempts to provide comfort to Terri with all the right words from the training. Yes, your niece is dead. Our crew did everything possible. Can we call someone for you?…etc.

Harry and I discretely remove the wire leads from the EKG. We disconnect the one-time use pads we shocked the patient with. We leave the airway open and the BVM attached. Harry turns off the oxygen, leaving the tubing. We drop our gloves on the floor and retreat from the room with our medical kits. Harry bends to retrieve his glove with the name and DOB. I recite both to him quietly. He drops the gloves to the floor.

“Ma’am, it will be thoroughly investigated, I assure you. The state police are on their way.”

Harry and I carry our bags out, securing them in our respective trucks. Harry pulls out a strip of police barrier tape and two pieces of duct tape. Back in the home, formally seals now-closed door identifying it as a crime scene – do not cross.

We three, the chief, the assistant chief, and me, the captain of a tiny rural EMS squad, now must remain at the beige single-wide home. We must sit, stand, wait quietly for hours for the state police to arrive, for detectives to arrive, for a call or visit from the associate medical examiner. We three must continue to communicate as a team while Terri spins through every emotion, including anger towards the EMTs that just killed her niece.

I envision the blood clot, or clots, that let loose from her leg. Eventually one squirted out of the aorta, taking the turn to the coronary branch, and then, with a left and right through the web, it finally came to rest when the left anterior descending artery got too narrow to let it through. Maybe another clot or two followed. A dam was built. The tissue distal to the clot started starving for oxygen. The tissue didn’t like that and started misbehaving. Tissue lives. It needs sugar, oxygen and a bit of this-and-that. Like all things that live, it poops waste. No tissue, no critter can live in a bath of its own waste. Starving and drowning in crap, the tissue dies. As tissue continues to starve for oxygen, the tissue nearby feels the effects. It convulses, stutters, and dies. A zone of death expands, eventually rending the heart non-functional. That happened about five minutes after we arrived. We did not kill her. A blood clot from her leg killed her. No amount of in-the-field advance cardiac life support will unfuck that artery, tissue, muscle, or heart.

I did not kill Terri’s niece. A blood clot did.

Harry did not kill Terri’s niece. A blood clot did.

Alex, as a senior, as chief, as paramedic, did not kill Terri’s niece for his lack of effort, even though he stood in the doorway watching.

Terri knows we killed her niece due to our ignorance, our lack of abilities, our inability to provide the right medications at the right time.

That’s not the point.

The point is that Harry heard the call from dispatch and said, “5, 2 on 2.” The point is that at no point was I alone. With skilled rhythms, intensive training, we moved through the call like a flock of starlings, weaving and swooping with nearly no words. During those thirty minutes, I shared in human magic. Harry and Alex and I mind-melded. We were one. For thirty minutes, I had six arms and three brains. Even dispatch, miles away across the river in another state was in that shared space with us. Every EMT and medic in the region knew that there was a tiny crew of people kneeling on a floor doing everything in the book to reverse the advance of death through a fellow human.

The spell broke when we lifted out medical kits and closed the door.

We wait our hours in post-spell fatigue, we brace for interviews, for the scrutiny over our every action. Some jackass will make sure that every drug, every modality we used was prior to the expiry date. Our credentials will be reviewed by detectives, again. And the louder Terri gets with her accusation that we killed her niece, the more pressure the medical doctor will, in turn, feel. Right or wrong, our next call will undergo intensive reviews. Why did Alex stand still while Harry, certified at a lower level, undertook so many tasks? Terri will tell anyone who will listen that the local rescue squad killed her niece.

Terri never again met emergency crews with akimbo arms.

Oh, right. She never dialed 911 again.

I would go on another call if only to feel that sense of belonging. So, I am a murderer. Whatever. I am loved too. I’m good with that.

Listen to author read the story:

https://trowbridgedispatch.iamaiken.com/p/murmuration-audio

In a town this small, saying “that address is familiar” feels stupid. We’ve only got 70 miles of roads and a few hundred year-round residents. Paved road, steepish drive on the north side, opening to a small clearing that contains a beige double-wide home. Three steps up to the door centered on the building. I don’t know why, but the lady of the house fusses at me each time I show up. She’ll need a name because this story is about her, or it is about me, you’ll figure it out, I suppose, and tell me. We’ll call her Terri, a nice benign name. At squad meetings and when on the phone with Harry, I have explored my frustrations about Terri in the past.

Which means that when the tones drop telling us, the squad, we have a medical emergency, I can envision the driveway, the house lot, the home, and her, Terri, arms folded tight against her body at the door.

At my own door, I jump into my uniform, leaving linen skirt and shirt on the mudroom floor.

“Dispatch 14RC5 en route.”

In a minute, I hear “5, 2 on 2.” I flip my handheld to the dispatch frequency and tune my more powerful radio to the ground/tactical frequency number 2.

“5 on 2, 2?” Calling out to Harry, RC2, our assistant chief.

“B, I’m on my way. 20?”

“Just hit dirt. You?”

“Haley’s field.”

“Yeah, I thought you were hayin’”

“Call came when I was reloading twine.”

What we’re not saying over the rather public radio frequency is that by calling out landmarks we shall match arrival times without anyone noting that one of us might have slowed a touch. That’s the old rule we’re all taught: “Two in. Two out.” For Sam, my wife, it speaks more of Army battle buddies.

Two red trucks meet at the bottom of the drive, one from the east and one from the west. Harry’s truck carries echoes of Harvard Crimson. Mine is more whore’s lip red.

Hearing a call follows a cognitive process. First you catch the address and hopefully the nature of the call. I sometimes repeat it as the dispatcher provides the rest. Skills I learned before we had text- and app-based messaging to help. Skills I still need in a rural, hilly terrain where mobile phones often fail to find a tower. You hear the address, then you envision the address. Maybe it is a silent marker on the road near by: a neighbor’s house, the scene of an accident, a stone improbably balancing on its tip. If the house and family are known, then I do a run-through of the folks living there and who is the sickest and most probable patient. By now, I normally have pulled my EMS trousers up to the knees. Past treatments, past crises, medical histories, and social histories bubble forward.

The dread hits as I climb in the truck, starting it and waiting for the electronics to stabilize.

The dread.

Why I am walking out of my office? Why am I giving up hours of well-paid billable work to go get yelled at by some Terri? Why am I giving up income to volunteer, to deliberately walk, run, drive towards someone else’s shit?

Then they yell at you. Then they honk at you. Then they drive around barriers you erect.

Hearing Harry call for me on Tac 2 turned my mind from dread to joy.

I am here because he is here. He ran off of a hay field because I am en route to a call at 2 o’clock on a June Tuesday. Who is in Trowbridge, Vermont at 2 o’clock on a June Tuesday? Old folks, kids at the local school, their teachers and staff. The road crew and town clerk. Preschoolers and their guardians. Maybe someone sleeping off a night shift. At 2 o’clock on a Tuesday, I am often the only EMT in town.

Often, if I don’t go, no one else will. Game over.

Had Harry been on his tractor cutting or teddering or bailing, he would not have heard or felt the call. He’d be tucked in, Bluetooth headset on, listing to NPR stories while his fire/EMS pager buzzes invisibly against the vibrations caused by the blue Ford tractor.

One from a hilltop hayfield and one from a Scandinavian-inspired office overlooking a Vermont valley, two EMTs find each other at the bottom of a driveway at the same time. Each of us driving a red truck. Each of us with red-and-white emergency lights. Each of us with a long, whippy antenna, each of us with a nylon bag that carries our few tools.

Calm waves down my body the moment Harry says: “5, 2 on 2.” He says in the plainest possible language, Brighid, I love you and I am here for you, let’s do this together. Hands open on my steering wheel as I pace my landmarks against his. I drove up and right from the southwest. He approached from the northeast.

“Dispatch, 14RC2 on scene with 14RC5 establishing Trowbridge Command. Any word on an ambulance.”

“Trowbridge on scene, establishing command. No word from an ambulance.”

“Understood.” Yup, we all understand.

What’s-her-name meets us standing sentinel to her home, a few feet in front of the three steps that lead to the house. We each park for a quick exit, and to leave ample room for an ambulance to drive up, turn around, and also prepare for departure. Yeah, Terri, Right. That’s what I’m calling her this time. Terri.

I envisioned her arm position wrong. She stood akimbo, as a sentinel to her home.

I know she called us. She should be waving her arms at the end of the steep drive, no? Or standing aside briefing us in breathless speech. Or maybe deliberately leaving open the front door for us and greeting us with a yell of: “Hey, I’m back here!”

Terri dialed 911 asking for medical assistance then stood in front of the door like a guardian preventing entrance.

“Why is it that every time I dial 911 I get you two? I tell 911 to send anyone else. And I’ve told Langford Rescue to never come here again. They’ve nearly killed my husband with their bullshit.”

Harry believes himself to be a peacemaker. He’s lovely about it and sometimes misses the mark. I should be a natural peacemaker, but I kinda need to be in a better mindset. I can’t find peacemaker in the tool kit when one, I walked away from my afternoon’s income; two, I anticipated the hostility from my own dooryard; three, I’ve heard her do this before.

“How can we help? Did you call 911?” Let’s go back to basics.

“It is my niece. She’s not feeling well. She broke her leg the other day and had surgery. We just need a simple ride to the hospital. I called Starkville Ambulance directly, they are supposed to be coming.”

“Terri, I think Starkville forward the information to 911. We’re not in Starkville’s service area.”

“I don’t want you guys here. Can’t other people show up?”

Neither of us know how to answer this.

“How about we take some vital signs and help you get an ambulance here? That’s what our radios are for.”

She says neither “yes” nor “no.” She simply turns and walks into the house, leaving the door open. On our open-air stage, Harry and I look at each other, shrug theatrically, and step forward.

That wave of gratitude starts at my feet, crawls my spine, and finishes at my neck. I shake my head, thinking, at least Harry is with me. If I had written “caller prevented access to the scene” on my run report, I’d be just fine, because of the law. Landlord trespasses a visitor, and visitor must leave or be subject to arrest. If she tells me to go, I must go. But she dialed 911 because somebody needs help. Terri and I would have stood at an impasse.

Terri walks the narrow corridor and points to the small bedroom.

We enter and start talking with Niece.

“You’re not feeling well?” Harry asks, dropping his bag in the hallway.

My bag is behind me on the floor. I take Niece’s hand in my hand. Skin feels moist and cool. Skin doesn’t return to pink after I apply pressure. Pulse is too fast and too wimpy to be very effective.

In an instant, Harry and I both acknowledge, with deep dread, that this woman is sick. In the sick/not-sick assessment, the score and resultant needle point far, far into the sick column. We share a glance that lasts milliseconds. We each encode the silent message with the brevity of “5, 2 on 2.” I am low in a squat next to the bed. Harry is high near the door by the niece’s head. I toss a pulse ox on the finger. I scan her lower body. The leg is immobilized and has external fixators. The black fabric cast ends at the knee.

Harry asks about the basics: name, date of birth—he writes it on his glove in pen—allergies to meds, and then stalls out. He stalls because she stalls. She was answering in one-word or two-word phrases. She got her name out clearly. Date of birth took three breaths. Sometimes that is all you get.

Simultaneously, while I brace her up, grabbing knees, Harry grabs shoulders. In a grunt that sounds like “one,” we lift and pivot her to the bed. Harry shakes his head at me. I know this message too. In another grunt of “one,” we slide/lift/drop our patient to the floor. Then in symmetrical movements, we push the bed and all furniture to the wall giving us a small place on the floor to work in.

From his bag, Harry pulls a pony bottle of oxygen. From my hip, I pull my portable radio.

“Dispatch, Trowbridge Command.”

“Trowbridge?”

“Dispatch fire to the scene and please find us an ambulance forthwith.” I could have left the forthwith off. Even with a practiced cadence, and level tone, every dispatcher and listener on the frequency knows I just hit the “oh-shit” button.

They answer: “1434,” a banal reading of the current time.

Terri keeps yelling at us that Niece has a broken leg and is recovering from surgery. Yes, Terri, we know we need to be gentle or the leg won’t heal correctly.

“Jesus, What the fuck are you doing? Can’t you see she’s injured.”

I did just lift the lady from her knees and place her on the floor. Maybe you, Terri, should be looking up, where Harry is attaching oxygen to his BVM or Ambu bag. Terri is still yelling when Harry squeezes a breath down Niece’s trachea. I open a vein, laying in an IV with speed and precision.

“She only has a broken leg. Why are you doing all that?”

“Dispatch, Trowbridge. CPR started.”

“1435”

Harry looks at me. “EKG?”

“Alex, has it.”

Which is when Harry’s bag moves and we’re handed an EKG from the door from a bodiless hand.

In a second, I cut everything off the woman’s chest. Shirt, bra, and some thin necklace. We push our patient closer to the bed, watching as her off-side shoulder and hand go into the dark space. With an EKG, pads, a mechanical airway, and all the cardiac meds we have with us, we try.

Alex says: “1455.” A second clue that Alex silently arrived on scene. He’s called out the time hinting that we’ve done 20 minutes of CPR and thus hit the end of the protocol.

Harry and I make eye contact and stop.

“1455,” I say making the declaration of death official. “Alex, can you call it in?”

I hear him on the landline phone. First, to dispatch, cancelling the ambulance and requesting the police to the scene. Second, to the hospital for medical control where he recites each of our actions and our patient’s responses. Whereby the doctor decides that our patient is dead. A fact known by me and Harry for a goodly while now.

Terri had stopped yelling and recognizes the facts as they are. She attempts to loosen her grip on the facts she wants to believe. Terri steps around the mess in the corridor. Alex attempts to provide comfort to Terri with all the right words from the training. Yes, your niece is dead. Our crew did everything possible. Can we call someone for you?…etc.

Harry and I discretely remove the wire leads from the EKG. We disconnect the one-time use pads we shocked the patient with. We leave the airway open and the BVM attached. Harry turns off the oxygen, leaving the tubing. We drop our gloves on the floor and retreat from the room with our medical kits. Harry bends to retrieve his glove with the name and DOB. I recite both to him quietly. He drops the gloves to the floor.

“Ma’am, it will be thoroughly investigated, I assure you. The state police are on their way.”

Harry and I carry our bags out, securing them in our respective trucks. Harry pulls out a strip of police barrier tape and two pieces of duct tape. Back in the home, formally seals now-closed door identifying it as a crime scene – do not cross.

We three, the chief, the assistant chief, and me, the captain of a tiny rural EMS squad, now must remain at the beige single-wide home. We must sit, stand, wait quietly for hours for the state police to arrive, for detectives to arrive, for a call or visit from the associate medical examiner. We three must continue to communicate as a team while Terri spins through every emotion, including anger towards the EMTs that just killed her niece.

I envision the blood clot, or clots, that let loose from her leg. Eventually one squirted out of the aorta, taking the turn to the coronary branch, and then, with a left and right through the web, it finally came to rest when the left anterior descending artery got too narrow to let it through. Maybe another clot or two followed. A dam was built. The tissue distal to the clot started starving for oxygen. The tissue didn’t like that and started misbehaving. Tissue lives. It needs sugar, oxygen and a bit of this-and-that. Like all things that live, it poops waste. No tissue, no critter can live in a bath of its own waste. Starving and drowning in crap, the tissue dies. As tissue continues to starve for oxygen, the tissue nearby feels the effects. It convulses, stutters, and dies. A zone of death expands, eventually rending the heart non-functional. That happened about five minutes after we arrived. We did not kill her. A blood clot from her leg killed her. No amount of in-the-field advance cardiac life support will unfuck that artery, tissue, muscle, or heart.

I did not kill Terri’s niece. A blood clot did.

Harry did not kill Terri’s niece. A blood clot did.

Alex, as a senior, as chief, as paramedic, did not kill Terri’s niece for his lack of effort, even though he stood in the doorway watching.

Terri knows we killed her niece due to our ignorance, our lack of abilities, our inability to provide the right medications at the right time.

That’s not the point.

The point is that Harry heard the call from dispatch and said, “5, 2 on 2.” The point is that at no point was I alone. With skilled rhythms, intensive training, we moved through the call like a flock of starlings, weaving and swooping with nearly no words. During those thirty minutes, I shared in human magic. Harry and Alex and I mind-melded. We were one. For thirty minutes, I had six arms and three brains. Even dispatch, miles away across the river in another state was in that shared space with us. Every EMT and medic in the region knew that there was a tiny crew of people kneeling on a floor doing everything in the book to reverse the advance of death through a fellow human.

The spell broke when we lifted out medical kits and closed the door.

We wait our hours in post-spell fatigue, we brace for interviews, for the scrutiny over our every action. Some jackass will make sure that every drug, every modality we used was prior to the expiry date. Our credentials will be reviewed by detectives, again. And the louder Terri gets with her accusation that we killed her niece, the more pressure the medical doctor will, in turn, feel. Right or wrong, our next call will undergo intensive reviews. Why did Alex stand still while Harry, certified at a lower level, undertook so many tasks? Terri will tell anyone who will listen that the local rescue squad killed her niece.

Terri never again met emergency crews with akimbo arms.

Oh, right. She never dialed 911 again.

I would go on another call if only to feel that sense of belonging. So, I am a murderer. Whatever. I am loved too. I’m good with that.

https://trowbridgedispatch.iamaiken.com/p/murmuration

I’m tired of traveling. I might blame the weather, but instead I’ll blame my boss. My boss is a passive aggressive, screaming, immature, crisis-creating, Seventh-day Adventist, vegetarian asshole. It is the “asshole” bit that matters the most, not his diets. We spent last Friday in Kodiak together. I got to listen to him misrepresent the capabilities of technology, misrepresent the scope of the mission, then I got to sit in his rental car while he drove around the island like a NYC cabby. All starting and stopping—break, gas—break, gas.

At the top of a mountain, on a razor’s edge, driving on gravel, with an extremely steep four-thousand-foot drop to the ocean, I want to see his hands at 10-and-2 on the wheel and his eyes glued forward. Instead, he is talking to me, looking out the side window, driving forward while looking sideways. I look over the hood of the car, all I see is ocean. Four-thousand feet below. Steep. This ridge is the top. No higher to climb. The fall would be far, quick, and deadly. Nobody would know we were gone, given the car would sink into the ocean. Goodbye us.

We don’t belong up here, certainly not in a tinny rental car. This is the domain of the mountain, the eagle, the mischievous raven. In their domain, I witness harmony, beauty, and grace. Feelings I did not share for myself.

I chirped, squeaked, then squealed. I hate being scared. And being scared from his recklessness is another thing altogether. To scare oneself, to push to the limit to work together to face the fear, that’s one thing. I don’t like it much, but I’ll do it as needed. Looking out two sides of the car and seeing nothing but a tumultuous ocean four thousand feet below while the car still rolls ain’t for me. Did I add that the wind was screaming at a gale? The little Ford rental sedan quaked. I removed my seat belt. My hand was on the door. I was ready to leap from the car before going over. I am not taking that fall.

That was Kodiak, Alaska.

Lies, racism, and fear while getting a neck-jerk tour of the crooked streets as the Boss tells me about the Seventh-day Adventist missionary corps that built the church there and their attempts to save Aleuts natives on the island.

Juneau

Better? Well the wind was blowing forty again. I was travelling alone, and now two hours away by airplane. Therefore, a different place, a different trip but I still worked for that same boss and the same federal agency-ish. The rain drove down from the sky in buckets. Rain so loud that when on the phone, people told me about a lousy static problem. Sorry, peeps, that’s the sound of the rain on the metal roof. I had perfect five-by-five reception on my mobile. The rain turned my Chevy rental into a crazy drum. I called the car “Blue Airbag”—airbag being the only word printed on the dash anywhere. Every other label had already fallen off this cheap piece-of-shit.

Wow! I thought the Kodiak rental car had it tough.

As I drove, I witnessed part of a mountain slide to the road below.

During one pass of the road, the mountain left a tongue of mud sticking out. It lapped down between trees across a pond. During the next pass on the same road, I saw that mud now included uprooted trees. The tongue, now bigger, lay between two houses.

That hillside road then had a big yellow digging machine and a cop car.

During my third pass by that road, I saw that the slide-down area had grown yet again. More trees claimed by the mountain. Trees with the bottoms pointing skyward, adult trees laying flat in the mud. The pond disappeared under mud and mess. A car with its wheels down crowned the mud pile that defined the bottom.

The little white car had come sliding down the mountain from its parking space three-hundred feet above. One minute, the owner could see it on the road. Then the rain and the mud carried it down the hill.

Like a jealous creature, the mountain stole, then stacked his new treasures. He stole from the forest. He stole from the homeowners. He shook his shoulders in the heavy rain, reminding us all that he’s the boss. You might already know this if you listen to the hills.

Imagine the owner of the car that was stolen by the mountain. Come winter this fella will have a new ski trail, nice and smooth, stretching from his living room to the remnants of the ice-skating pond below. Instead of appreciating his new private ski and sledding run, he’ll be yelling at All State Insurance that he wants a new white car and a fine new place to park it.

The local agent will tell him about the local Juneau deities and the special limitations in their policy protecting it from paying in the event of a natural act. The Agent will say: “If the Mountain decides to take your car as a gift, then you must honor that gift. And you must find a way to park your shiny new car and build your human house so that Mountain is less tempted by them.

A really good insurance agent in Juneau might even also suggest replacing the car with something that ravens won’t be jealous of. “He likes shiny things,” the agent will say, speaking now of ravens. “Get something older and rustier and don’t park it out so close to where Raven soars around all day, that’ll be better.” You live on the mountain with trees and ravens as your neighbors. Find harmony.

Regrettably, the claims adjuster actually lives in Ohio. That adjuster fails to understand the wisdom of an Alaskan insurance agent. He’ll have to take his big green stamp out from his left desk drawer, hit the forms once with an “act of god.” And with a bigger red stamp, the documents will get marked “denied.” What do Ohio Christians know of steep mountains and rain so loud you hear it through the phone? And cars so old and plain and blue that the only word remaining within them is “Airbag”?

Ravens and mountains never learn. They never repent. Why should they? They don’t have All State agents. If you listen, you know that they are the real bosses.

Imagine a Raven repenting, if only for a minute? Repentant Raven would transform into an insurance guy. Repentant Raven would invent a special insurance rider, mark it as paid, then with a flap, pay the homeowner fella extra money. That extra money might do so much, like buying materials to protect the house from the land sliding away beneath it. Then Raven will be able to tell the family the good news and maybe even hand them the keys to a newer car that has more chrome and silver and white. A car fresh from California or Japan. Wouldn’t that make him happy? Him being Raven. He likes new cars that are shiny and white with lots of chrome.

Repentant Raven is the good guy for the people. Happy people.

The mountain shudders . The mountain sends the car and the fella’s yard to the bottom of the pond. Repentant Raven makes Mountain look weak.

Who wins that fight? Raven will spend more time looking for good wind to ride, ‘cause that Mountain won’t want that old Raven sitting on his shoulder for a while. Raven would fuss and feud with Mountain. Ravens just do that. They fuss, don’t they?

Soon Raven will find new things to get into. He’ll fly off to tease someone else.

Too bad Raven can’t touch my boss. My boss has Jesus and that’s kind of like having a shield. Oh, and Raven can still make little messes and tease my Boss but unless Boss understands Raven, he won’t get the message.

My boss misses most of the conversation by listening to just one god. All the others scream at him. He refuses to hear them. My Boss feels their fury. And I feel fury from him all the time. Boss uses his fury to yell at others like me and the rental car. You have to have fury to tempt the fates by driving on a knife’s edge ridge four-thousand feet up with the ocean bubbling below the steep cliffs. When Boss find a quiet moment, he reads about the “Four Faces of Jesus as told in the Scripture.” Poor Boss, I doubt his mind ever had a quiet moment. That’s the book I see him reading when I leave him in the parking lot of Walmart on Tuesday.

I come out of the store. I see Raven sitting on a shopping cart.

Raven watches Boss read. Raven leans in to see the book and the chrome or maybe he wants some of Boss’ poofy fake-red hair.

Me? I know. I listen to Raven. I see his tricks sometimes. I tip toe, quietly, stealthily. I control my breath. Just by thinking about the next step, I move forward. Even this newly-filled plastic Walmart bag stays quiet for me. Just as I step behind old Raven, I let out a caw that shakes his tail feathers.

“Caw!!!!”

Raven doesn’t know what to do.

He turns his head towards me and starts to fly at the same time. Mistake, Raven. It is like he trips right there in the middle of the air. He’s all turned one way and flying the other. Like Boss up on the Kodiak Ridge. Except Raven tripped.

I roll with laughter. I am laughing and laughing for catching old Raven himself. Raven reading the back of a Jesus book. I got him. I got him good.

Luckily, I leave Alaska. Otherwise, I might be in for some trouble myself with Raven. But it is all fun. He knows I got him. He respects me better for trying. Maybe if Boss wasn’t reading about the faces of Jesus, Boss could have described Raven’s face before I scared the feathers off of him.

As it is, Boss missed the entire episode—looking up as the great black bird recovers flight. How do I tell him why I was laughing? I can’t.

I don’t. Jesus was born in a desert on the other side of the planet. The Boss will never understand the real world.

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As told by Alex Flynn

As I told you, this Boston kid was raised by a cop from Ireland. I studied Russian in school during the early 1980s. Not sure of the wisdom given I spent the nineties in dark spaces: windowless buildings in regions of the planet that were dark, or light, or hovered in forever dusk.

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