Cooking Bacon with Propane
Trowbridge Dispatch #1
Cooking Bacon with Propane
As told by Alex Flynn
“Are you with the fire department?” the guy with the chainsaw asks.
“No.” I answer while walking to the recently buried propane tank. I lift a plastic cover then switch the gas to the house off. The tank had been buried next to the stand-alone garage with buried copper pipe running to the house and the small generator that was hidden below busy aspens.
“Can you show me the leak?”
“Right up here. I wrapped a red plastic bag around it.”
“Alright.” I look around. Red plastic bag on a copper gas pipe feeding into a generator. It rose, the pipe did, from the ground vertically then turned at 90-degrees to the engine’s intake. The red flapped in the pre-storm breezes.
“Should be all set.” Genuine professional confidence. “Been in there?” I motion to Bea’s house.
“No, I don’t have a key.”
“Perfect, then we don’t have to vent the inside.”
“Are you with the fire department?” he repeated.
“No.”
“How did you know to come?”
“One of my friends on the fire department called.” Namely Harry, my former assistant chief on the rescue squad.
“So, you are in the department.”
“Still no. I guess I am playing the role of ‘key-holder,’” a rank held by some neighbors of absentee property owners. “Did you call the gas company after you dialed 9-1-1?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.” And it was. For me to call the gas company now would require that I drive the mile home.
I walk up to the former fire chief, the first official who just arrived on scene. “Gas is off. External rupture on the line caused by a chain saw outside. Gas company called. Should be all set. See ya!” I continue strolling to my truck. I’ve always struggled with Chief Reed. Former Chief, I guess. The old man is still running calls. I don’t think he heard me well. Then in all the years in Trowbridge, he’s never seen me well either.
Later, Harry and I reminisce about old calls where the solution to the emergency involved closing a valve or turning off a switch.
At home, I had barely sit down at my desk before being asked to return to the house. This time as the actual keyholder, not just role-playing. Except I don’t have a real house key. Instead of storing a rifle and shotgun under the rear seat of my pickup like many folks in these parts, I carry a Halligan bar and a firefighter’s axe— Why not? Never know when you need a bigger door key. In my minutes at home, I call the neighbor who cleans for the homeowner who rattles off the neighbor’s door code. She, the cleaning lady not the absent homeowner, is down with COVID yet again. How do I know? Because she texted me last night and because she is a friend and because and because and because, small town.
Back to Bea’s house with my special set of universal keys and a 4-digit number.
Life in a small community.
The gas guy, who was there to handle the repair is also a firefighter in a neighboring town. He spent a full day at my house earlier this summer. Now, from a compartment in his truck, he retrieves a gas valve and copper piping that has been encased in a cone of hard plastic epoxy. A treasure of his. I don’t know the whole story. Who needs to? It has to do with how some homeowner decided to fix a gas leak with 500mL of clear plastic epoxy. As I study the treasure, Gas Guy leaps into a recent story of a local who rolled over his gas tank with an excavator. We both know the punchline. In fact, everyone in Winchester County knows that punchline. “Excavator meets gas line” took about three days to travel around the towns. Boom is boom. Or as we said overseas, “BMF.” You can figure that one out. Except in Alaska where the “B” stands for “burr” instead of “boom.”
I unlock the house with the code, because digital codes tend to be kinder to property than kinetic solutions. So I tell the Gas Guy two more stories, because… firefighters! It is not gossip. We’re sharing educational anecdotes. I bring up the now-departed firefighter Robby Stark who drove the big red truck to the scene.
“I once failed to open a house, so I called for a truck to respond. Robby came up. He put his bucket on his head and donned his turnout coat. ‘No problem.’”
Seriously, who builds a rural house with polycarbonate bullet proof windows then gets so whacked on drugs and alcohol that the rescue team can watch them breathe too slowly on the floor? We both knew the solution. It didn’t involve a switch or a knob. It involved a firefighter’s axe. We opened the window like you do a car’s windshield–one whack at a time.
“Seriously, you have irons in your pick-up?”
“Yes, still do. You just never know.” I lift two blankets, two rolls of toilet paper, a useless but pretty first-aid kit you might buy at a sporting goods store.
“Yeah, no shit you have a rifle rack under your back seat.”
“I do, but I can’t carry a rifle.” Of course, I can—in Vermont. But it is just too easy to tumble over the line into Massachusetts a couple of miles south. In Mass, I would be a felon. In Vermont, I am a law-abiding citizen who carries an axe and Halligan bar where the rifle and shotgun belong. Kinda cool that someone builds a truck with a gun rack under the rear seat. Says something about rural America.
You think the link to rural America is off? Well, I drove my rural pickup truck to Tanglewood a week ago to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma. Some poor parking attendant chased me down with a white cone. He banged on the passenger side window.
“You rolled over a cone.”
“Probably. If you say so.” I can’t argue with him, he’s holding a white cone with tire marks. I mean, big truck, small cones in a traffic pattern designed for small cars. Squish. I don’t mean to squish cones. You lay out a parking lot for little cars and a full-sized king-cab truck rolls in (with firefighter irons under the seat) and cute white cones go squishy-squish.
I don’t want to squish traffic cones. I don’t want to break open doors–although I do know that I could open that door with my Halligan and leave small scratches (or a big hole).
Let’s move the story past the front door at Bea’s house. Because by now the Gas Guy and I are in her dark kitchen.
The stove doesn’t light.
Right, we need power. The power for the region failed during our not-a-drama. If the power in these hills hears thunder, it retreats like timid tamias. The Gas Guy goes back to the outside to start the generator and get a lighter. Stove, check. House lights? No go. We guessed that the gennie only covered the essentials such as heat and fridge. We check the basement by the light of mobile phone LEDs.
Then, all resolved. Stories told. We didn’t blow up a house. The chainsaw-wielding gardener did not remove a leg or blow up the side of a small mountain in Vermont.
At some event this month in August of 2024, I heard something that shows the value of rural neighbors who turn out to help each other. The most important lesson of rural life is that your survival relies on your neighbors. Your neighbors rely on you. The rest doesn’t matter.
The chainsaw-wielding gardener stands on legs that remain connected to his hips even after he cut the propane gas line next to a generator. He continued to cut back brush and small saplings while wearing basic denim. The Gas Guy fixed up the damage to the copper pipe. Because I just can’t help it, I suggest that the chainsaw-wielding gardener wear chainsaw chaps and eye protection. I wasn’t being funny. So what if he survived a not-a-gas explosion? That doesn’t mean he’ll survive the damage a running chain saw does to a leg. That’s an injury I don’t need to see again. Please know that when home, I also yell at YouTube when folks skip over their safety kit. But Kelvar chaps and eye protection would have done little for a guy using a chainsaw to cut an active gas line. Ever done much with a chainsaw? They make sparks. Sometimes you hit a nail, or a rusty bit of barbed wire buried in a tree, or...sparks. I occasionally see sparks on my big saw if the chain tension is off. Sparks—not scary when in the woods. But our fellow cut open a gas pipe. Thankfully, it was not an Old School iron pipe. Copper doesn’t spark. Iron does. BMF.
As for the few of us left in that door yard, we had all seen the worst that rural gas and heavy equipment can do. You tell me about an excavator over a gas line, I’ll tell you about an excavator that drove over a guy’s legs. Is it bragging? Probably not. Just an expression of what a pleasure it is to not have shit-go-boom. Who doesn’t love a scene where everyone is standing and talking in calm tones and there is an intact house sitting on an intact hill?
One might ask, just how do rural people communicate a need for help? It seems like magic. And sure, it is magic, sometimes communities still have magic. Harry heard the tone while sitting in an urgent care waiting room twenty-five miles away. He called me with a forthwith. I had no radios. And when beyond my own near-yards, I have no cell connection—actually, I never have cell connection, and beyond my near-yards, I have no Wi-Fi. At home, at my desk, I am tricked out like the command center on the Enterprise bridge.
I think back to my experiences writing the opening scene for The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County. I recognize the absence of my friends and colleagues on the fire department. Today, my old EMS trousers serve as outdoor construction clothing. My wildland fire gear is used when I tend bonfires. But I have my firefighter irons (axe and Halligan) secure in my truck. There are two tourniquets in my office backpack, plus a bag of gloves. And a pair of blankets.
And toilet paper because, well… that’s obvious.
Debriefing with Harry after the call, he reminds me of story where a homeowner called 9-1-1 with a kitchen fire on her electrical stove. Step 1: Turn off the burners. Step 2: Cancel the fire department.
I can’t let that go. Quid-pro-quo, baby.
“Last weekend when cooking bacon for chicken salad, some of the grease on my kitchen griddle caught fire,” I told Harry. “And I just yelled at it.” True, I did. “It went out.” True, it did.
I had also reached for a pot lid. That’s the training. You learn the fire triangle (heat, fuel, oxygen) early in the career. Giving fire a verbal order doesn’t always work. Sometimes it does. And when it does, you do NOT have clean a greasy, smokey pot lid, and you get to just keep cooking the bacon.