As told by Brighid Doran
I give Sam a push. She ignores the tones from my radio. She has ignored the multiple alerts telling us that someone dialed 9-1-1.
“Wanna come?” She doesn’t, I know that. She sleeps and fights my efforts. Wills.
Three-alarm fire west of Langford.
“They’ve toned for an ambulance to the scene three times.”
She stirs. I’ve already peed. I have already licked toothpaste. I’ve got silks on my top, bottom, and on my feet as thin liner socks. I pull on winter-boot socks, thick and woolly. I can still smell the lanolin in them. Sam pulls on some woodsy clothing, a blend between Cabela’s and REI.
I wait at the bedroom door.
“Midnight kiss!” And I kiss her. “Happy New Year.”
She hasn’t said anything back yet. Yet, she does respond to my love and my sense of joy.
In the truck, I call in our response. “14-RC1 responding to Langford for ambulance.” I turn up the CD player, which is playing some sort of rum-in-the-sun/sail-on-the-water song I shouldn’t like. Look around will ya, it is cold. Alaska cold. Polar Vortex cold. It takes nearly twenty minutes for us to get from the bedroom to the Langford Fire Station. The ambulance stands alone in the bay. The tankers, trucks, and rescue have all left. No, not quite all. There is their little brush truck against the far wall in the dark.
I unplug the ambulance from the extension cord. I rotate the battery switch to “both” as I climb up and start the vehicle. I see a belch of black smoke. I roll out. Sam falls in behind me in my pickup. Silently, we drive at a comfortable pace with both sets of our red-and-white lights dancing on the leafless trees. We do another thirty minutes of driving. I see the fire first, before we actually arrive at the scene. The ice fog amplifies the scene’s lighting.
Silently, I repeat Alex’s words. “Don’t get blocked in.”
“Dispatch, Langford Ambulance on scene.”
I have the only ambulance. I can’t get stuck in. If something goes wrong, I need to get a patient from here to a warm hospital. Driving over a big 4-inch supply line or a deuce-and-half hose is not an option. I park while looking at the fire then recognize I should back in so I can load-and-go if a firefighter needs help. I wriggle into the back of the rig. I check the gear. I pull a few crappy, dirty, disgusting blankets from under the bench seat. I set the heat to max. Flip on all interior lights. Check the oxygen supply and unclip the seat belts from the cot. I also fold down the cot’s rail. You’d think this is what should be done before a shift.
I climb into my own truck next to Sam.
“Pull up next to the ambulance,” I say.
We watch the fire scene through the windshield of my pickup.
My truck gets warm but never hot. On anyone’s scale, the mercury has inches or millimeters to climb before the water even thinks about turning back to liquid.
“Hey, you know how old Maine fisher folk get mercury out of Bluefish and Tuna?”
“Is this another Harry joke?”
“Of course.”
“Alright Brie, tell me how do old fisher folk get mercury out of their fish?”
“Easy, they hang them by the tail. When it is as cold as this, the mercury drops. They cut off the fish’s head and throw away the mercury.”
“Fuck, that’s bad.”
She’s waking up now. We watch a three-story home burn. It must have been built when the trains first rolled into this little town back when the Civil War was being fought. The formula for New England industry went like this: find a mountain stream, dam it for a waterwheel, set up a mill, build a factory around that mill, and then build a town around that. Then someone who is paid better than the others stands up a three-story house. Hints of the fire-red and the smoke-black mix with the white of the steam.
Nobody is fighting this fire from the inside, which increases the likelihood that everyone present will still be alive in the morning. I am pleased to see that there are no interior teams. It means that nobody has spare teams standing still in this cold as their relief and there is not a third team designated as the rescue team.
Neighboring families have opened their homes to warm up the firefighters.
There is this one guy in the middle of the ice fog. He’s woven his legs into the rungs of his ladder. His ass seems to be sitting on a rung with one leg going through. Knee on the underside of a rung and his ankle on the outside of the next rung down. His other leg snakes a similar pattern except he has the ball of his foot on a rung. He doesn’t move. That’s not strictly true. His nozzle works at wetting the second story front windows. The water stream had already broken the glass in all three windows. Fifteen feet up on a ladder that rests on a burning house, he rotates like a slow-moving lawn sprinkler, keeping water flowing through all three. This is part of the age-old “surround-and-drown” technique.
Part of the thinking is, why fight it? A hundred-and-fifty-year-old wooden home will not survive the fire. Nor will it survive the firefighting. But we must protect all exposed elements, all the houses and garages in this tiny village, as best we can. We must protect the village. If we were in the woods, the guys would make jokes about marshmallows and hotdogs while watching the building collapse while sitting in their warm trucks. In a village, we must all do our bit to protect the village.
My guy, halfway up his ladder appears to move within his turnout gear but his gear doesn’t move. He’s got a hood on, and his ear flaps on his helmet are down. Visor down over his face. Hands are gloved. Arms rigid, bent at the elbows. I don’t think he could move if he had too. Icicles form around his helmet.
Ice forms in each fold of his turnout pants like a real-life mockup of Lando Calrissian trapped in carbonite.
I don’t like this guy; he is an asshole of the first degree. He doesn’t like Alex, Alex Flynn that is, our EMS chief. He’s often the first to raise a fist or angrily bump shoulders with another first responder on a scene. Life with fire and EMS would be better without this guy. But now maybe I understand why his mother still loves him. And why people tolerate his mean bullshit. Because he is a guy who can interlace himself on a ladder on the first day of a new year holding back the fire that could burn this village to the ground.
That asshole, now fully frozen to the ladder, is holding the line with every other firefighter at this scene. In the full dark, on a holiday night, each of them are crusting with rime ice. Each new layer of ice reenforces the stress folds at their knees, shoulders, and elbows. Firefighters, some with iced beard, all with icicles visible below their face shields steadfastly honor their duty.
And the back of my ambulance is empty.
No one whines.
No one mentions the cold.
I travel the outer ring checking on the officers: A-side, B-side, C-side, D-side. I offer water, which no one wants. I explain dehydration to guys who are iced into their unforms. They think they don’t need water.
There is no yelling either.
The dominant sounds are made by diesel engines. Every truck and tanker running at high-idle. The ice seems to have its own sound, but I am probably imagining that.
I finish my loop then check on the truck operators. See the big suction lines? I follow those to the outer ring of the defensive line. To here, where three gas pumps pump water from the stream up to the trucks who pump it to the network of hoses.
That’s the history of this village. A mountain stream provides power for a mill. The first mill likely sawed the timbers that built these houses. Later mills shaped table legs and chair legs. That stream that once provided the water to power the mills now provides the water to extinguish the elegant but now-blazing home that the village-rich-guy built for himself.
By this decade, each floor had been reconfigured to serve as an apartment for a small family or couple who commuted to work an hour or more down off this mountain. The once rich-guy house became small, cold apartments in a poorly insulated building with old-style single pane windows. Each floor rented to a different tenant.
And Sam, my own Sam, is asleep in my pickup.
Following the events of September 11th, 2001, people created memes of New York City firefighters lifting the national flag from the rubble of lower Manhattan and handing it to a soldier deploying overseas. Years later, Sam is still deploying into combat zones overseas. We’ve just spent nearly a year rehabbing her leg after her second tour. And I am looking at a poster of a heroic firefighter frozen to a ladder rimmed with ice and icicles. Except he isn’t a poster, is he? He is someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s nemesis, someone’s friend. And when the call comes, he answers.
And no one will pay him for those years of work. And due to the PFAS in his firefighting clothing and the toxic gases at fire scene, his risk of getting cancer rises with every year he continues to answer the call.
About Trowbridge Dispatch
Trowbridge Dispatch is a set of short works that take place with the characters, places, and settings established in the novel The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, the first in the Trowbridge Vermont series, published by Flare Books, an imprint of Catalyst Press. These short stories are part of that series and will be published in the months between the novels. For each written work, the readers ought to be able to find or purchase the audio version. Like the novels, the short stories are read by the author I.M. Aiken.