This is what happens when you grow up as a smart kid in Lutz. In a down-at-the-heels exurban Central-Florida neighborhood with a step-father who works for the county and a mother who is a secretary at the nearby university. Four of their five kids are within two years of each other. Two are his, two are hers, and the youngest one is theirs together. Or, as she likes to say "his, mine, and ours".
I was in the middle of everything.
By the standards of our neighborhood, we were practically rich. We lived in an honest-to-god house on a street full of houses, just a block from the run-down travel trailers and old single-wides of the MGTP (the Mighty Good Trailer Park). Ours was the cypress-clad house on the corner with a hot tub on the back porch and a stained-glass window in the gable - lit from the inside at night (my step-dad's idea). A constantly rotating fleet of well-used cars filled the front yard, nosing up to the chain-link fence.
To our friends on the block, we had everything we could want - electric guitars, drums, a four track cassette recorder, a microwave oven, and a refrigerator stocked with Toaster Strudel and Dr. Check. I had a go-kart that I'd bought for thirty dollars from a friend. It had a three horsepower Briggs and Stratton motor, but no brakes or gas pedal. To drive it you had to hold one hand on the wheel and the other behind you on the engine's throttle lever. The kart's braking mechanism involved wearing an old pair of shoes that could be planted on the pavement to bring yourself, ever-so-slowly, to a stop. When eventually the go-kart was stolen from my yard, I got my big metalhead friend Eric, and we walked over to the MGTP where we - or he - physically threatened the suspected perpetrators until they produced the go-kart, somewhat the worse for wear. Eric's dad gave me my first welding lesson as we fixed the steering mechanism that the thieves had broken while racing the kart through the woods behind the Handy Mart.
We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to have cable TV and a VCR. We didn't have any movie channels so we had to turn the cable box up onto its dial when the parents went to bed in an often-futile attempt to unscramble Cinemax's latest installment of Emmanuel or Lady Chatterly's Lover. When the image wouldn't unscramble, we would sit listening to the audio and speculating as to whether the dark spots on the screen were perhaps nipples, kneecaps, or eyeballs. The VCR was a top-loading JVC with giant, primary-colored Mondrian buttons and a "remote" whose cord you had to route under the living room rug so people wouldn't constantly trip over it.
The neighbors thought we were pretty fancy, but we didn't compare ourselves to the neighbors. What we saw as kids, and especially as teenagers, were our own shortcomings in the eyes of our classmates at an upper-middle class suburban high school - having gained admittance through the use of a fake address. There, we were the poor kids. Still, our parents had bought us each a car for our sixteenth birthday - just like all the other kids at our school - but ours were bought for $500 (an AMC Hornet, a Plymouth Reliant, a green Pinto station wagon) and were necessary for us to get to school on our own, while the cars our classmates drove were BMWs and, at the very least, newer Toyotas.
Our savior, and eventually our curse, was punk rock. Money didn't make you cool in the world of 1980's punk. In fact, it was quite the opposite, and our shift from wanting the latest fashions to shopping almost exclusively at the thrift store couldn't have made my mother any happier. She wasn't a fan of our hair, but I guess you can't have it all. Our high school friends had a harder time establishing their working-class punk cred, but they had a lot more to rebel against than we did. The anti-establishment fire may have burned a little hotter in them. They were the children of the buttoned-down yuppies that all of our new idols despised. Our parents were more of the post-hippie Laissez-faire variety. They took us to bluegrass festivals and we periodically stole bits of stale old weed from the same little baggie in their top dresser drawer. By the time I was sixteen, everyone of us, children and parents included (except my youngest brother who was only seven), smoked cigarettes in the house all the time. It was unbelievable.
I'm not quite sure where it came from, but the one thing that seemed to run strong in our family was what has typically been called "Protestant work ethic". Perhaps this was something that my parents got from their parents (most of them survivors of multiple tours of duty in multiple wars, the Great Depression, cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, and perhaps most notably, depression). Somehow this work ethic had been passed along almost completely intact, but devoid of all religious associations. We were raised, and remain largely, agnostics and atheists. Hard work was not something done to achieve salvation, but simply because it beat the alternative, and in the years before Prozac, hard work was second only to alcohol in providing many of us with a way to outrun our own creeping depression.
I've always had a bit of a split personality. The hands-on, real-world side of my brain is in a constant struggle with the more imaginative, free-association side. One thing I've never had much patience for is rules. I like to take things as they come, and having hard and fast rules in place always seems to stifle any attempt at truly thinking through a situation. Plus, nobody loves a rule book like a dumb person loves a rule book. The biggest rule followers in any organization are invariably the least creative, most unimaginative thinkers. Whether it's the Bible, or the City of Tampa Construction Code, there's nothing that makes life easier for the dullard than being given a written set of instructions on how to conduct oneself. This is why, contrary to popular belief, I think atheists are the most morally-minded of individuals. There's a lot of hard work that goes into creating your own morality without the assured guidance of rule books and sermons.
The fire department is as rule-bound an institution as any other paramilitary organization, but unlike many similar agencies, firefighting has a long tradition of creative rule bending and breaking. What saves us as firemen and frequent defiers of the rule book is the fact that the final outcome is usually easily measurable. Did the house burn down? Did the patient survive? Did anyone get hurt? This is helped by the fact that every situation is different and the rules often don't apply at all. As long as you can justify your actions to someone after the fact, and the outcome was satisfactory, you can chalk it all up to thinking on your feet and responding to a dynamic situation. You just have to hope that your actions come down on the right side of things when the history of the incident gets written. There are plenty of situations where, at least in the moment, it may be possible to see two distinctly different outcomes. Your heroic actions could just as easily get you demoted as get you Firefighter of the Year.
So this is where I found myself in the summer of 2013, a newly-promoted Driver Engineer sent to one of the furthest outlying stations in the wilds of southeastern Hillsborough County. I had come from a moderately busy suburban station that averaged 8-10 calls per shift covering an area of about 6 square miles, to a rural station that averaged 1-2 calls per shift and covered an area of 125 square miles. We didn't do much, but when we did it was usually serious and our backup was a long ways away. You could easily have a structure fire all to yourself for twenty or thirty minutes before another unit arrived on scene. And all this with no fire hydrants.
In the Florida summer, Wimauma and its surrounding agricultural lands are the frequent site of large-scale brush fires that can burn hundreds or even thousands of acres. These fires may take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to control. The apparatus assigned to our station consisted of an engine (or fire truck) manned by a crew of three firefighters, a one-man tanker truck carrying 3500 gallons of water, and an un-manned brush truck staffed by the firefighters from the engine as needed. When called for a brush fire, we usually just grabbed our gear off of the engine and jumped on the brush truck with the tanker following in our wake. On this particular afternoon, the call was dispatched as a simple grass fire at an address at least 10-12 minutes from our station. The three of us piled into the brush truck and pulled out of the station with the tanker close behind. On small outdoor fires such as this, we generally only dispatch a single engine or brush truck. In this case, due to the water supply issues, we had the tanker coming as well. As we got closer, dispatch updated us that the fire was "possibly" threatening a structure on the property. A few minutes passed and they were advising us that this was a confirmed structure fire with at least one house burning and an unknown occupant level. With each update we discussed our plan of attack, but our strategies were severely limited by our choice of apparatus and the equipment that we had available to us.
We discussed the possible scenarios across the front seats as we sped towards the rising column of thick, black smoke in the distance. We had three people, one airpack (each brush truck only had one air pack on it), two sets of structural firefighting gear (our rookie had left his on the engine, only bringing his lightweight brush gear), and no handlines suitable for fighting a structure fire. We ran down the inventory coming behind us on the slow-moving tanker - one more airpack, 3500 gallons of water, a pump, and two 2" handlines that had probably never been pulled on a structure fire and may have been completely unserviceable. The beginnings of a plan had started to come together. The Captain and I would suit up in our structural gear while the rookie pulled the brush line and fought whatever brush fire there was and we waited for the tanker. One of us would pull the second airpack off of the tanker and we'd pull both of the 2" handlines to fight the structure fire. As we discussed our options, I realized that I was grinning from ear to ear, and I voiced to my crew what I had been thinking since the start of this whole debacle. "This is gonna be awesome."