Aug 15 2003
Accident
My brother Jonathan is a proud member of the volunteer fire department in this little community. It takes hours of training and the willingness to be yanked out of sleep or away from dinner to respond to an emergency. And without being paid, of course. Jonathan tells me that if his pager goes off while he?s sleeping, he finds his feet are already on the floor before he?s consciously awake. He gets called to the same scenes as my sister Megan does if she is working in her capacity as EMT. Small town, you know.
In case you?re wondering, yes, the fire department does get called out to rescue cats stuck in trees, and a couple of days ago, Jonathan got paged in the middle of dinner and flew off to help with a propane leak. When he got to the scene, propane was gushing into the air in the style popularized by Old Faithful. He asked if they had turned off the tank. They hadn?t. Jonathan turned it off and left. He was back in time for dessert.
While I?ve been up here, it?s been relatively quiet on the pager front, especially considering that it?s vacation time and high season for emergencies: car accidents, swimming accidents, boating accidents – my brother once had to rescue a guy who had fallen off a cliff and survived, and another guy whose logging truck went off a bridge, essentially destroying both legs, but who also survived.
Some people aren?t as lucky. I heard someone’s car leave very fast, very early this morning, when it was still dark and starry. When I emerged from my tent a few hours later, I found my brother in the living room, still in his fire gear and still horrified by what he had seen. And he doesn?t horrify easy. A guy had driven into a telephone pole at full speed, no skidding or any other signs of trying to slow down and stop. My brother said he had never seen so much blood at a scene, which is the same thing the telephone pole repair guy said and the guy who towed away the twisted piece of metal that used to be the accident victim?s car. Megan got called in to help, and is now driving the guy to the trauma unit at Santa Rosa. My guess is there are no atheists in ambulances.