ARIZONA WILD FIRE

I remember my first firefighter’s funeral. As a twenty-some year-old rookie fireman, it was a very poignant moment for me, but one I felt I had to witness because, for me, I felt it came with the territory. Silently, though, I hoped and prayed it would never be me. Yet you simply had to honor your dead, and there was a certain solemnity that went with it. After all, they had given all they had to give. I guess, at that moment, I felt that I would get acclimated to such events. That as time went on, the funerals would not be as moving as that first one was for me. That, somehow, you would harden to the tragedy that can only come out of such events. I was wrong. They only got worse from that day forward, because there was an accumulative action to my grief. Firefighters belong to a great fraternity. Whether you’re fighting fires in the heart of New York City, a small town in the back roads of America or somewhere in the wild forests of the West, you have one purpose in mind; to do what you can to safeguard the people and their property, and to always remember the oath you took to do just that.  For the most part, you are always revered for your efforts by others, but never more than when you didn’t come back to the station, and never, ever, more than when you paid that ultimate price.

Death is no stranger to firefighters. Thankfully, not often is it one of your own, but you do have to deal with it all the time. You have had to press your ear to the blackened, burnt lips of victims to try and hear those last words—coming from throats that are scorched beyond being able to talk any more. You have begged someone pinned in the front seat, of a crushed and mangled car, to stay with you for just a few more minutes so you can get him or her to the hospital. You have done C.P.R. until your arms ached, and all the time praying this drowned child in your arms would just please breath and live again because you can’t stand hearing her mother’s screams in the background. There are no strangers in this trade, for the minute you were called they became your victims to care for, and it got up close and personal in a hurry.

Somewhere in Arizona, hundreds of hearts are broken. Moms and Dads have lost their sons, wives have lost their soul mates, and the nightmare they prayed would never come to visit their house, is now here. Children, who only days ago tried on their dad’s boots and helmet and wanted their picture taken, can’t understand why daddy is never coming home. In the tiny town of Prescott, where the ‘Granite Mountain Hotshots’ came from, a black cloud has descended over the station they left that day. All that’s left are their vehicles in the parking lot and their possessions in their lockers. Flowers and memorials sit outside the fence in silent respect.

Sometime in the future, nineteen rookie firefighters will once again fill the Hotshot ranks. For you see, fire takes no holiday and waits for no one. Life—as that fire station once knew it—will begin again. Then, bells will ring and a plume of smoke on some far away mountain will be calling them in once more. On the hill where they died, new plants will have bloomed and new houses will be going up. Soon, no one will know there was ever a fire. No one, that is, but the Granite Mountain Hotshots and those who loved them.