“Sorry about that, I wasn’t paying attention. Had my cruise control set and was just talking and talking.”
“You had your cruise control set?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were going 75 miles an hour.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Well, maybe I didn’t have it set.”
“Maybe.”
“Uh…30? Uh…can you stop a bus?”
I think I tilted my head the way a dog does when they hear an odd sound.
“Say again?”
“Can you stop a bus? A big, red bus. Headed your way.”
A big red bus. Coming for me. Hmm…that seemed to have the flavor of a chain-yanking, doesn’t it?
A second later, dispatch said, “Three males, suspects in a string of car thefts last night in Iowa.”
Rock and roll, baby! Let’s do this thing.
That’s just fun. I mean…for me…not so much for those who got their car stolen. But this kind of thing doesn’t happen all that often in my small jurisdiction so I was all up for it.
I got the information, went to the highway, and waited on the bus. But I was a little nervous, too, because the Iowa agency was sure these guys were the second half of a six-man team. Sure of it.
But no arrests, they said.
Huh?
I was told to stop them, photograph them, get their names and addresses and other info, see if one of them had any cuts…and…?
Put them back on the bus.
Even now, couple of months later, I don’t understand that. If these are the guys, why send them packing? Doubly so since they’re from Chicago. Come on, these guys will disappear in the chaos of Chicago and that department will never, ever see them again.
But it wasn’t my case so I did what I was asked.
Initially, the plan was to stop the bus on the side of the highway. I’d climb aboard a big red Trailways full of something like 60 plus people, find my three guys, and do my thing.
With no one watching my back. With no one keeping an eye on our little trio of ne’er-do-wells while I photo’d and ID’d and all that. Plus, no one seemed to have any idea if they had a record, if they liked to fight, if they were carrying weapons.
In fact, after I found the bus and was driving behind it, I’m beginning to realize I don’t know squat.
So I suggest having the bus stop at the truck stop. Get me a little back up from the city boys. Just in case these guys were packing attitude or gats.
Rather than city boys, two of my own show up. Yeehaw for the boys in brown. So I clamber onto the bus and 64 pair of eyes are staring hard at me.
Because I just stopped their trip home.
“Welcome to Bureau County,” I said, my arms wide like some sort of barker at the entrance to the Freak Show.
Told them I’d have them moving as quickly as I could, but that I had a wee bit of business with…and I read the three names.
No one moved. They all stared at me.
I read the names again.
And again no one moved.
At this point, the hair on the back of my neck was starting to tingle. My sergeant was behind me and could feel him stiffen up. He shifted his body and took a more tactical stance. The officer outside started eyeing the sergeant hard, waiting for whatever was about to happen.
I slipped into my jail voice; big and booming and brooking no bullshit. That voice has come in handy a number of times.
“Gentlemen, there are two ways this can go. If I have to go through this entire bus person-by-person? Not the easy answer.”
There was a loooooooong moment when nothing happened. Those moments always leave me a little light-headed afterward. Ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, nothing happens. Someone steps forward, someone raises a hand, someone does the right – and safe – thing.
But during that second or three you think about the one time out of one-hundred. Adrenaline starts to pump. Skin heats up. Vision narrows (suddenly I couldn’t see my sergeant in my peripheral vision). Fingertips go numb from loss of fine motor control. Stomach tightens. Breath shallows.
And you start thinking about bullets flying, or guys coming at you with iron-hard fists, or a mope grabbing a passenger and jamming a knife against their throat.
You think about the million things that could happen.
“Gentlemen,” I said. “Last chance.”
I stepped up to the first passenger, though I was actually riveted on the middle of the bus where an older guy fidgeted.
Finally, he stood. “Yeah, I’m's him.”
The younger two decided that was their cue. They came down the aisle – behind the first guy – straight to me.
I took them as far behind the bus and our assembled squad cars as I could (don’t need the bus people seeing all their business, I thought, if you can dig it), and did my thing. Name, address, birth date, pix of faces, full bodies, shoes, treads.
And just a few questions, if you please, about that unbelievably giant gash running the length of your finger. The one that’s bleeding all over everything? That’s so deep I can see the bone? That you have a napkin wrapped around?
I can’t remember now exactly how he said he got it but I remember laughing – unprofessionally – at his story. Right out loud. Right in his face. I tried to stop but I couldn’t. It was just so much freakin’ bullshit. He didn’t quite say “paper cut” but it was close.
So I snapped pix of the bloody finger (isn’t that an old camp fire horror story…The Bloody Finger?) and…?
Put ‘em back on the bus, per Iowa’s request. Drove me crazy because these were obviously the guys. Their bullshit stories didn’t match at all. Not in the big details, not in the small details.
I followed them back to the bus, which bugged the shit out of them, and apologized to everyone for the delay. Then I wished them well and sent the Big Red Bus on down the road.
And for some reason, I couldn’t get The Who’s ‘Magic Bus’ outta my head.
“I’m the pastor.”
Then, “We’re late to church.”
And then, “I think I’m going to change my sermon this morning. How hurrying can cloud your judgment.”
She came to my attention in September, 2009.
It was amusing, funny in a sad sort of way, and so I made fun of her a little. Mostly gentle humor, I like to think, but I laughed at her.
She’d been drunk. Riding a bicycle through one of our small towns, calling loudly for her boyfriend. I’d been afraid she was going to get run over by one of the semis thundering through on the state highway that sliced the village in half.
She’d been sheathed in a mostly see-through shirt and she’d kept her cell phone in her bra. When she figured out that, instead of calling for her lover, she could actually call her lover, she yanked her shirt up and her bra down to get at her cell phone, and let the glory of the twins hang out.
I came across her again a few weeks ago.
Wasn’t as funny this time.
My partner and I got called to a domestic early in our shift. Call it 6:15 or 6:30. When I arrived, I realized I’d been to this ramshackle disaster of a house a few times before, serving papers and checking welfare.
The windows were covered in broken panes of glass and plastic sheeting, the side door was hidden deep inside an alcove open to the outside. The alcove had a desk stacked with mail, bras hanging from a line of Christmas lights strung from corner to corner, and a door to the house that wasn’t quite paper-mache, but close.
I knocked, hard, and got no answer. So I opened the door.
She sat at the table, staring at us, her eyes streaked with mascara and tears, and wearing a tight, mostly see through shirt.
I recognized her immediately.
But I also recognized something else: her posture. It was straight and harsh, uncomfortable. And her eyes keep shooting from us to a doorway to our left. I put my hand on my gun and asked if I could come in.
She said yes and I moved quickly. Her posture was so strange, and her expression so discomfited, I had no idea if the other half of this call was still around, maybe with knives, maybe with guns.
But she was alone. The guy who’d beaten her had left.
Her posture was odd because since the last time I’d seen her, just about a year ago, she’d had a couple of back surgeries.
We talked to her for a while and got the standard story. She moved in with him so they could take care of each other; two people who’d been beaten up by life and who’d met at a bar while too deeply into their cups. They argued constantly, but then believed what passed for making amends was love.
To me, it seemed less like love than desperation and a twisted kind of co-dependence.
I try not to judge because relationships can never be understood by those outside of them, but I just wanted to get in her face and yell, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Get out of this nightmare. Get away from this son of a bitch before he kills you!”
She wasn’t quite incapacitated; she could move, albeit slowly and with great effort. Even sitting at the table and talking to us seemed to be difficult. And this guy – this Brent – had been beating on her because he’d been drunk and swacked on coke and mad she couldn’t get on her knees and blow him.
While we were there, Brent called. I answered the phone and invited him to come talk to me. He declined my request and immediately started crying. He loved her and was sorry.
“For?” I asked, hoping I could get an admission.
“For not being a good person.”
But try as I might, I couldn’t get him to cough up that he’d beaten on her. He wouldn’t tell me where he was and eventually, he hung up.
She had no marks at all, and the house was a disaster above and beyond anything that might have happened as the result of a fight. Beer cans were strewn everywhere but they were in the yard, too. Empty vodka bottles were piled on every surface but none were broken. The fast food wrappers seemed to be a decorating choice, as did the piles of clothes and mish-mash of toiletries.
It was chaotic, but that seemed a natural state.
In other words, I had zero physical evidence of anything other than a nightmarish, alcohol-driven living situation.
I believe he beats on her. I believe she beats on him. I believe that together, they hurt each other frequently, violently, and nearly endlessly. Who knows how many black eyes and scratches there have been? Who knows how many minor trips to the hospital? Who knows how many cuts from broken booze bottles?
But there was nothing criminal I could prove that day. And after nearly a half hour of talking, she changed her story and said he hadn’t hit her and anyway, she didn’t want him arrested.
He was the only one who worked, she said.
And he loves me, she said.
So finally we left. There was nothing we could do.
I half expected the sound of a semi to pound down on us as we left, blasting through on the state highway, but none came. The air was dead silent.
And I realized that maybe my concerns for her getting run over by a truck when she’d been drunk were misplaced.
Maybe, just maybe, the truck is their relationship.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s barreling down on them, full speed with no brakes.
We’ll be back…and it will be bloody and ugly and we’ll be lucky if only one of them is dead.
It was like that scene in the flick where he falls asleep in his coke.
White everywhere.
Now…I admire that we mounted a rescue mission. I really do.
But maybe putting together a convoy of five vehicles to drive into 50 mile an hour winds whipping up more than a foot of snow on a roadway that was invisible (hence the need for a rescue mission) was not the most efficient way to do that.
I, being the only available deputy, was tapped to partake of this rescue. I was fourth in line, behind two giant plows, their boss in a four-wheel drive, high-clearance truck, me in my two-wheel drive crime cruiser, and a four-wheel drive tow truck behind me.
We were told to drive into the nightmare, stop at each and every vehicle, get the occupants out, then hook the things to a tow truck, and follow the plows out.
Problem: one tow truck, five or six known stuck vehicles.
Problem: the plows never stopped.
Driving at less than 5 miles an hour, I followed the convoy into the storm. At the first stalled car, half buried in a snow drift, I got out of my car, slipped and fell on the ice, was blinded by the snow, but made it to the stalled car. I found no one and got back to my car.
Put it in drive, looked up, and saw no one.
Because the plows had never stopped.
They had disappeared into the raging wind and I couldn’t see the road. I told the tow driver behind me that the car was empty and we were leaving it in the ditch where we found it.
Slowly, ever so slowly, we inched forward to the next few cars, going through the same ritual at every stop. My uniform got increasingly wet, I got increasingly frozen, and the plows got further and further away.
At the third or fourth car, I found her. Older, anxious, sitting behind the wheel of her car, trying to drive it out.
It was more than three-quarters buried by a snow drift that continued to grow because of the wind. The back wheels spun and spun, digging her deeper and deeper in.
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
“What about my car?”
“Fuck that car,” I said.
She looked stunned for a moment and I immediately regretted my choice of words. But I was standing there, straining with everything I had to keep her car door open against the wind. I’d already fallen half a dozen times, my fingers were turning blue while I found I couldn’t hardly move my mouth or lips.
We weren’t going to take the time, at the height of the worst storm in years, to hook it up and try and drag it out. Even if the tow truck had been able, which I didn’t think was possible because you can’t haul something out of being stuck when you have no traction on the ice.
“We’re leaving it. We’ll get it later.”
She hesitated for just a second, then came with me.
Once in my car, I realized we were completely alone. The plows were long gone, the tow truck driver behind me was lost somewhere behind me, and I couldn’t see the front end of my car.
I don’t normally suffer from claustrophobia, but seeing nothing but white for 360 degrees is more than a little unnerving.
I drove slowly and everything was fine for a couple seconds. But it didn’t take long before I inched into a drift.
I got out and realized the car was now at a fairly severe angle from the road. So I backed up a few inches, tried to straighten out, and headed forward again.
Into another drift.
Again, the car was at an angle.
Though it felt like I was driving straight, I kept getting sideways.
So I drove a couple feet, got out and checked. Got back in and drove a couple feet more, got out and checked again.
But I had no point of bearing. I couldn’t see the road, which meant I had no visual on whether or not I was passing anything. And I couldn’t tell when the car was moving because the only thing I could see around me – the snow – was moving constantly. It actually left me with a touch of vertigo.
And now I’ve got another problem because my uniform is completely wet. Down to my skivvies. And every time I got out to check the road, the wind froze my wet uniform.
I sat and waited for the tow truck driver behind me to find us. He did when he almost ran into us. Then I got on the radio and called the plows. They were a mile down the road at a staging area.
They had to turn around and come back to rescue the rescuers.
Which leads to another problem: now they’re facing us.
With not enough road space for any of us to turn around.
Eventually, both plows managed to plow out a huge swath so they could get turned around. Then we managed to follow them out to the staging area.
At that point, we closed the road and I went home to change into a dry uniform.
I then spent the rest of the afternoon directing traffic away from the road. In the teeth of that storm, people drove right up (and frequently tried to drive around my squad that was parked sideways on the road with the lights on), and demanded to know why the road was closed.
“Uh…snow?” I said.
Part of the traffic had been directed off of Interstate 80 and around a 20 vehicle accident. A few hours later, slightly further west, there was another giant crash with five or six cars.
It was an ugly day.
But as it finally wound down, the wind and snow stopped enough for us to get the road cleared. It took two state plows and eight tow trucks. Turns out there were something like 13 or 14 vehicles buried in all that snow, way more than we’d realized.
Luckily, there was no one in any of them. So while they may have been stupid enough to drive into the storm, once they got stuck, they were smart enough to get out of the storm.
But my question is: how?
We never saw anymore cars drive into the nightmare. And we never saw anyone walk out.
Ooooohhhhh…freaky.
The upshot for me? I got sick…duh…and had to take three days off. Then I got better and went to an agency Christmas party where…I got sick again!
I love the holidays.
Okay, understand it wasn’t my fault.
That’s first and foremost, all right?
Secondly, you have to remember that even with headlights…and high beams…it’s impossible to see everything.
So after tracking down a possible drunk recently, I headed back to the jail. (I’d spent quite a bit of time with this guy and realized, eventually, that he wasn’t, in fact, drunk…just feloniously stupid.)
It’s already winter time and night comes very quickly in this part of Illinois. In fact, night fall happens in about 3.7 seconds. From the moment you realize the sun is setting, it’s a heartbeat, maybe two, before you’re plunged into darkness.
So I’m driving along and there he is.
First thing I realize is this son of a bitch is HUGE.
I’m not a deer hunter, not by any stretch. I do not define ‘fun’ as sitting in an outhouse-y sort of structure teetering precariously in a tree at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, freezing my huevos off, waiting for an animal who’s senses are so attuned to danger he smelled and saw me in my little outhouse 30 minutes before he woke up from seventeen miles away.
Plus, it doesn’t seem sporting to me to shoot an animal from a mile away with a scope that could pick out the sex of an astronaut on the moon while covered in deer piss scent to hide your own smell. You want to impress me with your hunting?
Mano-a-mano, baby.
Which isn’t to say I won’t eat deer meat. Especially when it’s made into sausage with jalapenos and cheese. Mmm mmm mmm, lip-smacking good!
Anyway, I’m driving along and there he is. He’s huge. He’s in front of me and my car. And he’s staring at me.
Daring me to hit him.
Damn thing crosses the road two seconds earlier or later and we’re both good. We both go home that night, he to his mommy, me without having to call my Lieutenant and explain why my squad car has $3,000 worth of damage.
I hit the brakes and hold the wheel straight (I’ve seen too many accidents made worse, if not fatal, when the driver yanked the wheel to try and avoid the hit.)
Then I realize that this thing has a rack of antlers taller than Dikembe Mutombo.
Now I’m thinking: just for karma, this honker’s gonna come tearing through my windshield, which I’ve seen happen, and gore me with that rack. I’ll be punctured 40 or 50 times and I’ll bleed out before I can stop the car.
I actually heard the conversation of my co-workers: “Damn, lookit all them holes in his face!”
“Must’a shot himself with that shotgun. You know he wasn’t any too bright.”
But it doesn’t come through the windshield. Instead, it manages to land dead center on my hood. Thus none of my headlights or turn signals are damaged. But one point of the rack blasts right through the right quarter panel on the squad.
Three inches down from the windshield!
So either this thing bounced around like a freakin’ pinball or I actually hit an antlered giraffe with a loooong neck and simply didn’t realize it.
After stopping, I made sure I wasn’t dead, made sure the animal was, then checked the car. It was drivable and so I continued on to the jail.
My stomach was in knots.
‘Cause I had to make a call.
Our fleet has taken a beating lately. Lots of deer strikes, a raccoon or two, various other things. And most cars have lots and lots of miles. The last thing I wanted to tell my Lieutenant was that my car was down and out.
But I make the call and he is supremely unconcerned. Actually, he sort of laughed. I was sort of freaked out and he had to remind me a couple of times that I had never hit a deer before. In fact, he said, other than the raccoon, I’d had exactly zero problems with my squad.
“Yeah, but here’s my problem,” I said. “See, I’ve handled a thousand car versus deer calls. And every time, those people say, ‘I wasn’t going very fast…and, gosh, it came out of nowhere.’”
“Yeah?” he said.
“And I always thought, ‘bullcrap. You were going 90 and you weren’t paying attention.’”
“Yeah?”
“Well…damn, LT, I wasn’t going very fast. And it did come out of nowhere.”
He laughed. “Guess you gotta apologize to all those people.”
Damn. OK, here goes:
David Turner…sorry.
Kathleen Simpson…sorry.
Little Joe Haggard…apologies.
Dude, this might take awhile….
My first night on the military base, I get a knock on my door.
No peephole so, “Who is it?” (’cause I’m cautious that way).
Nothing.
“Who is it?”
A muffled something.
We go through this dance a few times and eventually I just open the door (’cause I’m not so cautious that way)
A red-headed woman. Wearing boots. Drinking Red Stripe beer. Strapped with a .45.
Uh…have I died? Am I in heaven?
Turns out she was a cop from Missouri. She and her two chums were out trolling the base looking for officers who were there for training. They were bored.
Made me laugh all night.
I spent a week in Iowa for negotiating training and it was the most intense and interesting single week of training I’ve ever had. We spent time with the basics of negotiation, when and why, when it probably will and probably won’t work, methodologies, theories, etc., etc. We touched on barricaded subjects, hostage situations, suicides, and personality types.
And we got hammered with the first priority: the preservation of life. Everyone’s life; hostage, good guy, bad guy, innocent guy. Everyone comes out alive at the end.
(remember that point, it gets important later)
Wednesday, we did a four-hour, live-time scenario; a simple robbery gone bad with a hostage. I played a bad guy and while I was supposed to respond to whether or not the negotiators did well in their conversations, I was also supposed to piss them off.
No problem. I can push until they want to shoot me. And I can make trades and walk out alive or dead, whatever you need. That was all fun.
But it was also enlightening.
The negotiators knew nothing. Every bit of information they got during the scenario came from their own work. They knew nothing about the bad guy and his motivations.
So while we were talking, I realized my T-shirt had a ripped seam. Without thinking, I mentioned. Not a big deal, just an interesting observation. A toss-away line.
But for inexperienced negotiators, who knew nothing of the scenario and where it was going, this casual line was apparent gold. They came back to it time and time again. They thought it was somehow a look deep into my psyche.
Made me laugh my ass off. Eventually, I tried to tell them, within character and in the scenario, that it had nothing to do with anything.
But the thing that did mean something – my frequently quoting Bob Dylan’s ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ – passed completely over their heads. Either they didn’t know the song, didn’t understand the quote, or hadn’t a clue why I was babbling about that particular song.
The lesson here: listen to every word, but know some of them are useless.
Ultimately, everything came out fine.
Thursday was when the wheels came off.
That scenario had me playing tactical commander for all five negotiating teams (who were running the same scenario in their own little worlds with their own little bad guys on their own little timelines).
That day, the instructor told all the bad guys to be irrational, to give nothing up in trade, to threaten to kill everyone, to not respond even to well done negotiations. In other words, to be as big a pain in the ass as possible.
And all five bad guys were. One in particular kept his conversation at nearly a screaming level for the better part of six hours. He banged on the walls, beat up the ice machine near him, slammed the phone so hard he almost broke it.
I kept most of my tactical-ness focused on him. He was going to the one, I knew, who’d come out of the house guns blazing, dead hostages in his wake.
Throughout the afternoon, the instructor kept amping up the situation. She allowed the bad guy to find better than 20 guns and thousands of rounds of ammo in the house. She allowed the bad guy to cut off phone conversation for almost a half hour. She allowed the ‘hostage’ 16-year old daughter (actually in on the robbery) to start texting the teams begging to be rescued, thus throwing them another kink.
Every fifteen or twenty minutes, everything got more serious and watching the negotiating teams was amazing. To see the bad guys reach through the phone and disassemble the teams so easily was eye-popping.
At one point, a negotiator screamed into the phone, “We’re gonna get you that car. We’re gonna put in a GPS, track you down, and kill your ass.” Then he followed that with, “Well…fuuuuuck youuuuuu.”
Uh…maybe not the best response to a man holding lots of weapons and two kids?
The point is how frustrating that scenario got, which is what the instructor wanted.
What those inexperienced negotiators did was to let the bad guys set the tone and, more importantly, the pace. Nothing the negotiators did could slow things down. That particular day, time was the worst enemy. Time deconstructed our focus and hammered our concentration.
And it was wildly interesting to watch the responses to it. Of the five teams, one fell apart completely and had no idea – five hours in – even how many hostages there were. Two did fine and were just able to keep up.
One, under horrifyingly bad leadership that kept changing its mind, running from one theory to another, then threatening the negotiators if they didn’t do a better job, gave up about 45 minutes before everything was done.
Their team leader came to me and said, “There’s nothing else we can do, you’re going to have to go tactical.”
There’s still a bruise on my jaw from where it hit the floor.
What he was saying, in other words, was that preservation of life meant dick to him. ‘We’re tired, we’re frustrated, we’re angry…shoot him, we don’t care.’
I don’t believe for a minute everyone on that team believed that. But I know – as certainly as I know anything – that the team leader did believe that and had infected, at least temporarily, his entire team.
This is what bad leadership can do. This is the path down which an entire team can be led. Regardless of a team’s make-up, of how smart or dedicated or experienced or willing a team might be, shitty leadership can screw the pooch every single time.
At the same time, in stark counterpoint, the fifth team (made up of absolutely average officers, but with an incredible leader…one of the cops who’d come to my door Sunday drinking Red Stripe), rocked my world.
Their bad guy was the one who’d been such a pain, who’d beaten the ice machine up and screamed his way through six hours.
And he came out alive. Surrendered.
When I asked, shocked, how he was still alive, the bad guy said, “Because they (the negotiators) kept trying. They never stopped.”
That’s how it’s done. Regardless of how the negotiations come out, regardless of whether or not the boys with guns have to go in, you never give up.
Yes, they had great leadership. But I believe that’s the lesson regardless. Even if your team-leader is piss poor, you keep going, never give up.
My phone woke me up.
“What we have here…is a failure to communicate.”
From ‘Cool Hand Luke.’ It’s my text alert because I think that’s funny.
It’s a picture.
Lots of inky black smoke rising over I don’t even know what. I think, ‘Okay….’ Can’t fathom why one of my co-workers would have sent it to me.
So I go back to sleep.
What I didn’t know was that by that time, 8:30 on a Saturday morning, the fire had been raging for better than two hours.
An hour later, my phone rang and within 45 minutes, I was manning a traffic barrier, turning cars away from a chemical fire that was pouring massive amounts of black, toxic smoke into the sky above me.
The chemical plant in the western part of my county had exploded about 6 that morning. By 10, our unified command post – a recreational vehicle outfitted with communications gear that has the ability to manage any small scale disaster or border incursion or counterinsurgency in relative comfort – was on the scene.
As were something like 29 volunteer fire departments, a handful of ambulance crews, Illinois Department of Transportation, and a veritable alphabet soup of local, state, and Federal agencies.
And lil ol’ me.
Our officers closed down roads as far as two miles away, tried to keep traffic moving, tried not to get run over, and tried to keep an eye on exactly which way the thick cloud of toxic smoke was drifting.
Within a half hour of our arrival, another officer brought us some water. Within an hour or so of our arrival, officers brought us some food.
And that was that. After that, the chaos left us on our own.
Directing traffic is a terrible job to have. If you’re doing it for a few minutes, or even half an hour, that’s one thing. But for hours on end with no breaks, it’s physically and mentally demanding.
The problem, even in bright neon-yellow vests, is that no one sees you. Ask any officer and they will reel out endless stories of being nearly hit, or hit, by someone more interested in what the officer is blocking traffic from than in actually driving.
One of my first vehicles that day was a man hauling a boat. He, of course, was so intent on the smoke that he had no idea where in the road I was. Honestly, I’m not even sure he knew I was there at all.
And thus ran over my toes.
I yelled at him to stop. That did absolutely nothing.
So I punched his boat.
Hard.
That got his attention. He stopped and took exactly two angry steps toward me. Then he raised his hands, apologized, and asked which direction he needed to go.
I never said a word.
Perhaps the message was in my eyes.
My partner and I were there for the better part of eight hours. And had it not been for the kindness of a couple of fellow patrol officers and one local fireman and his wife, we would never have had food, water, bathroom breaks, or even a chance to catch our breath…which was by that time, exceedingly ragged.
We swamped ourselves in sun screen and yet became more and more pink as the hours rolled past.
Eventually, when that day was done, we went to he command post only to find?
The volunteer firemen.
These were the men who got called out at 6 a.m. and were still there twelve hours later. That’s a long day…a regular shift for us…and most were obviously tired. Some had inhaled fumes and been exposed to a much more raw version of the chemicals than we had been.
Some of them were getting transported to hospitals and some were being treated on the spot and I felt for them. I don’t think most volunteer firemen ever think they’re going to deal with something of the magnitude of that fire. Unlike their suburban or urban counterparts, I can’t believe they wake up in the morning thinking about chemical fires. Most of them are farmers so I suspect, at this time of year, they wake up thinking about getting those crops in.
However, not all of the firemen were being treated.
Early on in this nightmare, the EPA told the firemen to stop fighting the fire; that the best course of action was to let it burn itself out.
So most of those guys were on site with absolutely nothing to do.
But they were tired anyway.
It’s tough business to spend the day drinking from an endless supply of ice-cold bottled water, exhausting to have to lift, repeatedly, slices of pizza.
So they had to take a day-long break…in lawn chairs.
I was furious. I suspect that none of these guys, with the exception of the fireman and his wife who I’ve already mentioned, had one thought for the men keeping traffic away from their fire scene.
The next day, when my partner and I came back (yes, we got overtime, but these were our days off and we thought we were helping to keep people…volunteer firemen…safe from distractions) it was worse.
We blocked the roads and dealt with angry people who simply did not want to take a detour; confused people who didn’t understand the detour; semi-rigs that couldn’t easily take the detour; and plain idiots who just came out to “get a look at that fire.”
Everything was better organized that second day, there wasn’t the tension or sense of uncertainty that there had been the day before.
Which made our job much easier.
But later in the day, nearly two hours after we were told lunch was being delivered, I was ordered to go get lunch for my partner and I.
While making that drive, I discovered the oasis that was the volunteer fire fighter haven. I found at least one Red Cross truck, a couple of portable bathrooms, and at least one hundred fire fighters.
All being amply fed by the Red Cross. All pulling ice-cold sodas and water from ice chests scattered all over the tranquil scene. And all getting regular bathroom breaks that didn’t involve slinking into the brush when there was a dearth of cars to detour.
And many of them were – again – sitting in lawn chairs.
Notice at least two of them giving me the stink-eye.
That’s because when I drove by the first time, on the way to sandwich fixin’s that had sat in the sun for who knows how long, I was visibly angry.
On my way back to traffic control with one hastily-made sandwich each for myself and my partner, I slowed down enough to snap a picture.
A major chemical fire, one that involved days’ worth of major road closures, God alone knows how many agencies, huge plumes of black toxic smoke visible, allegedly, from nearly 50 miles away.
And they’re hanging out in lawn chairs.
Ain’t that great.
Later, just as icing on the cake, there was a field fire near one of our small towns. A brush truck from a local department came screaming through, lights and siren. It came so close to hitting me as it came around our barrier signs that the woman to whom I was giving directions actually yelped and yanked me closer to her car.
This asshole’s outside mirrors were less than a foot from me.
Scary enough, right?
Here’s the thing: he was running lights and siren.
On a closed road.
What the fuck?
You’re going to run lights and siren to a non-threatening brush fire through three miles worth of CLOSED road?
There was no other traffic, dude. No vehicles, no pedestrians, not even any damn birds or deer.
Lights and siren?
Tell me, sir, who exactly, on this stretch of completely closed road, are you trying to warn with your lights and siren?
I understand the EPA ordered all the agencies to not fight the fire. I understand that some firemen had to be kept on scene in case anything happened. I have no problem with any of that.
But when I’m standing in the sun for a total of 20+ hours, when I’m being run over by civilians and nearly run over by the volunteer firemen I’m out there to protect, maybe you wanna think about not sitting in a law chair for hours on end while you eat and tell jokes and listen to the radio.
It is not a social gathering. Don’t treat it like one while there are other men and women out there working and sweating and slowly getting sun-crisped to make sure you’re safe.
Ultimately, the fire took three or four days to burn out, the building was demolished, and the handful of jobs at that plant are probably not coming back.
What I try to spend my time thinking about, rather than the handle-bar mustached moron who almost killed me, are the fellow deputies and volunteer fireman and his wife who kept us hydrated and kept us updated to keep us going during a tough couple of days.
Thank you so much.
I pulled her over for running a stop sign.
“I stopped.”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“Yes, I did, but I’m not going to argue about it.”
“Can I see your license and insurance, please?”
“Here. I stopped. I absolutely stopped.”
“Ma’am, you were right in front of me.”
“I’m not going to argue about it, but I stopped.”
“Ma’am, do you understand the definition of not arguing?”
“Well, I just have lots of things on my mind. My husband’s in Iraq.”
Soooo…first you didn’t do it, then you did but only because your husband is in Iraq. And why, exactly, does a man being in the desert cause you to run a stop sign?
And, oh by the way, why are you using your husband’s military service as an excuse for anything?
“I just bought some meat.”
Remembrance and Regrets
The Cancer Chronicles
