It’s inevitable. The call never comes in when you’re sitting in your car, chatting with your buds at the station or otherwise ready to drop everything and head off. I guess, like organized chaos, the randomness of fire alarms has a pattern: at night, when businesses close up, during the daytime, when people are away from home or when I’m in the shower. No matter how many times I’ve heard the dispatcher put in the call, my heart speeds up just a bit. It shouldn’t, I know…but it does.
It’s a bit like a baby’s cry. You know there’s something wrong, but you don’t know what…and you won’t until someone gets onscene or someone calls us to apologize for a dinner gone wrong or a faulty smoke detector. It’s a long ride, at 3 in the morning, when you make your way to the firehall, hop into a firetruck and head to some distant address, red and white lights piercing through the night, not knowing whether the alarm is a false one, or something more sinister. It’s a lonely ride too.
Not much traffic on a country road in the those early hours and not much company except for the chatter of the radio as other firefighters sign on and get their apparatus in gear. If the adrenaline is flowing, I can’t tell it by their voices.
Usually, almost always, someone arrives on scene, talks to the owner and the call is cancelled with a promise to have the alarm company come and check the wiring the next day. The roof lights go dim as I seek out a safe spot to turn the apparatus around and head back to the hall. There’s often a small sigh of relief as the heartbeats taper off to a normal rhythm. I know that soon, I will be softly crawling back into bed, eyes wide open, trying to counter the effects of the slow rush of adrenaline and glad that tonight wasn’t a working night.