Yesterday, six firetrucks curved down my street, parked three floors below me, put on their big fire jackets like I would prepare to go out into the snow as a kid, and unscrewed our fire hydrant. Seeing anyone do anything with a fire hydrant was shocking; it felt like someone doing an improv skit with a fire hydrant. But sure enough, some fire man unscrewed its ears like a blender and locked in that big fabric hose which is really just a big stocking.
As if it was all just very Wednesday of them, the lead truck craned out its ladder, with the only firewoman I saw taking that heavenly stairway all the way up to the roof of a neighbor building. She stepped around solar panels like they were flower beds, checking for fires. I and all my neighbors who were home opened our windows and walked out to the patios like many rapunzels, fists under our chins, to watch, refusing to go back to the blandness of whatever was happening before.
And never in all of this was there fear. I, of course, first looked and smelled, and thought about patting the handle of the door for heat, but if my house was on fire, I think I would find out about it before six firetrucks would, so I just, to extend the metaphor, watched the play play on.
Below the roof the firewoman was atop of, firemen came out of every crevice and from every direction. It looked like Seal Team Six engaging with targets-hostile, but the target was a fire that no one could get eyes on. They surrounded windows, peering inside, and tapped on doors in their swollen fire suits.
And the preceding sounds like it would be the most of my afternoon, but it all started to fizzle out in about ten minutes, without the use of their fire stockings. All the firemen, and firewoman trudged back up the hill of our street, closing the big square doors to the truck in frustration and defeat. More than all of them, the head fire chief, who is so important he drives a fire Chevy Tahoe, instead of a fire truck, scratched his hair, white from this and a million previous false alarms.