Russia wants to bomb Canada

[stromboli]

This is how we get guys volunteering for SEAL training.

Lol. Believe it. Testosterone is a powerful drug. I can blame every wrecked motorcycle and a few scars on it.

[SGOS]

This is how we get guys volunteering for SEAL training.

Stuff like this is exciting work. It's dangerous, but chances are you won't get hurt.  It's always somebody else.  You think about danger, but mostly you do so in an incidental way.  I and my buddy were digging line in the gully where the rocks were coming down.  A crew was digging line above us, and loosening the rocks.  I told my friend, we should get out of the gully, so we bumped the guys ahead of us, who bumped the guys ahead of them. 

Where we had been in the gully was quickly filled again by the guys behind us, who decided to dodge rocks instead of bumping the line.  I watched the guy that got hit in the head trying to dodge rocks.  My buddy and I were doing the same thing in the gully.  It seemed simple enough.  Every time the crew above dislodged rocks they would yell, "Rocks!"  So it was simple enough to dodge them.  It didn't really seem that dangerous, but something told me to get out of there.  The guy that got hit was confronted with several rocks at once.  I watched him bob and weave the first two or three, but then his luck ran out.

At that time, my experience was limited to chasing smokes, small fires that 3 or 4 guys could put out overnight.  Of our crew, I apparently had more experience than any of the others, and they asked me if I would act as crew boss, which I declined because I'd never been on a project fire up until that time.  So they got some poor schlep from another crew to take the job.

After the accident, our crew was sickened by the event.  One of our crew members authoritatively announced that our crew boss would be called before a tribunal and his "head would roll."  That became a truth, which no one on the crew could actually verify, but we all assumed whoever announced that knew what he was talking about.  No one ever knew what actually happened to the crew boss, but like the rest of us, he did look very demoralized.  I'm happy I wasn't the crew boss.

That was after a week of losing ground on the blaze.  That day, it started to rain, and mother nature started taking care of the problem for the government.  After all the excitement, they anticlimactically started sending crews home.  Our crew was the first to go.  I assume it was because of the accident.  I don't know how many other crews were sent home in the next couple of days.  It was late August and the fire season was starting to wind down, anyway.  It was demoralizing for entire crew to witness that bloody accident. It was a pretty somber trip home. 

Yet I always liked fighting fire.  The whole bunkhouse would get really jacked during fire busts.  Even some of the nonseasonal overhead.  My boss, the Fire Control Officer on our district would practically go nuts.

[stromboli]

Yes you do get jacked up. If you are an adrenaline junkie I can recommend it. One thing is for sure. Murphy's Law always applies. We were working a brush fire below the Indian Hills subdivision, which is built on top of a rocky slope, anchored mostly by Gambrel Oak and undergrowth. fire burns Gambrel Oak and undergrowth, anchor gone. Fortunately the resultant slide didn't get anybody, but it put a dent or two in the apparatus at the bottom. Thrills spills fun and a pissed off Chief.

Its funny because at the time it didn't seem that dangerous, but looking back it's like "WTF was I thinking?"