New faces aren't common in The Sink Hole. Lately though, this old man had been coming in. He would sit on the opposite end of the bar from me, nursing a single beer for hours, and occasionally he'd shoot me a glance. I did my best to send him a scowl in return, but more often than not I just ended up slobbering all over myself in the attempt. During one of the rare chats I'd have with the bartender, I mentioned I originally came here to learn to fight forest fires, and saw the old man perk up a little bit. I think that may have been the first day I saw him in here.
My stomach lurched. I wasn't able to hold the grog down any longer. It all gushed back up. The harsh mix of stomach acid and whatever caustic shit was in the beer seared the back of my throat and my nostrils. At least I made it outside of the bar that time. The owner said if I vomited inside without making it to the bathroom one more time I'm banned from the establishment. Not sure what I'd do without the reliable Sink Hole. I'd probably just buy myself a bottle of something more reminiscent of rubbing alcohol than actual liquor, curl up on a park bench, and hope that by the time I saw the bottom of the bottle I'd still have my senses to get myself back home before I freeze to death. Then I'd wake up the next morning blind from the wood alcohol.
“You doing alright there kid?”
I turned around and saw that old man from inside standing near the alley entrance to the bar. I think this is the first time I'd ever heard him speak.
“Yeah, I'm fine. Don't worry about me, gramps. Just go back inside and mind your own business.” I tried my best to look as dignified as possible with snot and vomit dripping from my nose.
“Listen kid, I noticed you in the bar a few days ago, I figured you could use some help.”
“Stop calling me kid. I'm twenty five God damned years old and I don't need no drunk geezer looking out for me.”
“You sure don't seem to have the wits of a twenty five year old. All I ever see you do is drink until you can't even stand and then vomit all over yourself.”
“Most of it's on the ground, not me.”
At that point I'd had enough. I started to walk away, hoping he'd take the hint. Not this guy though. I guess he was determined to get something through to me.
“When I first saw you, you told the bartender you were looking for firefighting work.”
“Yeah, so?” I quickened my pace, and tripped over my own feet and fell to the ground. The old man helped me up, even as I tried to push him away.
“Firefighting is my line of work, kid. I've been doing it for decades now. The summers keep getting drier and hotter, and the state keeps getting less and less resources to properly manage the forests. The end result being, we get a lot of forest fires around here.”
“Yeah, ok, and why are you telling me this?”
“We need new people every year. It's seasonal work, so most of the labor force moves away. Come the end of September, I’m the only guy left on the team.”
“Are you in need of a completely inexperienced drunk?”
“Experience, you'll get in time, but lowlife drunks aren't the sort we're looking for.”
“Then what are you doing talking to me?” I'd had enough of his lecture. I tried to bull past him. He stuck out his hand and pushed on my chest, stopping my getaway. I was too out of it to put up much more resistance.
“Stop for a second, son, so I can look you in the face when we're talking. Right now, you're no good for anything. You're on the way to drinking yourself to death, and it isn't going to take much longer for you to get there. I see kids like you every year. They come here because they had nothing left for them back home. They think they'll find something here, something to at least pass the time and scrape a living off of. Over time they all realize the same thing, life's rough here. The work is harsh, the weather is harsh, and the drink is harsh. Even the water here tastes rough. You, though… you seem a little different. I don't know what it is about you, but you seem like the kind of person that can buckle down and focus toward a real goal. That's why I'm talking to you. You've fallen into the same trap as every sad sack who comes through here does, but I can see you climbing out. You just need a little guidance, and I think I might be able to help you out a little bit.”
“What makes you think you can help me?”
“To be honest, you remind me a lot of my son when I look at you. I-I lost him a few years ago. Working down in the mines.”
“So what? You want to relive your father years through me? Find someone else to fulfill your fatherly needs, gramps.” I started walking away again. I hoped he would get the right signal, but the old man grabbed me by the arm and twisted me around to face him.
“Listen to me. I just want to help you, you stupid son of a bitch. Firefighting takes a lot of training. I can help you with that. It will be worth your while if you're willing to put in the work. Trust me on that.”
“Whatever, old man. I don't even know you. Why should I believe anything you're saying?”
“I'm not going to force you into anything. If you want my help, stop by the forests service building downtown tomorrow morning. Ask for Paul.”
Sleep came easy for me that night. The tradeoff were these bizarre dreams I had the entire night. I kept going back into The Sink Hole, over and over. The only thing they would serve me was tap water. The bartender would always give me some strange, random response to anything I said to him. ‘Drink up, it'll put scales on your chest’, ‘Have a sip, it’s good for your brain, or at least the one in your second head’, ‘Drink enough of that and you'll shit out a mighty fine necklace’, ‘Trust me, you’ll get a better buzz off that than any alcohol we have here’, ‘You’ll get all your vitamins and minerals drinking that, and then some’. Paul was there too. Something terrible was always happening to him, but he didn't seem to mind. Once he was on fire, completely engulfed in flames. Another time he had a knife sticking out of his back, his body covered in bloody bandages and his wrists bound. I think I saw the crushed body of his son sitting next to him, trying to take a drink but his crushed throat wouldn't allow it. Paul wasn't wrong, looking at his son was like looking in a mirror. That is, if the image of a man I’ve never met in one of my own dreams is anything to go by.
When I finally awoke, I reached for the nearest bottle. Empty, everything was empty. Not the best start to my day. My head was killing me, and I had nothing to calm it down and wipe those dreams from my head. I stumbled around looking for some cash. I couldn't find anything. Just the lock box under my tent. On the box I could still read Jon's handwriting, ‘Save it for a rainy day’. It wasn't raining, but if it's always 5 o'clock somewhere, it’s always raining somewhere too, right? Screw it, I thought, I don't need to make excuses to myself. I wanted to get drunk, even if it meant wasting everything I'd earned up to that point. There was a combination lock on the box, and I'd be damned if I could remember the combo. I figured I'd have to break it open, though I lacked any real tools to break the lock. I slept on top of enough rocks, one of them should have been good enough to break open that cheap lock. I'd have to dig in the ground under the tarp to get to them.
What the hell was I doing? Digging in the winter earth with my bare hands just to get some cash to stupefy myself for a few hours? That couldn't have been the only thing I was good for. Fuck. The headache was killing me, and my bowels felt like they were taking a ride on a roller coaster. Was I even enough of a man to go through alcohol withdrawal at that point? I couldn't remember the last day I didn't get drunk. The collective hangover could have quite literally killed me.
Screw it, I thought. I took a walk downtown. The old man was right. I wasn't going to survive much longer if I continued on as I had been. I needed a change, but firefighting? That's dangerous, hard work. I guess shoveling around toxic waste all day isn't that great for you either, but at least it didn't involve being burned alive. Just the slow death from inhaling carcinogens all day long. I'd be making near four times as much as I did then if I became a fire fighter. If the old man was everything he clai
med, I might just have a shot at making a living out of it. Something one day I can look back on and think “Yeah, I could have done worse things with my life”. The American Dream.
I had arrived at the forests service building. I convinced myself it was purely by accident. I was just "out for a walk." I started to snoop around the building, looking inside the window. It looked like there was only one person inside. I guess that kind of made sense, though. It's not like they're going to make everyone work in the God damned lobby viewable from the outside. This is it, I thought, I'm going in. I had five seconds to work up my courage. If I turned tail and ran, only one homely looking old lady was going to see me in my humiliation. Not a huge dint to my pride, but enough to have made it sting a little. I opened the door and stepped inside. I walked up to the old lady and said, “Hi, I'm here to see Paul. Is he in today?”
“Hold on one minute. Please have a seat over there.”
This was going to be just great. I was going to sit there and wait with my thumb up my ass only to find out she'd never heard of anyone named Paul. If there was one thing I could always count on, it was that nothing ever worked out for me. Regret and disappointment. That was all I'd ever have in my miserable life. Maybe one day I could experience hope and fulfillment and a sense of accomplishment. Probably at the same time I experienced the sweet release of death.
“Hey there, kid, have you decided to take up my offer?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 2
Paul was one tough bastard. Every day we'd be up by sunrise, every night we were up to nearly midnight. Three square meals a day, and absolutely, positively, no drinking. ‘Square meals’ might be a bit of an overstatement. I ate a bit of cornmeal sludge and some beans three times a day. Every now and then we threw in something green if we could find it. Well, mostly green with a decent amount of yellow and brown. There was even the rare occasion we'd get to eat some real meat. We just needed to hope we find something dead on the side of the road to do so. Certainly much better than what I was eating before Paul. Living with Paul had made me realize that I must have been getting around three quarters of my daily calories from alcohol. I no longer got to look forward to chugging some cheap whiskey that burns all the way down to my stomach as though I swallowed a lit acetylene torch. Three meager servings of over boiled cornmeal and mushy beans was what brought light to my days then. That's what I told myself anyway.
My life really had turned around since Paul took me in. I lived in a house. Well, as much as what you can call something a house in those days. When I was a kid we would've called Paul's home a ‘shack’, and a pretty run down one at that. There were four wooden walls, a roof, and a floor that was not made from dirt. It was pretty sturdy, or at least sturdy enough for us to suspend two narrow hammocks. There wasn't enough space in the place for the two of us to live in and also have beds. All of the furniture folded up, and in total there were two chairs and one small table. The only source of heat and ability to warm up our meals was a makeshift brazier. It looked like a 50 gallon steel drum that had been torn in half and then propped up on three cinder blocks. Every time I had to reach in to grab the food it became a tetanus risk, having to avoid cutting open my arms on some jagged rusty edge that was sticking out. Between the brazier and the insulation blankets Paul had nailed to the wall, the place stayed surprisingly warm, and was a huge fire risk. I guess having a trained firefighter and a firefighter-in-training helped to mitigate that risk somewhat. We were mostly through spring at that point, but I think that was the first winter where I was able to feel my toes at any point during it.
The training Paul had been giving me didn't seem to have a whole lot to do with actual firefighting, but then again, what the hell did I know? The first step he had me take was quitting all my vices. No drinking, no smoking, no whoring, no being a dumb ‘down on my luck’ kid who blamed the rest of the world for all of my problems. Paul hadn’t been all that successful at the last one, but I can't fault him for trying. Everything else though had worked. I tried to convince Paul that, if I'm going to be working around smoke, I should toughen up my lungs by smoking burning ash on a regular. Just a cigarette or two a day would suffice He didn't take too kindly to that. His ‘punishment’ for all of my grievances was a disappointed look on his face and silence for a day or two. I thought I was getting off easy at first. I was used to cane beatings that I'd get at the youth shelters I had hopped around to and from during my later adolescence. It was only a week before a day's long silence and the occasional cold, empty glare was enough to make me wish for the simplicity of corporal punishment.
The rest of my training consisted of reading some books and trying to entertain myself while Paul was at the office. The Forestry Department had no office jobs available at that moment, and certainly not enough work to warrant paying another person, so I had to wait until fire season to get a real job with them. In the mean time I had been looking for ad-hoc work maybe once or twice a week to help contribute to the food costs for Paul and myself. He could easily pay for it all with what he made, but he was beginning to rub off on me and I didn't want to feel like too much of a mooch. Anyway, there was only one book that Paul gave me that was actually about how to fight fires. It was a whole bunch of high level stuff that I didn't really understand at the time. Different technologies that were used, like airplanes and helicopters, how to dig the trenches to create fire lines, and how to survive in extreme environmental conditions. It was all great to read about, but I still wouldn't know what the hell to do if I got thrown out there right then. The book also mentioned that firefighters would work in teams, called hotshots. There would typically be about twenty people to a team, with hundreds of teams positioned all across the US. According to Paul, it would be remarkable to have a team as large as ten back then, and there were maybe fifty total spread around the country. The rest of the books were all memoirs of firefighters who I assumed were long dead, or some outdoors fantasy crap like ‘Call of the Wild’ or ‘Hatchet’. Those had been by far the most enjoyable books to waste my time reading. I was supposed to learn ‘what it takes’, mentally and physically, to be a firefighter. From what I'd read in these memoirs, the main thing I needed to learn was to become accustomed to loss.
Paul just walked through the door, back from work. He was there a bit earlier than usual.
“Office life as titillating as usual today?”
“I didn't go into the office today. I took a personal day.”
“Why's that?”
“I had to buy all of the equipment for your training”
“Great. Presents. What did you get me, some more dog-eared books?”
“No. Up to this point, I've just been slowly trying to detox you from the crap life you've been living. Now it’s time for the hard work. I've got you a good pair of boots, some toughly built clothing, a backpack, a tent, and other various tools for the outdoors.”
“What are we going to be doing?”
“We're going to be living off the land for the next few weeks. They don't really need me at the office until fire season starts, so I can manage to take the time off without affecting the department. I'm going to be teaching you survival skills. How to fish, hunt, and forage for food. How to make a fire without a lighter or match, how to build your own shelter, and how to do it all with minimal effect on Mother Nature.”
“I'm nothing but an ignorant city boy. How do you expect me to learn all that?”
“You'll have to learn, kid. If you don't, I'll let you be taken by the elements.”
“Doubtful. You’re too much of a softie for me to take that threat seriously.”
“Don't try me. You need to know all of this stuff when you're out there in the wilderness doing actual firefighting work. I've spent entire seasons without ever returning to HQ. This isn't hard stuff, kid. It's what they taught ten year olds in cub scouts for crying out loud. I think a halfway put together twenty-something can handle it.”
“Alright, alright. Calm yourse
lf down, old man, before you have an aneurysm. You're just hitting me with a lot of stuff right now, ok?”
“Good. Get yourself ready. We leave tomorrow at dawn.”
“Not like I have anything to 'get ready'. You're the one who has all of my equipment.”
“I meant mentally kid. Get yourself a good meal, a good night's sleep, and prepare yourself for a month of physical hardship.”
“I spend my days half frozen and shoveling shit into barrels. I think I'm properly prepared for a little bit of physical hardship.”
I should have heeded the old man's advice. Begrudgingly shoveling some mining waste a few days a week hadn't done anything to prepare me for what was to come. While it was light outside, we never stopped moving. Paul always had me foraging for something. Trying to find firewood for the night, looking for plants that are edible, learning how to spot the poisonous ones, finding a fresh water source, looking for animal habitats. All the while I was carrying a pack that weighed more than I did. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the pack was full of equipment to aid in my survival, but half the weight was coming from rocks Paul put in. The extra weight from the rocks was supposed to help with my physical conditioning, and to help ‘toughen me up’ or some other nonsense Paul seemed to have made up. We never slept in the same spot either. Every day, a new location, which meant I needed to find a suitable campsite, clear it out, make sure we weren't going to accidentally light the whole forest on fire when we built the campfire, and try and find a place with natural surroundings to utilize when building our shelters. We had a tent, but Paul tried to make me construct our shelter with nothing more than a single piece of rope, and if there isn't much to work with in the area, a canvas sheet. I made lean-to's by stacking branches and leaves and moss and any other wilderness debris against the rope tied between two tress, makeshift tepees made from a couple of long branches I found lying about, and Paul even had me try to rig up this hammock between two trees with the rope and canvas. I think we made it to three in the morning before my knots gave way and we both nearly broke our tailbones after we crashed to the ground.
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