Ultimately, you leverage dress, demeanor, and terminology in an attempt to project an aura of calm and control. The true hero is steady in the maelstrom, one hand tending the victim, the other pointing the way to definitive succor. You will need, sometimes, to squeeze your eyes shut real tight to maintain this image. To say nothing of your nose.
I am backing the car out of the driveway when the pager goes off. I intend to meet the grunt novelist Mike Magnuson for a training ride south of Eau Claire. My bike is in the backseat, and I am wearing Lycra biking shorts, a light blue racing jersey, matching ankle socks, and cycling shoes. Man unconscious in a barn, the dispatcher says. I have no intention of going on the call, but figure I can open the fire hall doors, find the fire number on the map, and get the rig started and ready to roll for whoever shows up. I tug off my cleats and pull on my steel-toed Caterpillar boots. I leave them unlaced. They flap around my ankles when I run.
I get everything ready, and still no one has shown up. I take a quick look up and down the street. No one. Looks like I am the only first responder in town. It’s the last thing I want to do, but I jump in the rescue van and take off.
It’s hot and muggy, and the air in the barn is heavy and wet, sweet with the smell of manure. The farmer is lying across the cement walkway. He was milking a cow when it stepped sideways and pinned him against a waist-high pipe stanchion. He thought he heard something pop. When the cow swung away, the man tottered to the walkway, then suffered a Valsalvian reaction (a precipitous drop in blood pressure subsequent to increased intra-abdominal pressure preventing normal blood flow to the heart) and fell to the floor, cracking his head. He’s on his back now, head lolling over the gutter. In order to assess his airway and take cervical stabilization, I have to step right into the gutter channel, into a slick of creamy green manure. At my back, stretching away to either end of the barn, a horizon of black-and-white cow rear ends. I grew up on a dairy farm, and I know what effect excitement has on the Holstein bowel. Excitement = Excrement. Tails are already cocking up and down the walk. I glance over my shoulder and wince. Two big hocks and the back end of an udder. I’m really not worried about getting kicked—unlike horses, cows kick more powerfully to the fore than the aft—but when I turn my eyes upward and see Bossy’s greasy tail twitching between a pair of dung-stained thurls, I ask the hired man if he can find a tarp or something. He hustles off and returns with a square of plywood, which he holds between me and the cow’s rear end. I put my hands on either side of the farmer’s head to stabilize his cervical spinal column and check his breathing. I’m locked into this position now—once you take up manual C-spine stabilization, you are not to release it until the patient is definitively immobilized, usually after being strapped to a long board and secured with head blocks.
He was unconscious for about five minutes, says his wife. He’s semiconscious now. “Can you hear me, Jerome?” I ask, and there is no response. “Jerome! Can you hear me?” Now his eyelids flutter, and he mumbles something affirmative. Later, filling out the report, I’ll check the little boxes next to “verbal” and “confused” and “sleepy.” I’ll also write a little note including the fact that he was originally unconscious. It’s basic stuff, but we try to record as much information as possible, have it ready for the ambulance crew. It establishes an important baseline. As the farmer is passed up the line to more definitive care, his status can be gauged against what we found when we first got to him. I have some help now—Tim, one of our new first responders, has arrived in his private vehicle. I hold my position at Jerome’s head, and Tim continues Jerome’s assessment. Pupils equal and reactive to light, albeit sluggishly. No visible bleeding or cerebrospinal fluid discharge from the ears. No Battle’s signs (bruising behind the ears indicative of a basilar skull fracture). Hand grips equal bilaterally, movement in both lower extremities. Subaxillary breath sounds present bilaterally. No obvious chest or abdominal injuries. No tracheal deviation that might signal a collapsing lung. I don’t have my handheld radio, but the ambulance should be getting here soon. Tim is taking Jerome’s blood pressure. Jerome is able to tell us his head and belly hurt. Behind me, some stop-start splashes, then a cascade. The cow is peeing. The urine hits the concrete and spatters across the gutter. Jerome is getting spritzed. I clamp my legs together and shift to shield his face. Hot pee soaks my shorts and dribbles down my calves. The hired man has wandered off. I can see the plywood square leaning against the wall at the far end of the barn.
The ambulance is here now. On their way out, they put the chopper on standby. Based on the fact that Jerome is talking now, they cancel the chopper. Then, concerned when he seems to be losing consciousness again, they radio back and give the chopper the go-ahead. I keep my position while Tim and the paramedics carefully package Jerome and attach him to the longboard. Now the cow behind me jacks her tail and lets go a loose stream of feces. The bulk of the volley misses me, but I can feel the warm patter of the ricochet dotting my back and legs.
Once Jerome is affixed to the board, I run out of the barn to set up the helicopter landing zone. A freshly mown hay field behind the farmhouse looks like it will do nicely. I point the rescue van south and park it with all the strobes lit and spinning. Then I do a quick walkaround, making sure there are no loose objects in the area that might become airborne in the rotor wash. Back in the van, I hear the fire base trying to contact me. Some of the other firefighters have returned to town, and seeing the van out, wonder if I need any help. Now that Jerome is all set and the landing zone secure, I tell them no, but they are already on their way, and so will continue. And somewhere along the line, a group of first responders from Sanderson has headed our way.
You hear about turf wars in EMS, but we’re blessed. We get great support from neighboring services. A little overlap happens now and then, but it’s mostly viewed as welcome help. So the fact that the Sanderson crew was coming out of its area wasn’t an issue. In fact, I suspect they got started when they didn’t hear me responding on scene. They were being neighborly.
But they were led by Lorraine.
Lorraine is flat surly. Somewhere along the line, a particularly tenacious bug has burrowed up her transverse colon and taken residence, sideways. She throws equipment on scene. She cusses her own EMTs. She’s been known to kick an ambulance cot and send it careening down a hallway. She wears cowboy boots and dresses like a man. She also happens to hold a position of some power in local EMS circles. So one must be circumspect. It’s a shame, really, because Lorraine has given years and years to the ambulance service, no doubt often for no thanks. And yet, the most reward this public service appears to have given her is a lemon wedge in each petulant cheek.
So you dread Lorraine.
Everyone arrives at once. The Sanderson contingent, in several pickups. A couple of our guys in pickups. Our fire truck, with lights flashing. The chopper. I radio the pilot, tell him the landing zone is over here, south of the flashing lights. He sees the lights on the moving fire truck, and radios back. “A moving landing zone…that’s a first!” I jump back on the air, redirect him to the flashing lights on the stationary rescue van. He brings the craft in nicely.
Jerome is loaded. The chopper departs. I’ve been busy, but now I have a moment to catch my breath and look around. There are trucks and flashing lights everywhere. A platoon of firefighters and first responders. And Lorraine, headed straight for me. I wince. She pulls up and asks if that was me on the radio, telling the firefighters I didn’t need any help. “Yeah, we pretty much had everything covered by then,” I say. Lorraine lights into me. “You don’t ever land a chopper in a field without a fire truck standing by!” I don’t remember hearing this in any training session, and suspect Lorraine is just target shooting, but I let her go.
And she does. For quite a while, right in my face. She wants her pound of flesh, which is apparently grafted to my ass. And so I am standing there, on this hilltop in this fresh-mown field, in the center of this circle of friends and strangers,
my bare shit-spattered legs stuffed into my clodhopper boots, my skintight shorts reeking of cow piss, and Lorraine is yip-yapping, and I am looking her right in the eye and just taking it, because she might have a point with the fire truck thing, but mostly because I figure the gas she vents might take the pressure off the colon bug and get us all some relief, and I’m thinking, if I had gotten up three minutes earlier this morning I would be on my bike right now, pedaling past sunny meadows just like this one, and thinking, what a glorious day is this…
Later, much later, I think for a very long time about this scene.
I am disgruntled. Long after the fact, I come up with assorted repartee. I indulge in revenge fantasies. In the most straightforward, I grab Lorraine by the ankles and troll her up and down the gutter. In another, I stand tall in the rotor wash and improvise a series of rude limericks, each beginning, “There once was a narwhal named Lorraine…” In another, I compose a list of terms detailing Lorraine’s anatomy, limiting myself to adjectives ending in -ic, -erous, or ematous. In my favorite, I say, well, at least I look good in biking shorts.
I chewed it over for a while.
Then I smiled.
Everything said and done, what you had here, was your Supreme Heroic Moment.
Springtime. A farmer calls. He’s been planting corn near a swamp. His orange tractor has backfired, the sparks have lit last year’s bleached canary grass. By the time I get there, the brush buggy is parked at the edge of the field. The lieutenant I drenched at the cabin fire last winter is handing down backpack cans. I run around the front of the buggy and he hits me right between the eyes with a stream of water.
“Know what that was for?” He’s grinning wide.
Sure do.
12
PENULTIMATE
ALL JACK MOST WANTS is someone to tell him what’s the deal with his rock. The rock is a legend now. Jack’s constant companion. He’s lugged it in and out of every bar and restaurant from New Auburn to Bloomer and back. At the firefighter banquet we gave him a tube of super glue. Told him to stick the rock on the hood of his car to avoid the trouble of dragging the thing in and out of the trunk all the time.
Jack found the rock on a Saturday. His “day off.” He runs the feed mill all week, grinding corn, mixing mineral, making deliveries, bulling the heavy bags around. On the weekend, Jack and his twin brother Mack generally split and haul loads of firewood, but on this particular weekend, Jack had been hired by some lake ladies to build a fieldstone fence. That Saturday, he was gathering material for the fence, picking rock at his folks’ farm. Depending on how the glacier treated your farm, picking rock is a rite of spring here. When we were growing up, the farmers used to hire gangs of kids—some, like the ten Jabowskis, were a gang unto themselves—to slog along behind hay wagons in the plowed fields, pitching rocks on the wagon bed until it sagged and the wheels pressed deep in the dirt. When it was full, the farmer hauled it to the end of the field or the edge of a swamp and dumped the load. You can still see these cairns all around the county, the smooth brown and pink and tan stones in mounds the size of a Volkswagen.
Jack picked the rock on Saturday, but it wasn’t until Sunday morning, when he was turning it in his hands to determine how it might best fit the wall, that he noticed the paw print. The rock is about the size of a bowling ball, and countersunk on the surface is what appears to be the paw print of a large cat—a central pad surrounded by five toes. The print is an inch deep and crisp. It could be covered maybe by a large pancake. Jack pulled the rock from the wall and told the women he was working for he’d be keeping that one. He got a lot of opinions that first day, mostly from guys drinking beer. He stopped at my house and pounded on the door. I looked the rock over and took a couple of pictures. It was strange, all right. Sure looked like a big old paw print. “Whadd’ya think?” said Jack. “Saber-tooth?” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.
Jack was on a mission then. He’d take time off from the feed mill, or from cutting wood, and he’d set off with his rock, trying to find out what he had. He showed it to everybody local—neighbors, the science teacher, strangers at the Gas-N-Go—but then he started seeking out experts. People with qualifications. First place he tried was the Science Museum over in St. Paul. “They said it was a sedimentary rock,” says Jack. Then he left it with a geologist in River Falls for a week. “He said it wasn’t sedimentary, it was volcanic,” says Jack. A geologist on staff at the university in Eau Claire agreed that it was a volcanic rock, but didn’t clear up the mystery of the print. “He said no cat could have put a print in a rock like that,” says Jack. “He said it would have been too hot, and an animal would not step on a hot rock.” Some experts suggested the print was formed by chance, others said it was carved by man. “But the geologist in River Falls told me no way, because that rock was too hard,” says Jack. He took a day off work and went to the Field Museum in Chicago. Took his daughter with him, and I would like to have been there to see old Jack come stomping through the doors with that rock under his arm.
“The lady there gave us free passes all day,” he says. “She came to the conclusion that, yes, it was a mammal print, but, no, it wasn’t, because the rock was too old. No one carbon-dated it or took a sample of it, but they said it was about two million years old.”
Jack followed another line of inquiry. “I said I’d like to see a saber-toothed tiger if they had one, so I could match it up. And the lady there said, ‘Well, a saber-toothed tiger has a bigger foot than that.’ And I said it could be a kitten. Sometime in its life it had to have a smaller foot than a full-grown cat. She said that made sense, but that was as far as she would go with that.”
Jack and his daughter had a good day at the museum. But nothing definitive came of the rock with the paw print. He says he’s going to keep searching. He got someone to make a wax casting of the stone, so a friend could make a plaster mold of the print for a rockhound in Arizona. He tried a creation scientist. “He used to be a science teacher for fifteen years,” says Jack. “Now he just preaches and he says the Bible says the world and everything in it is only six thousand years old and everything was made at the same time.”
Jack does get some ideas in his head sometimes. And I imagine somewhere in his conversations with the experts he finds a way to let them know how much firewood he cut last week. So they probably get a little chuckle from his visits. But you’ll forgive him if he begins to think his theories are as reliable as any expert’s. “Nobody has agreed with each other,” he says. He thinks for a minute. “I just took it all in, and I’m just kind of curious about who is right and who is wrong.”
Not long after I moved here, I noticed my backyard was sinking. Indentations, scattered throughout the grass. I stuck a rake handle in one and it dropped in four feet. I got to entertaining notions about what might be down there. Most of the notions were of your boy-who-just-read-Treasure Island variety. I figured maybe something important or valuable had been buried back here, or that I’d unearth the New Auburn equivalent of the terra-cotta army from the ancient Chinese Qin Dynasty. I know when they dug the basement in the lot next door, they found a lot of old beer bottles. So one day a friend and I grabbed a shovel, a sifter, and a notebook and went archaeological. In every hole, what we found mainly were huge rotted roots infested by platoons of red ants. Later on, Durlin Baker, the old-timer who lives out back of my place, across the alley, told me, Yep, there used to be giant elm trees in my backyard, but they cut them all down when the Dutch elm disease came through. Sure enough, when the lady down at the Gas-N-Go lent me some old newspaper clippings, I found a photo of the original schoolhouse taken in the 1930s from such an angle that my house—freshly built—was visible in the background, and the yard was sprouting with elm saplings. We dug up two of the holes and kept a list of what we found in the sifter:
bits of charcoal
piece of green glass
porcelain chips with orange pattern
nail, rusted, attached to piece o
f board
plastic bead, red
oval chunk of cement, or lime
candy wrapper (Jolly Rancher)
Not much, but something. Signs of previous inhabitants. “Sure,” said Durlin Baker, later. “They used to burn their trash out back there.”
If we’re going to settle in a place, we like to dig around a little, get a sense of what came before. The digging reveals things, and even if they were discarded without thought, as was the candy wrapper, they nonetheless represent a fraction of history. That candy wrapper is the husk of a split second. When they dug the footings for St. Jude’s Catholic Church down the street, they kept turning up bricks from the old brick factory that used to stand on the ground. When my brother dug out a culvert north of town, his backhoe raked away the blacktop and revealed the cheek-by-jowl logs of the original corduroy road still socked tight in the dirt below. When I had to wait to be waved around a monstrous asphalt grinding machine last summer, I noticed that it was removing the asphalt in layers, and that it had cut the patch beside me on such a plane that the long-buried centerline was visible. I felt a goofy little reminiscent tug when I looked at the yellow paint, thinking that the last time I saw it exposed to the sun I was probably sixteen and riding my bike home from football practice. Silly, I suppose, but it spoke to the ties between the archaeology of a place and the archaeology of the heart.
We dig for threads and echoes, all correlating past to present. If we study the history of a place in order to establish a contemporary context, we are free to make what we will of any resonance, however tangential. A heavy ledger in the back room of the New Auburn village hall contains the handwritten minutes of the first recorded meetings of the village board, including the promulgation on May 28, 1902, of “Ordinance No. 9: An ordinance to prohibit the leaving of animals and teams unfastened in the public streets and for the prevention of cruelty to animals in the Village.” Nearly a century later, the photocopied minutes tacked to the post office bulletin board note that during the meeting of March 9, 2000, discussion included “the incident of the shooting of the pig that got loose from Olson’s Market.”
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