The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  The fireman’s ideal was a magnet for Welles, as it is for so many boys of a certain age. The jubilant blast of the siren, the unpredictable call in the night, the monstrous gleam of the ladder truck, the fearsome power of the hose guns, the boots and turnouts and helmets, and the real and irresistible pull of fire—its brilliance and drama and danger. A living thing, a real and attacking beast. The appeal lay in all of it, and something more, the chance to live out and execute an edict every child is taught but most forget fast: to help.

  Christmas 1981, when Welles was four, his grandparents had a special gift for him, a blazing red ride-on fire truck. Upon first seeing it, Welles, who was formally dressed for the holiday in his little Eton suit, stood back for a few moments, as if uncertain how to proceed.

  “He was afraid to go near it,” Alison said, picturing the scene. “He couldn’t believe it was real. He was just so in awe of his fire truck. Maybe he was trying to figure out how they shrunk the truck down.” So Welles simply stared at the small metal engine, with its black wheels and bright chrome and beckoning seat behind the steering wheel. How did Santa get it down the chimney? Eventually, he walked toward it, sat down in it, and attempted to maneuver it around the room.

  “He climbed in and tried to pedal it,” Alison said. “It was not easy to pedal.”

  The pedals were indeed difficult to crank, and soon the gleaming red sides wore a coat of dust. Even though Welles would ride it at times down the sloped driveway, screaming with joy, wild to the world, he outgrew its small frame soon enough, and the toy went downstairs in a corner of the house somewhere, ignored and unused.

  But the memory of the day, of the gift beside the tree and Welles under its spell, remains.

  • • •

  Welles came by his passion honestly. After all, it was an inheritance.

  As it was for his father, one he came into as a teenager during a New England summer. Jeff was out for a drive on Martha’s Vineyard, where his family spent a long stretch each summer. While cruising through the Vineyard town of Chilmark, daydreaming, enjoying the freedom that came with his new driver’s license, he was snapped out of his reverie by the bark of an order. It was Ozzie Fischer, island tribal elder, waving for him to pull over. Ozzie was a Vineyard treasure to most who knew him. Born in 1914, he’d spent his entire life on the island, a farmer, a town selectman, a local sage. He was also the fire chief in Chilmark.

  “Boy,” he said, standing next to the driver’s door. “Do you have a license? Are you sixteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Fischer said. “On Saturday, I will see you down at the firehouse. We need more volunteers. So you are going to volunteer.”

  Jeff wasn’t sure an answer was required, but said yes anyway.

  The order was not a surprise. Jeff’s two older brothers had already volunteered for the department in summers past; it was the younger one’s turn. He would spend the next two years serving.

  “We didn’t get much training” was how he remembered the preparation.

  The work was more grimy than dramatic, and Jeff loved it. The most common calls on the island were for dump fires or, indoors, for chimney fires caused by tourists. Visitors could prove overly eager for the romance of a fire on a damp and cool day, without bothering to check whether the flue was open or the chimney actually worked. There were a few of those each summer, smoky affairs that rarely threatened any real damage to the summer cottages. He didn’t face a house fire during his time, but the excitement of getting the calls, putting on the gear, rushing to the scenes—that he could remember; and the rush of what might happen and the difference he could make—that stuck inside him. For years, working at his banking career, he lived in towns where there were paid firefighters, and the opportunity to volunteer wasn’t there.

  A few decades later, in 1985, the chance finally came. The family had been living in Upper Nyack, New York, for a few years by then. Day after day, Jeff passed the perfect little firehouse on North Broadway. He loved the place—its corner bell tower, its single engine door, its ancient red brick. The building loomed there, a marker from another time, resolute and ready. How many times did he consider stopping in? He always had the next commute to make, or an errand to run. It was around the corner, but he’d never visited.

  In September of that year, on a Sunday morning after services, Jeff was in the back hall of the church having coffee when he saw Homer Wanamaker, the chief of police for Orangetown, near the village of Upper Nyack. The two were neighbors. Jeff asked what he knew about the firehouse around the corner. Homer knew plenty.

  “I’m president,” he said.

  Jeff explained his experience out on the Vineyard years ago, and his interest in volunteering.

  “Stop off at my house,” Homer said. “I’ll give you an application.”

  By November he was voted in. By December, he was cooking a meal for the entire active company, more than two dozen firefighters. Such duty was required of its newest member. He now belonged to Empire Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 of Upper Nyack.

  • • •

  Nyack, New York, is actually composed of five villages and hamlets: Nyack itself and Central, South, West, and Upper Nyack. It was named for the Native Americans who settled the land before the Europeans arrived; the Nyacks migrated north from Coney Island (the word nyack in the Algonquin language means “land at the point,” and Coney Island does resemble a peninsula at low tide) and moved some thirty miles, to the hillsides that form the riverside terrain of the villages. Situated along the west bank of the Hudson, with a shoreline that looks east, through the erector set of the Tappan Zee Bridge, across to Tarrytown and Westchester County, Nyack’s town center grew in step with New York City’s residential and industrial sprawl northward.

  As jobs and population grew, so did the demands for local government. In 1872, Upper Nyack broke off to form its own incorporated village.

  By the count of the 2010 U.S. census, a little more than two thousand people called the village home. Many who live there would say they hail from Nyack, period—the division between Upper and the rest of the Nyacks is important to some, but rarely comes up outside the area’s own parochial conversations, and any deeper divisions have largely faded over time.

  There are still handsome stone mansions along the river’s edge of North Broadway in Upper Nyack, and more modest homes drifting up the hills to the west, looking down on exactly one grocery store, one bar, two synagogues, and one former Christian house of worship, the Old Stone Church, which is owned by the village itself. The First Methodist Episcopal Church of Nyack, the structure’s more decorous name, was built over a couple of years from the native stones and timbers of the region and finished in 1813. It’s the oldest church building in Rockland County, New York, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  There is a second building on that register: that firehouse at 330 North Broadway. It is a two-story brick structure in the Queen Anne style, finished in the summer of 1887, with a white steeple above its corner bell tower and a gabled façade over its wide door. It has been home to hundreds of village men who have spent thousands of hours there, arguing and laughing, cooking and eating, remembering and dreaming, and waiting for the bell to ring.

  And when it did, the Upper Nyack Firehouse convulsed with movement. And the volunteers of Empire Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 acted with the resolute urgency of those driven to reach one destination: wherever the fire was.

  • • •

  The Upper Nyack fire company was formed in 1863, nine years before the village itself was incorporated. Which is somewhat odd. The village of Nyack already existed, had its own fire department, and there was no evidence of that department’s ineptitude. By the standards of the time, Nyack’s firemen covered the region competently. But the men who lived along North Broadway in what would become Upper Nyack wanted to have the first and closes
t chance to save their own families, and their own homes, in their own way. They wanted the responsibility, and the honor, of keeping those around them safe. The job was theirs to do, not someone else’s. This mission was the very foundation of Empire from its charter, its call to existence, instilled in every firefighter who would ever wear its turnouts.

  An insurance claim that reached the New York State Supreme Court in 1887 suggested, however, that for all its brio, Empire Hook and Ladder was not infallible. The claim was for fire damage, of all things, to the building occupied by Empire Company No. 1 itself. The department’s own fire station had burned to the ground, along with its truck.

  But by the time the insurance claim was paid in 1888, the new firehouse for Empire Hook and Ladder was already finished. A resident of the village who made his fortune out west by selling supplies to prospectors in the California gold rush was the primary benefactor in funding the new firehouse, with help from other village families. The building took two years to complete.

  This time, all parties involved made a simple decision when it came to the new firehouse. The design could be subject to debate, but not the material. There, the choice was clear.

  Brick.

  • • •

  Before they moved to Upper Nyack, the Crowthers lived just to the north, in Pomona, New York. Their house on Ormian Drive had four bedrooms and a flat backyard of maybe half an acre backing up to a patch of woods. They would soon be five: Mom, Dad, Welles, his younger sister, five-year-old Honor, and the baby girl to be, Paige. It was a family’s starting point, a two-story base camp from which to strive and grow.

  In time, Alison and Jeff Crowther would move the thirteen miles south to Upper Nyack, closer to the city, for various reasons, including proximity to the church where they worshipped. But they were still in Pomona in the winter of 1984, on a cold Sunday morning as they were getting dressed for church, when a father and his seven-year-old son had a conversation about the difference between fashion and function.

  Faith was meaningful in the Crowther family. It was not an ornament to display, or a verse to memorize. It was important, if not eclipsing, central but not total. The standards of a Christian upbringing provided a path to living and, if followed, a glorious destination in the end, but there was a lot to do in between, and not all of it among the pews, or on one’s knees.

  Still, Sunday morning was a clear and holy time in the house; the first half of the day was devoted to church: dressing for it, getting to it, and attending it.

  Welles’s wardrobe was the subject between father and son on that winter morning in 1984. As with any question of what it meant to be a man, Welles looked unblinkingly to the same source seeking the same voice: his father.

  With time dwindling and the church hour approaching, Welles called for his father’s help. He was wearing a new suit, the first Alison had ever bought him, a boy’s gray flannel, warm and formal, Sunday best. Welles wanted to complete the ensemble by wearing a tie. But there was a wide gap between desire and ability. After a number of tries, he did what any reasonable boy might do. He shouted down the hall.

  “Dad!”

  Jeff came, took a knee, flipped up his son’s collar, and went to work. As he did, Welles looked down at his father, already dressed and set, and noticed a part of his wardrobe for the first time. Sticking up in a few sharp points in perfect white spikes, he saw the perfection of his father’s pocket square.

  “What’s that, Dad?” he asked. “Can I have one of those?”

  “This?” Jeff answered, looking down at his jacket pocket. “Sure.”

  After cinching the knot up toward the top button of Welles’s shirt, Jeff stood up and went back to his bedroom, looking for another white handkerchief. He kept a stash in his top drawer. He reached for one, and at the last second, anticipating where that clean white handkerchief might end up, he grabbed another from his drawer before heading back down the hall to Welles.

  When he returned, he bent down again, and showed his son two handkerchiefs in his hands, one white, one red.

  He took the white handkerchief and folded it into the same pattern as his own, with the small points projecting upward, neat and sharp. Instantly, it took shape, like a pressed piece of origami. He tucked it into the small breast pocket of Welles’s suit coat, and made sure the presentation matched his.

  “Well,” Jeff said, “that’s for show.” Welles smiled.

  Then he pulled out the other handkerchief he’d carried into the room.

  He looked at Welles and smiled, holding out a red bandanna.

  “This,” said Jeff, “is for blow.” He made a gesture, holding it up toward his face. “To blow your nose.”

  He made sure Welles understood the difference, and then folded the red handkerchief neatly and placed it in the back right pocket of his son’s pants.

  “You can always keep this back there,” Jeff told him. “You’ll always have it if you need it.”

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Welles said, beaming. “That’s great.” In the simple course of getting dressed, the boy had received this unexpected gift.

  During the services at Grace Episcopal, Welles stood straight, looked handsome, and felt proud. He was a portrait in his new suit. But it was the bandanna in his pocket, tucked inside with just the top edge peeking out, that gave his wardrobe that extra bit of flash, to carry and keep.

  • • •

  The red bandanna would have other uses in time. To wipe away sweat and dirt, or clean up a mess, or keep the hair out of his eyes. Or to polish up a bumper or a gleaming silver bell. The handkerchief was a welcome sight, especially during the endless cleaning and polishing that went into the firehouse day. Or when a parade loomed on the calendar, and many would after Jeff joined Empire. For every firehouse in Nyack, the town parade meant two things: an all-out war of pride in having the cleanest rig, and the tedious process of making it that way.

  Empire Hook and Ladder’s volunteers wanted every piece of chrome blinding, every rim shining, every inch gleaming. The challenge for every ladder truck was the same: a lot of inches to cover, and a lot of them in places never meant to shine, or even to reach.

  For this inglorious labor, the company had a special worker who was adored for his ethic.

  “Hey, Welles, do you want to come with me to the firehouse?”

  At eight years old, the answer was automatic.

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  He was put to work immediately. Welles already knew many of the men as his father’s friends, seeing them at church or around town, but in this setting they possessed a different air. Larger, warmer, brighter in their blue T-shirts, they traded inside jokes punctuated by booms of laughter. They were a team. And they had no one to play the position of crawler.

  The men had started to remove the ladders from the bed atop the truck, and the space underneath was thick with leaves and sticks and congealed muck and grime.

  Who exactly was going to crawl in there?

  “Welles, you want to?”

  The boy jumped right up to the top of the truck and crawled forward, his feet disappearing from view before being replaced by a set of hands sticking out from the top of the bed, waiting for the tools he’d need. He was handed a vacuum hose and began sucking out the detritus that the other cleanings and washings and waxings missed. He was eager and happy. The men listened to the vacuum slurp and watched the hose stretch, and shared a hearty laugh. The kid was good. He was useful.

  He was one of them.

  • • •

  In a way, the firehouse was Welles’s first team. There would be many others, with different uniforms on different fields. He poured himself into all of them, hearing the same mantras whatever the season.

  Effort counts. Attitude matters. Hard work wins.

  Welles took them all in—the nostrums and platitudes rarely given to the naturally talented, wh
o don’t need to hear them, at least not yet. The encouragements and clichés were delivered to him from the start, and accepted as gospel. Of course the world yielded to effort. The victory always belonged to the most determined. How could a result be shaped any differently?

  From the time he began to play sports, Welles epitomized the try-hard guy, the striver, the kid wringing out whatever ability he has through practice and will. A streak of fearlessness was useful too, as an available substitute for physical genius.

  He taught himself to skateboard when he was nine years old, dangerous enough for a boy whose house sat near the bottom of a large hill in town. The house was also a venue for the monotonous thud of plastic hockey pucks on summer mornings, blasted into the net and the walls beyond. Neighborhood kids heard the sound for hours on end.

  As he first entered the civilization of youth sports, he found that he simply loved being on a team in all the sports he played—football, baseball, hockey, lacrosse. So often, team is the refuge of the effort and glue guys, the ones whose instincts for the game outpace any selfish flair, players who work for the good of the whole because they understand what the more brilliant player may never grasp: a good whole allows everyone, the good and the not as good, to get better.

  Before concentrating on hockey and then lacrosse exclusively, Welles played on Pop Warner football teams for several seasons, moving up each year by grade and weight. His lack of size became more conspicuous as the weight divisions grew wider, with a greater range of players competing against one another.

  As one of the smaller ten- or eleven-year-olds in his grade, Welles played defensive back for the Valley Cottage Indians. In Oklahoma drills, where two players went head to head with each other in close quarters, a contact drill where each is trying to knock the other down, Welles was a tough out. Matt Drowne, a bigger teammate, remembered the drills vividly. “He was a genuinely tough kid,” Drowne said. “I think of him knocking the s— out of me.”