Tales from the Station

Being in the fire department has some perks. We have the motto “If you call us, we will come”. We also have the motto “If you feed us, we will stay” As a volunteer outfit we don’t get paid which is sometimes a hard concept for people to grasp. Those who do grasp the concept know that they can help us out by feeding us. Especially at some of the long duration calls like searches and recoveries.

If you have ever been to one of our chicken barbeques, and most of you have, you will notice that we sell out rather quickly and there are still chickens cooking on the grill. This is our payment for working the barbeque. Each member helping gets rewarded in chicken. Even though at the end of these functions most of us don’t even want to look at chicken we still take it home. No amount of cajoling, bribing or begging will get us to surrender our hard earned chicken dinners. It always amazes me that people show up an hour late and demand to buy the chicken reserved for us. It makes me wonder if this happens to other groups selling barbeque chicken.

One day we attended a two car accident. One of the vehicles involved was a refrigerator truck full of frozen food. The truck was badly damaged and the driver stated that all the food was a loss because he couldn’t get another truck to pick up the food before it thawed out. For the benefit of everyone involved the fire department quickly offered to take the food, all 700 pounds of it, back to the station to avoid unnecessary waste. We even dedicated two units and manpower to transfer it all to our commercial freezers.

Every fire call for a month after that you would see the guys eating ice cream in the station afterwards. Included in this smorgasbord were boxes of steak and pizzas. We never ate so well. Our meals were usually determined by our budget, if we were doing good, we ate good. If we were hurting our meals got more basic. Even more basic than bologna which is really expensive when you’re feeding thirty people. So we’re talking hot dogs and soup. We have the luxury of having an ace cook in our station and we usually eat good no matter what. This guy is the scrounger most scroungers attempt to be.

One of the things he scrounged was frozen bread dough. He had a connection with food distribution and he got cases of frozen bread dough. We put it in three freezers we had in the ladder truck bay, even the freezers were scrounged. It was great, we were getting freshly baked bread every Monday night to go with our home cooked meals. What no one had counted on was the three freezers were on the same circuit and something had tripped the breaker. We didn’t have a call for a few days so we didn’t meet at the station until Monday night for our weekly radio check.

Whoever went out to the Ladder truck bay first came back and reported a mess. We went back there and saw the most unholy vision to cross our eyes. Each one of the freezers had a monster blob of leavened bread dough bursting forth. The doors were wide open and hundreds of pounds of bread dough escaped the icy confines of the freezers and were slowly making their way across the bay. It was such a mess that one of the freezers had to be scrapped.

On Halloween night we have a feast which sometimes we enjoy and other times we can only smell because we’re so busy chasing calls. The community as a whole comes together on that night to make sure the hooligans can’t get away with too much. They also know what we go through and donate food for that night.

One year someone shows up at the station a week before Halloween and offers a whole deer. The conversation went like this “Do you guys want some venison for Halloween?” I said “Sure”. He goes and gets a deer out of his truck and presents it to us. He said “I thought it was a buck but it turned out to be a doe. It was dark, you know.” He left while I was trying to comprehend the conversation. One of our members called a cutter and he got to work right away processing the deer. We had venison everything that Halloween night including stew, meatballs, barbeque and steaks.

Our coffee is quite another matter. Some of our members are sticklers and won’t drink anything but the best, specifically Timmy’s. Our scrounger friend had scored some army surplus coffee which came in fifty pound containers. Everyone knew this and most accepted it, after all at three o’clock in the morning you just want some coffee and damn the label. A couple of members still insisted on drinking nothing but Timmy’s coffee.

So we bought a can of Timmy’s. Every time these members came in the Timmy’s can came out and a special pot of coffee was brewed just for them. What they didn’t know is that for over a year every time that Timmy’s can ran out it was refilled with the surplus coffee from the fifty pound containers. They even complimented it and thanked us for going out of our way to get them Timmy’s. Both of those members retired since then and this is probably the first time they’re hearing about it. Hey, maybe Timmy’s was the army supplier, you never know.