Processes

 

I hadn't been a fireman very long, maybe a couple of years. I had just got my Rescue qualification, and I'd been rostered to drive on a night shift with a Senior Firefighter who had been doing rescue so long I felt as if he didn't even need me along.

It was one of those funny things at the start. We had practiced and practiced so much, cut so many cars to tiny pieces that I knew I could do it. I wanted to do it for real though, just to make really sure. You wouldn't wish one of those wrecks on your worst enemies though, you sort of knew then, and would grow to really know.

Years later my mum would ring me sometimes and after some time ask how my work was going, how my shifts had been. Sometimes I got to say, 'we haven't been doing much at all'. And she would say 'well isn't that good for everyone', and I'd agree, and never feel bad, I wished I never had to do another one by then.

Part of knowing you could do the work was the repetition. I had set up the equipment so many times I knew distances and angles and where to stand, where not to.

Looking back now I can feel how much concentration that took, how my head would be full of all the things I needed to do next. Sometimes as the ambulance drove away other firemen would ask me about the people we had just released to the ambos and I wouldn't really have a clue, that's how feverish the effort was, for me. Just make sure you follow the sequence, keep going and get to the end.

That first night we had a job just like that. It was way up on the escarpment so our light truck got there fast, long before any of the lumbering pumps could catch us. 

The Senior went over to the car, and I began the process, started the generator, ran the lines, connected the tools, put the lights up, stabilised, on and on, ready and away we go. I made all the cuts just the way I should have. The ambos were right there in the car, with any number of lines into the woman driver and you could tell they were thinking, this is good, we'll be gone soon and she'll make it.

I made one more cut, and that was it, she died. There were so many ambos, and so many lines and machines. And in a moment she was gone, something to do with a terrible pressure injury. As we released the last part of twisted metal holding her down.

I couldn't remember anything about her, her hair colour, what she was wearing, nothing. That's how much of my thinking was taken up in the process of getting to that point. And it never bothered me that job.

Years later I did all those same things on automatic, so I could hear the things the ambos said, the cops, even people standing nearby straining for a view.

That's when everything started to bother me, I knew exactly what those people looked like, every time, I knew what sort of shoes they were wearing, recognised aftershaves and perfumes.

I couldn't fill my head up with details, so when the ambulance drove away I had known those people for twenty minutes, forty five, more. 

I couldn't help but know what was to come, what had come to an end.