Cincuenta Mas Dias

Where does one begin? Today I put together a calendar of my final months working full-time in the Fire Service. That calendar shows that I have '50'/Cincuenta Days or Shifts remaining. Wow, how can it be? A career that began in 1977, with a school break of four years in the early 80's, will conclude next Spring with 32 years. So I began to think...what if I wrote something each shift regarding the previous 32 years? Let's see if it might happen.

Not my picture, but experienced this kind of fire a couple times in 77'

How did it begin? I had traveled after my first year in college at El Camino to Southern Oregon to work on the road engineering/survey crew. About three weeks into that summer a request was made for volunteers to raise their hands if they were interested in going to a week long of fire fighting training. The rest, as they say, is history. As a boy, like many boys, I had a dream to be a firefighter, but never really gave it much thought. Now...it was dropping in my lap.

 There are maybe three or four awesome stories from those days. The first I'll share today...SHIFT 50. I've added the songs from Boston 'More Than A Feeling' and Steve Miller Band's 'Fly Like An Eagle. They were the 'cassettes' that we were playing enroute to the scene.

So it's July 1977 (yeh I know you weren't born yet), myself and two other guys were called to go to a Lookout in the Fremont National Forest to retrieve the belongings of one of our lookouts who had lived there for over 20 years. The ride up the mountain to the lookout was filled with smoke and some small spot fires. We were 19 to maybe 23 years old, pumped with an amazing amount of adrenaline and just plain crazy. I don't recall how many trips we made up into this lookout, but by the time we were done we had our truck full, especially some personal items that he had requested. I wish that I had a picture of that day. The one in my head is a clear as if it happened yesterday. To say that I was hooked is a definite understatement.

See ya next shift.