Population 485 (23 page)

The most important information the dispatcher can convey, far more important than
what
, is
where
. Get us there. Get us there, and we can figure out what needs to be done. It is gut-wrenching to be lost when you know someone needs you. The new road numbering system has helped a lot—this is hard for me to admit, having written dyspeptic essays griping about Beaver Slide Lane becoming 270th Street, and the Dirt Road becoming 3 1/2 Avenue—but you still run into trouble with transposed numbers or missing signs or the mad twists up around all the lakes, where north/south reckoning goes right out the window. I still get lost now and then, but with each year, the map in my head gets larger and clearer. It’s a comfort to feel that, to feel the landmarks assembling in my brain, more and more available, more and more a part of me.

And then about the time you think you’ve got it pegged, you find yourself stumped at an intersection, lights blazing, siren wailing, the fleet rescue rig suddenly a very gaudy, public and
stationary
monument to your befuddlement. With capable pride I once led the troops to a barn fire out by the Dovre church—me out front in the rapid-attack truck, with a loyal parade of tankers bringing up the rear. I was on the radio, directing the stragglers, and the directions I gave them were spot on, which lent greater irony to my inexplicably exiting the main road a quarter-mile early. All the other rigs charged right in behind me, of course, and it was quite a sight, all of us executing frantic Y-turns there in the wide open. It’s like the Blue Angels—if the lead guy dives into the desert, everyone else follows.

Sometimes when you get close, you get help—people on porches, or out at the mailbox, or even out at the nearest intersection, crisscrossing their arms in the air, waving us in. We had a fire call last winter and there was some confusion about the address. We knew only that it was a chimney fire, and that an Amish family owned the house. I was out front with the pumper, and we knew we were getting close when the tanker driver behind me called on the radio. “Any idea which house?” And right then I saw all I needed to see. I got back on the radio. “Maybe the one with the Amish guy on the roof, waving?”

And then I kicked the radio over to the local government channel. “New Auburn Pumper One to dispatch, we are ten–twenty-three.” Ten–twenty-three is ten-code for “we’re there.” Now you have to fight your fire or do your CPR, but the tricky bit is over. You found the place. You are where you are supposed to be.

“Call,” we call it. You
take
call, you’re
on
call, you
have
a call. “Are you on call today?” people ask. In New Auburn, we are on call twenty-four hours a day. We are not scheduled, we are simply assumed to be available. We carry our pagers everywhere we go, we sleep with them beside the bed. You get so you jump at anything that beeps or jingles. I stayed with a friend over the holidays, and she had this Christmas clock with a little Dickens scene, and every hour on the hour, it played a wheezy electronic carol, the first note of which matched the tone of the fire page. Every hour on the hour, that clock would fire up, and I’d jerk as if I’d been goosed.

I was paged one hundred and six times last year. Fires, drunks, babies, grandmothers. Injured farmers, frightened salesmen, old fishermen. The pager is on my hip right now, even as I type. It will go off, perhaps in the next five minutes, perhaps next Tuesday when I am in the bathroom. My heart will jump. If I’m getting something from under the sink, I may crack my head on the grease trap. I’ll listen for the details, find out
where
, begin forming a half-baked picture in my head. I’ll run across the backyard, headed for the hall. Whoever’s out there needing help, they’re getting me, for better or worse. Me, and a handful of my neighbors. We’ll do what we can. There was this old man, we used to get called to his apartment almost on a weekly basis. He had a heartbeat like a broke-down roller coaster, and every once in a while he’d just check out, and his wife would dial 911. He was usually mildly dazed but smiling and conscious by the time we got there. We answered call after call until finally his old heart cashed in. But I remember walking in his bedroom at two
A.M
. toward the end there, and seeing this little man looking up at us with such trust, and I thought one day I will be the little old man on the bed. And I hope my neighbors come when I call.

When I take call for the Chetek service, things are a little more formal. The day is split into three standard eight-hour shifts, with two EMTs on duty around the clock. It’s still a volunteer service, and you are free to go about your day, but you have to wear your uniform, and you have to be able to make it to the ambulance within five minutes of being paged. That means I have to drive up there for the duration of my shift. I take some writing and stay with friends. It’s a lake community, and in the summer, I’ll sneak out with my fishing pole. Sit under the long bridge and try to fill a pail with bluegills. Simple bobber fishing, a worm on a hook. Watch the fluorescent orange bobber ride the wavelets, wait for the
bump-bump
of the nibble, and then the
shloop!
when the fish gets serious and lugs the bobber under. The thing about bobber fishing is it’s always charged with potential. No matter how bad or good the fishing has been, the idea that at any given moment the bobber will go
bump-bump, shloop!
keeps you focused as a dog eyeballing a biscuit. On a good day, I catch supper. If I catch only one or two, I clean them and take them to my grandmother.

It’s peaceful under the bridge. Traffic is light, just an off-and-on thump and rumble through the concrete overhead. The girders are studded with swallow nests. The adults swoop in and out, fluttering to the lip of the nest mouth, where the young ones lean greedily, their sharp, flat beaks open wide, their
griiitch-griiitch
calls echoing amongst the pilings. Emerging from a relationship that ended in a way that simply brings to mind the word
abattoir
, I once spent a day on call under the bridge, fishing and willing the waves to wash up something I could use. Late in the day, a speedboat carved a wide arc far across the water. A young boy leaned over the prow, cambered against the wind, chinning the spray like a spaniel. I tracked the boat, straining to hear the engine, thought of the way we strain at love when we sense it fading. When I did isolate the sound, it was keening and hollow and lagging well behind, never catching the craft. Somehow this reinforced my belief that the important lessons we learn one remove too late.

There are times, when the black dog has me backed deep in the cave, that I hope—this is ignoble—the pager will go off. Like the bobber on the water, the call gives you something to focus on. It is a mind-altering excuse to dismiss everything but the emergency at hand. Vindictive or weepy lovers, divorce lawyers, credit card balances, the ghosts slow-dancing with the skeletons in your closet, they all disappear at the sound of the tones. I have driven to fires with guys whose wives are leaving them, wives whose husbands are leaving them, guys who are facing liver surgery, guys who are facing bankruptcy, and the fire sets it all aside. A man is trapped in his car after a head-on with a semi, and when I run toward the vehicle, the halogen scene lights have created a magical tunnel in the falling snow. I run down the tunnel and am surprised how peaceful it feels in that car. I spent the week caught in the crossfire of a friend’s child-custody case, for which I am a witness. My guts are tattered. It is searingly cold, and we have to slide the man out over the waist-deep snow on an inflatable sled. We are struggling with straps and cutting tools and keeping track of the man’s vital signs, and I find myself perversely grateful to him, because he has given my sour guts a reprieve.

My brother John is a bearded, backwoods-looking fellow. Lives in a log cabin, owns his own dump truck. He was on call up in Chetek last summer when he got paged out on a LifeLine call. The LifeLine is a big button attached to a bracelet or necklace and worn by elderly or infirm patients. In an emergency, they just punch the button, and their address pops up with an alarm at the dispatch center. Then we get paged out. Even more than your average call, you don’t know what you’re getting into with LifeLine pages—all you know is someone has pressed the alarm. The call was out in the country, and John and his partner, Sharon, made good time, lights and sirens all the way. It was a hot day. When they arrived at the address, a lady was sitting in the yard on an electric scooter. Beside her was a prostrate goose, covered with Frisbees. It seems the goose had passed out in the heat. The frisbees were for shade. “I can’t pick him up,” said the lady. “And I need to get him in the shed, where it’s cool.” Moving carefully, my brother picked up the goose and placed it in the shed. He says it didn’t look good for the goose. In the meantime, the deputy sheriff who had responded tried as gently as he could to explain to the lady that this was not appropriate use of the LifeLine. John and Sharon drove back to the hall and entered the run in the logbook. Under “Nature of Call” John wrote “goose weakness.”

Over the years, your calls tend to conflate. Time presses singular events into the thin strata of history. We accumulate a body of calls like an artist accumulates a body of work. It becomes difficult to recall specific works. Some, like the goose weakness, stand out; most recede to latent memory. You have to remind yourself sometimes, then, that with the exception of a few frequent flyers, your arrival at the end of the driveway is a significant event in the lives of those who call for help. It is not just another call. It is a moment likely to be incorporated into family lore as “the day the ambulance came.”

You try to act accordingly. To meet the expectations. To—simply—
help
. You won’t always live up to the hype. “What we’re going to do…,” I was saying, when the woman on the couch interrupted me. “Oh, I know,” she said, “I’ve seen
Paramedics
.” This is like telling your Little Leaguer you expect him to yank a Randy Johnson fastball over the left-field wall. We are basic-level emergency medical technicians. We have skills, but they are
basic
. We can’t always match what you see on TV. But people are generally kind. A week after John carried the goose to the shed, a painstakingly scribed note arrived in the mail:

Dear Abalane Driver with Beard

I am sorry I just wanted you to help my goose. Thank you for your help putting him barn She was in 30’s year’s. She died at 1 pm That day. On E.R. they fix animls. The policeman made me Feel Bad I will not wear LifeLine any more. I did not call Police Man.

Thank you For helping

Ramona

He died
with his wings out
He went
to heaven.

C
AT

E
ARLY LAST SPRING,
my neighbor called and asked if I had ever killed a cat.

I had not.

But I had heard stories, and was inclined to believe they took some killing.

Trygve Nelson owns a computer company. We have an arrangement, heavily weighted in my favor, in which he provides various services, including virtual handholding, hard-drive voodoo, digital exorcisms, and extended sessions of commiserative tut-tutting. I, in turn, proofread his business cards. To hear Trygve talk me through computer trouble is to hear an indulgent father reassuring his blubbering, dimwitted toddler that the ankle-biting monsters under the bed are gone bye-bye. I fear the effects our long-term relationship may have on his mental health. Every time I solicit his advice on a new program or piece of hardware, the poor man is forced to execute a reverse drop-shift to dumb-down gear so violent it smokes his intellectual clutch plates. Imagine Einstein forced to explain the theory of relativity to a classroom of second-graders using only a Ping-Pong ball, a spoonful of custard, and a bag of lint. Without Trygve, I would be scribing in the dirt with a stick. He is my technosavior.

But when it’s time to get fundamental, guess who he calls?

“This stray cat’s been hanging around, and it’s getting sicker. It’s coughing. Hacking up stuff. Sandy’s in her rescue mode, but this cat is miserable.”

Sandy is Mrs. Nelson. She spotted the cat moping in the hostas a day earlier, but today it had collapsed on the deck and was too weak to meow. Its eyes were crusted and pus oozed from each nostril. Its coat was matted and foul. She helped it lap at some water and called the vet. The vet was out, so she left a message and called the humane society. The woman there told her to call the local constable. She dialed the number and explained the situation to the man who answered. His reply was gruff.

“You got a gun?” The constable didn’t sound as if he intended to leave the recliner.

“Well…
yesss
…but is it legal to shoot something in your backyard when you live in town?”

The constable remained focused on the cat.

“It might,” he rasped, “have the rabies.” He pronounced it
rabbies
, as in
tabbies with rabbies
, that sinister, prefatory
the
insinuating certain ominous eventualities.