Who gave HER the keys?
This is what I drove as a forest firefighter. Note the commercial-style truck front half. Note the Frankensteinish conglomeration of boxes, pumps, and a 600-gallon tank on the back half (trust me, it's under the parade banners). Imagine it in a bright, candy-apple red.
mmmm...BIG TRUCK! With a big horn! I was in Tonka-lover heaven.
I learned how to drive a stick shift using one of these, much to the future dispair of any other manual vehicle I would ever drive (in my mind, 4th gear is eternally way on the other side of the car. Not good when it is actually 2 inches away). The shift pattern filled a space that was about two feet high and three feet wide, and to shift into fourth gear I had to slide over in my seat (I was only an inch away from having to unbuckle). It also had a high/low button on the shift lever, which changed the 4-gear confusion into an 8-tiers-of-hell structure that almost guaranteed me being in the wrong gear at the wrong time. Once, when I tried taking the truck home by myself, I got stuck on the hill to my parent's house for a good ten minutes, frantically trying to get first gear (low) to kick in and almost breaking my arm on the emergency brake.
I rocked the logging roads in my big red engine. Though the steering wheel was a good 2.5 feet in diameter, I finessed around potholes like the Engine was a Ferrari and was constantly scaring my other crew members with the speed of my cornering. The one big problem I had was believing that the truck could somehow compress itself when faced with obstacles in the road. I had absolutely no sense of its size and relative fragility (it had a fiberglass shell, mostly. Found that out real quick) and was always scraping the roof on low-hanging branches. I ripped a bumper completely off on an innocent log once just driving through a campground we were monitoring. My vehicular infamy in the firefighting circles was just beginning, though.
The incident that brought about the greatest renown (and the greatest amount of lecturing afterwards) happened one day after a heavy rain, when we had a false alarm called into the dispatcher. It was supposed to be in a fairly remote section of the county, somewhere in the midst of a web of logging roads and very few houses (even fewer people, and none with all their teeth). Albert was driving the other engine making our fruitless quest, and both of us were getting frustrated at the lack of fire and twisting roads. Finally, after I'd lost sight of him for a while, he radioed that he'd found a clearing and that I should meet him there to eat lunch. I headed his direction and stopped at the edge of a swamp that had recently been a field, with Albert sitting on his truck on the other side. I was a little wary of the mud, but figured that if he could do it, I could too (ahh, pride).
I gunned the engine and took off roughly in the direction of the muddy road, and didn't see Albert frantically waving his arms above his head until my engine was past its hubcaps in mud, and sinking fast. Of course I had a full tank of water. Of course I'd gotten far enough into the swamp that the first two rescue attempts left one other engine with a torn-off bumper and a second engine stuck in there with me. The half-bumpered engine limped off to go find some more help, and we all sat on top of our engines laughing at the situation and trying to avoid the almost door-height mud. Well, I was laughing at the situation. They were mostly laughing at me, and my previous rationalization that somehow Albert had floated his engine over the swamp and, dammit, so could I. They finally found a farmer who happened to be working a few miles away, and he graciously agreed to drive his CAT tractor back and pull out both engines from the muck.
It was a long while before I lived that one down.
posted by LadyJay @ 2:37 PM
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