The firehouse is a fun place to be during the holidays. I worked Christmas Eve night tour into Christmas Day day tour and ate like a hog and lost a few games of Monopoly and did a lot of laughing in between runs.

A little before one a.m. on Christmas Eve (or Christmas morning) we got a call for smell of smoke right around the corner from the firehouse. Gay Street is one of those really old, curved New York streets, lined with 200 year old buildings. We knew as soon as we turned onto the block that we had a job, because the smell of a structural fire is unmistakeable. But it took some searching to figure out which building contained the fire.

The fire was in the basement, and we stretched the line to the door, charged the line, and made our push down a long, very narrow and very smokey hallway. Visibility was zero. We pushed to the end of the hallway, John on the nozzle, me backing him up on the line, and Justin behind me with Jim controlling the stretch (making sure we had the right amount of hose lengths, and that it was not tangling or kinking anywhere).

At the end of the hallway was a back bedroom, and as we came to it suddenly the grey vision of thick smoke changed to the fluid orange of rolling fire. “I’m opening up,” shouted John, and then the kick of the line belting out water, and everything darkened to thick smoke. We got down low and advanced the line into the room, moving blind, John, rotating the nozzle in clockwise circles and pouring water everywhere. We pushed deeper into the room, and our captain shouted for us to turn and get the fire to the left. There’s never an easy path, between tables and chairs and who knows what else, and as John made a sharp turn to reach where the captain was calling for water, he fell backward over something. He never lost the line, and I held it tight as well, and in a second he was back up on his knees. But now I couldn’t get behind him easily, so I was unable to back him up as well as I wanted. I let go the line with one hand and grabbed for whatever was in my way. I threw aside a small table, and then felt something big on the floor. Justin came up close behind me on the line, so I let go to move the big thing on the floor, and my hands found a head and I realized suddenly that this was a body. So I screamed “10-45! 10-45!” And I tried to get a good hold on the guy. The captain got there quick and found the legs, and a guy from 5 Truck came in and got the arms, and I grabbed around the middle of the guy, and for a second we were going in three different directions. What the captain and myself didn’t realize is that we were close to a back door, which is where the guy from 5 Truck had come in. So luckily we didn’t have to try to get out the way we came, down a fairly long and very tight hallway. When the smoke cleared and I realized we had carried the guy outside, we stopped, and I quickly took off my face mask. I had been sure that the body would be alive, just unconscious, but at first look I was pretty sure he was dead. The poor guy had on only shorts, and had layers of skin peeling off his body from head to foot. It sucks to pull a guy out, and then realize it was too late. We made a move to carry the guy further, and as we did, I slipped, and fell face first onto the man’s belly. Though I don’t think my mouth touched him, I spit as a natural reaction, and accidentally spit right in the guy’s face. I felt terrible, and apologized to a corpse as I wiped the spit from his face.

Anyway, the fire was exciting, but had a sad ending. Nonetheless, finding a 10-45 in a fire raises your standing a little bit in the firehouse. And the guys, of course, have been poking fun at me since I told them that I was a little freaked out about falling face first onto the guy. “Did you hear Nav got a grab?” “Yeah, I heard he found it with his face.” Stuff like that.