I smell like a campfire. My wife is complaining and telling me to go take a shower. Such is the life of the volunteer firefighter. Ok, I am not technically a volunteer firefighter but I did voluntarily fight a fire today.
I was at Josh Callaway’s house for a birthday party. Josh and I worked together until just recently when he took a new job. I am so sad that I don’t get to work with him anymore that I have been finding little ways to keep working with him, like helping him put the pizza in the oven, or get candles for the cake, or brush his teeth…
Callaway and I were standing on his lawn talking when I heard a beeping noise and noticed smoke pouring out of the kitchen of the house across the street. I figured someone had just burned some brownies or something, but that sure was a lot of smoke. There were kids, a couple of teenagers and a preschooler, wandering around and walking in and out of the house and they didn’t look very upset about the smoke, so we weren’t too worried, but that sure was a lot of smoke.
Callaway and I decided to go over and check it out. The littlest kid mumbled something about a fire in the house and we didn’t see where the other kids had gone so we just went in to the house. The kitchen was full of smoke, but it wasn’t coming from the kitchen. We explored further and saw smoking pouring upstairs from the basement. We got about halfway down and started to rethink our plan because there sure was a LOT of smoke!
It was a walk-out basement and we could see the open back door so we figured we could get out if we started to choke to death. We fully expected to find a couch on fire or something, but it turned out to be a smoldering fire in a fireplace that must have had the damper shut. We ran into the other kids and explained what we were doing in their house and told them to stay outside.
We ran in and out several times making attempts to get the damper open. We wrapped our hands in a towel and reached up into the fireplace, but neither of us could find it and the smoke was choking us. By the way, that whole “stay low to the floor if your house is on fire” thing totally works. Though eventually there wasn’t much air down there either.
We didn’t want to just dump more water on what turned out to be a big pile of pine needles because there was already enough smoke, so we went to the neighbors’ homes and asked for fire extinguishers but there wasn’t a fire extinguisher on the whole block. We had looked for sand and couldn’t find any that wasn’t full of leaves and such, and then Micah fortuitously found a couple sandbags full of wet sand. We cut them open and I made a few more runs into the house tossing big scoops of sand on the fire. The smoke stopped almost immediately.
The girl that started the fire was pretty upset with the prospect of being grounded for a month, but there was nothing we could do about that.
I’m off to take a shower.