“I was a firefighter when I was 19 or 20. I was trying to get out of the draft and I thought of it as a good place to hide. I was working out of a fire station in a tiny town called Jacumba. There was an enormous amount of preparation and training that was like rehearsing a play … pretending to fight fires, learning how to dig a hole if you are cornered by a fire. … One night at maybe 3 a.m. the bell sounded. This was the real thing. I slept in my clothes and only had to put on my boots, and down the pole onto the truck and the siren was blasting and I am hanging onto the ladder and my heart is going like a drum and I am panting hard. It was late and all of a sudden the aroma of fried chicken envelops our truck and we begin to slow and there it is, roaring and crackling: a chicken ranch on fire. The old farmer couple, Mom and Pop, are holding each other in silhouette as their world burns. … The captain says: ‘WAITS!!! Take that hose and start putting out some of these chickens.’ So there I am aiming at these flying, screaming, burning chickens, and I had never seen a chicken fly before, but boy can they fly. … There had to be a hundred or so of them and the blast of water would douse the fire and they would come crashing to the ground — and then another and another. There was no time to think or prepare.”
2087
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