Weird Is the Word For Things People Do When Flames Crackle
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I became a fire buff when I was a small boy.
With the dawning of my interest in fires came the realization that people do weird things when the flames start crackling.
I was still quite a young boy when our family moved next door to a fire station. I made every run, slipping out of school in the daytime, jumping out of bed at night and dashing to the fire station.
One cold, snowy midnight the alarm sounded and I barely made it in time to go racing away on the truck. As we pulled up before a big old house with flames shooting from the top, a middle-aged woman came screaming out the front door. Seeing her was a shock, for she didn’t have on a stitch of clothes.
The woman stopped sudden, terribly embarrassed, and began trying to cover all of herself at once with her hands. Then she turned and fled back into the burning house, ignoring the firemen’s frantic shouts to stop.
No clothes—no blush
They were getting ready to go in after her when she came running out again. This time she didn’t seem embarrassed, although she still had on absolutely no clothes. Clutched in each hand was a dental plate. She had gone all the way up the stairway of that burning building and into her bedroom to rescue her brand new false teeth.
Some years later I asked her about it. She said that when she rushed out and saw the firemen all that came into her mind was that she didn’t have her plates in. So she went back and got them.
There was a fair measure of logic in her actions, compared to those of a university professor I watched one night.
This professor’s house was an old county landmark. Inside, he had a priceless collection of Old Icelandic literature, thousands of other fine books, antiques and paintings.
The professor got word that his house was on fire and came on the run. Firemen tried to restrain him but he raced right past them into the burning house. Soon he came out—carrying a dimestore wastebasket as tenderly as though it were his most priceless possession.
Later I asked him what went on in his mind when he rescued it.
“I don’t know exactly why,” he said. “But I felt something like the drunk on a midnight binge who suddenly gets the idea that he ought to call the President of the United States and bawl him out. It just seemed like saving that wastebasket was the most important thing I would ever do.”
Not far from where I once lived, stood a nice ranch house. Quite a few years ago, a young bride and her husband moved into the house. For a wedding present, the bride’s parents had given the young couple one of those huge cast-iron wood-burning kitchen ranges.
One night when the husband was away, the young wife attended a party at the home of neighbors. Someone spotted fire coming from her house.
In spite of the protests of her friends, she dashed into the burning building. One of the men in the party—a big, strong fellow—went in after her.
Iron will
Soon they slowly emerged, carrying that mighty kitchen stove—the only object in the house that the fire could not damage—she one end, he the other.
Later, it took four men to move it. Out of curiosity the young woman, who weighed about a hundred pounds, tried to lift one end of the stove and couldn’t budge it. People seem to draw almost superhuman strength from some source when the flames roar, just as they apparently do in performing amazing feats while under hypnosis.
It is interesting to note, too, the manner in which that treasured gift is sometimes rescued. There was, for example, the young woman who ran up the stairs of a burning building, burst into her apartment, grabbed the clock her parents had given her as a wedding present—and flung it out the window onto the sidewalk, smashing it to pieces.
She had “rescued” it—the objective was achieved.
People who live alone almost invariably try to save anything living that has brightened their lonely existences. One night I watched firemen help an elderly woman out of her burning home. Though she seemed barely able to stand, suddenly she broke away from them and made her way back into the house. Soon she came out burdened down with a goldfish in a bowl, a canary in a bird cage and an ancient tomcat.
Mother knows best
Even stranger is the almost unbelievable indifference a human being will show toward what would reasonably be considered the most priceless possession of all—his own children.
In Chicago one night, I saw a woman rush out of her burning apartment cuddling a Pekingese dog in her arms as though it were her child. The amazing part was that she had left her own two children behind, trapped in their bedroom. Firemen quickly went in and rescued them.
Some of the physical feats performed by people during the hysteria that fire often causes simply cannot be explained. Several years ago I watched a fire in which three men were trapped in the basement of a department store. Two of them were big men. They burned to death. The third was a medium-sized fellow who escaped by crawling through a slot in the wall below the display window.
I examined that slot and concluded that it was impossible for a man to get through it. I couldn’t even get started. I had a couple of men try to push me through but they couldn’t. Yet the man was bigger than I.
I asked him how he got through that slot without even suffering scratches from its metal sides.
“It was as though something was pushing me,” he said, “some kind of noise. I heard that noise very clear. It wasn’t a voice. I’ve been trying to think what it might have been, that strange noise, and I’ve finally decided it was the rustling of an angel’s wings. Anyway, when I heard it, I just went through that hole slick as a cat.”
Every ladle bit helps
One Chicago fire station answered a call and found a combination shed and garage building on fire. It was a tall building, and it was isolated. Seated on top of it were two young men, around 19, ladling water from a washtub onto the burning roof.
The fire was put out and the young men taken off the roof with a ladder. Then it suddenly dawned on the firemen that there was no way for anybody to get up on that roof, other than flying. There was no ladder. There were no handholds, no drainpipes, nothing for anybody to hang onto in climbing. And it was tall.
Yet the two young men had not only climbed it but had also lugged a tub of water up onto the roof.
“How did you get up there?” a fireman asked them.
They looked at him, then they looked at each other. A puzzled look came over their faces. Finally one of them said, “How in the hell did we get up there?”
They never did figure it out.
Firemen are accustomed to dealing with nudity-at-fires situations. They even have a term for it, “unprotected exposure,” the same term they use for stores of fiammables that are not protected by sprinklers.
Even firemen have been known to get caught in that “unprotected exposure” situation. Several years ago, some of the undergraduates at a California college were allowed to sleep at the volunteer fire station in exchange for fighting fires.
When a night alarm sounded, one student bounced off his cot and slid into his hip boots. He made a run for the truck, caught it and away they went.
Three blocks down the street, with the truck going like mad, he discovered that he had on nothing but his boots. None of the other firemen had noticed his condition.
