fighting fire....with firefighters

Yesterday I had to work a few hours at the Pioneer Square Fire Festival, which is a big party for fire fighters. There were fire fighters as far as the eye can see. A lot of them were doing this thing called Firefighter Extreme Challenge (www.firefighterchallenge.com), which I hadn’t heard of, but supposedly it is very famous. It involves carrying things up a giant thing of stairs, pulling something up, then running down again, and getting the hose and putting out a fake fire, hammering stuff, then dragging someone to safety. The fire fighters who compete (in full outfits!) can usually do it in two minutes and it was pretty impressive. And scary, because once when I was watching a guy collapsed under the weight of the dummy victim he was dragging to safety. It made me think though that every profession should have its own extreme challenge (mine would involve speed typing, putting up canopy tents, and trying not to eat my lunch before noon).

Our booth was next to the Seattle Firefighters Pipe and Drums unit; they were all jovial fellows who wear kilts and play bagpipes and drums at all sorts of events such as weddings, funerals, and St. Patrick’s Day parties. They had these special flasks built into their kilts so I guess that explains the joviality. So I heard more bagpipes and drums in a few hours yesterday than I have probably previously heard in my life.

They also had fire fighters demonstrating how they tear a car apart with saws and the jaws of life to save people who are trapped inside cars after accidents. All I can say is that if you are trapped inside your car after an accident, you’d better hope that you are unconscious, so you can be spared the pain of watching fire fighters take off the top of your car.

There was a mascot challenge at the festival as well, which I didn’t see, but I saw the mascots walking around. Well, one of my biggest dislikes in the world is people dressed up in animal costumes. A little bit is okay here and there---like, I don’t mind if people wear rabbit ears at Halloween, and sometimes I have to restrain myself from buying rain slickers that look like frogs for my future children. But I do not like full-on costumes, so mascots are enemy #1. It probably started back in college, when I was having a very bad day, the kind of day where you question why you are at this school and what are you going to do with your life and etc etc etc. This bad day happened to take place on DUC Day, which was a party for the cafeteria basically. On the one hand, it was good because there was usually free cake, but on the other hand, it was bad because they had this giant duck walking around. And in the midst of this bad day, that fucking duck would not leave me alone, and it was just not helpful to my delicate mental state to have a duck constantly poking me.

I digress. The good part of the story was that yesterday I saw a mascot (poetically enough, the U of O duck) walk into a tree. Later I saw a guy throw up under the same tree.