So, uhhhh…. “Road report.” You’re probably beginning to see a pattern here… nothin’ to see here, folks… move it right along. No hazards, no out- of- the- ordinaries, no slowyadowns. This reporter is at a loss for words, and the ones who know me well will say that only in a black hole of reportable info will I be short of words.
So, we’ll go with story-time today. The silver lining, to the lack of road hazards, right?!? Today’s topic will be fire… only because fire season is here (in Southern California, fire season begins on July 15, and ends on July 14, but remember that fire CAN still occur on the “off” season, too… ). We have already had a few conflagrations on the mountain, some even smoldering at this very moment. Saturday, we had one out at Lake Silverwood, which many of us were able to follow, live, as it happened, thanks to the great on- scene reporting and photography by Raymond Ray and Bryan Jeffrey. Fortunately, nobody was hurt in this fire (even if the guys tried real hard, by walking through smoking embers, and being assaulted with water drops and Phos- Chek (that’s the stuff that is the opposite of Napalm)), but it appears that many BBQ grills, tents, sleeping bags, and bicycles lost their lives. (Don’t get Huffy over lame jokes, now).
I’ve actually got a lot of “fire” stories under my hat… today I’ll share just one, just in the off- chance that we have OTHER days with no road conditions to report, necessitating more “story-time” days.
I was in the military, on a nighttime field training exercise somewhere in a deep forest in Germany. I was driving a HMMV (You civilians know this as a, “Humvee”), with SFC Johnson in the passenger seat. Ol’ SFC Johnson was among the last of the truly badass “John Wayne” types. He had seen combat in Vietnam, he was grizzled and scarred from bullets that had actually creased his face. He chomped on cigars, lit or not. When he talked, he wasn’t one of these guys who inserted a curse word every few “regular” words… instead, he inserted only a few “regular” words in between strings of curse words. The guy was tough… he made Chuck Norris look like a delicate millennial pansy (Chuck, I’m only kidding… you know I don’t mean that…) (Readers: I DO mean that… but I’m still a little scared of Chuck).
Well, it was around 0200 hours, and we were in a very spread- out convoy driving under “blackout” conditions. During night battle, vehicles don’t have headlights on, of course, so that’s how we trained, driving in convoys or even solo through very rough terrain… with no lights whatsoever. And, this night was REALLY dark. However, as we drove, suddenly, everything around us lit up… with bright, orange light. And, one second after the illumination began, I heard a “click,” followed by a “whoosh.”
I turned to SFC Johnson, to ask him what he thought of this unusual chain of events, even though we were only two seconds into it by then… only, SFC Johnson was not in the vehicle… there was only an empty seat, and a lonely door flapping in the breeze. Turns out, the “click” I’d heard from that grizzled ol’ piece of perpetually- cursing cigar- leather was the door handle, and the “whoosh” was him exiting the vehicle. He never said, “I’ll be stepping out now, would you mind slowing the vehicle?” or, “See ya later, BBQed ribs!” or even the more typical, “Mother $%&# *@)##, son of a @*&%, %***$% up your @%#$, &!@# FIRE!!!!*$%^^ in the $%^# @!**%!!!” Nope… instead, he simply exited the vehicle… no fanfare whatsoever. No goodbye.
This was because he figured out before I did that the illumination was coming from underneath our own HMMV, and he had no plans to stick around and discuss the matter with anybody. The parking brake, I would later learn, was in a state of permanent application. However, the diesel engine in the vehicle just torqued it right along as though there was nothing holding us back. Eventually, though, the heat from the friction of the applied brake caused ignition, with a big, bright fire engulfing the underside of our HMMV.
Fortunately, using the fire extinguisher on board, it was fairly easy to quash the flames before the entire rig was destroyed. And, after a couple of minutes, a dusty but uninjured (of course) SFC Johnson appeared from the road I had just traveled alone. He probably could have arrived sooner, but my guess is that he hid out for a while, waiting for his driver to extinguish the flames. Perhaps he wrestled some bears, or munched on shards of glass to pass the time.
In the end (and, here, 20+ years later), we had a good laugh about it. SFC Johnson’s biggest loss that night was his cigar being bent, but, obviously, he just taped it up and kept on chomping, cursing, and being tough as nails. Well, tough as those nails that suffer from pyrophobia, anyhow.
So, fire season may offer its concerns, worries, even heartaches. But, it’s here, we WILL deal with it, and we’ve got awesome leagues of firefighters out there to put the fires out. And, who knows… maybe entertaining events will transpire… the silver lining!