Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
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From Woody’s column archives, December of 2017, the sentiments ever as true now during the devastating wildfires in Southern California…
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When the Thomas Fire burned my father’s home down to the ground, my boyhood bedroom went up in flames.
Lost, among more valuable heirlooms, were posters of Jerry West and John Havlicek, Arthur Ashe and Bjorn Borg, Bart Starr and Leroy Kelly, and other heroes from my youth.
After the apocalyptic air cleared of smoke and ash, this clarity came: How misguided to consider someone a hero because he can hit a jump shot in the clutch, zip a backhand passing shot, throw a touchdown spiral.
Today, the poster I would want to hang up is an enlargement of a photograph I saw from the atrocious Thomas Fire. It is picture of a true hero. A firefighter.
Striding boldly through dense smoke filled with floating embers aglow, he is faceless behind a helmeted oxygen mask. His firesuit resembles an astronaut’s lunar spacesuit, except instead of pristine white it is soot-smudged tan with neon-green-and-silver reflective stripes.
The firefighter clutches a crowbar in one black-gloved fist, a red-bladed axe in the other. Deacon Jones, from another boyhood poster turned to charred dust, never looked more fearsome. The firefighter is ready for real battle, not the gridiron kind.
Hercules’ second labor was to defeat Hydra, a monster so devilish that every time the mythical Greek god chopped off one head, two would grow back. The Thomas Fire mercilessly seemed to multiply similarly.
Thousands of real-not-mythical heroes have been laboring to defeat this Pyra beast. Heroes from throughout California and also Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, and Washington.
Not only do firefighters, and other first responders, put their lives on the line – and frontline – helping others, but something that often goes underappreciated is they are thus absent from their own loved ones during times of calamity.
Another poster-worthy photograph taken during this Cal-amity features the black silhouette of a lone firefighter against an orange inferno backdrop, heading towards the flames because that is what these brave heroes do.
If the world were fair and just, firefighters – not superstar athletes – would be on bedroom posters and have multimillion-dollar salaries. Like pro athletes, firefighters too often wind up with prematurely broken bodies; often scarred lungs as well.
Firefighters should wear capes, like Superman or Batman, for they are real-life superheroes. I did not know it at the time, but I was boyhood friends with two such future superheroes and manhood friends with a third firefighter.
Thinking of Don and James and Hall, and their brave brethren, I am reminded of a parable about a man tossing starfish, one by one by one, back into the ocean after hundreds had been washed ashore by a fierce storm.
A second beachcomber walks up and says dismissively, “You’re wasting your time. There are too far many beached starfish for you to make a difference.”
Likewise, there have been far too many threatened homes and buildings for firefighters to possibly save them all, yet they battle on as indefatigably as the tide. If asked why, I imagine their answer would be the same that the first man on the beach gave while tossing a single starfish into the water: “I cannot save them all, but to this one I’m making a world of difference.”
One more photo: a small girl, wearing a disposable respiratory mask, stands in front of her family’s front door on which she has written, in neat block letters, in chalk of pink and orange and blue and yellow, with an added red heart: “Dear Firefighters, Thank You For Saving Our Home.”
I wish every fire station had a poster of it.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can