Over at the fire department in Tasley, Jeff Beall had gone on the local broadcasts so many times it had become rote. He gave good quotes, and he had a frank, matter-of-fact speaking style that appealed to journalists. Shannon Bridges got used to turning on the morning news and seeing the recording of her work from the previous night, her sooty pink helmet, bobbing in the background of wherever was the latest burning.
For decades in this county, firehouses had been the center of social life. Fire stations held fall chili cook-offs, summer barbecues, year-round bingo tournaments. Every October, the Tasley station had taken a donated patch of woods and turned it into a haunted forest, with hay wagons full of passengers being slowly pulled past ghosts and zombies. It was the highlight of the Halloween season.
But that way of life had been hard to hold on to, not just in Accomack but all around the country. Enrollment in volunteer fire departments had declined nationwide with 11 percent fewer volunteers than in the 1980s. It was a money issue and a time issue: Volunteers who used to learn on the job alongside their fathers were now required to complete hundreds of hours of coursework before they could become certified, often at their own expense. As fire safety improved, the cost of equipment had ballooned (one self-contained breathing apparatus cost $5,000) and the time dedicated to fund-raising for that equipment had ballooned, too, with volunteer departments nationwide spending an estimated 60 percent of their time raising money. For all of the myriad reasons that young men and women set out to join fire departments—excitement, public service, community, a sense of duty—it was difficult to believe that any of them would have cited, as a primary reason, “bake sale.” One study by the U.S. Fire Administration, about retention rates among volunteer firefighters, found a few factors unique to rural places, one being the replacement of small Main Street businesses with larger department stores. It was easier to hang a “Be back soon—fire duty” sign on the front of an independent shop than it was to get spur-of-the-moment permission to leave a shift at, say, a Best Buy or Costco.
In Accomack, C. Ray Pruitt, the director of public safety, personally had several explanations for the decline of fire volunteers, all of which mirrored the national data on enrollment decline. Pruitt’s department was responsible for maintaining the volunteer firefighter rosters and organizing the annual training. He’d also been a firefighter himself, because his father was, and his grandfather was. He could remember when volunteers were so abundant that it wasn’t unusual to have twenty-five or thirty men respond to a single fire call. In his youth, people went to the firehouses the way they went to bars, as places to unwind, gossip, feel plugged into the community. The problem, as Pruitt saw it, was that people were now plugged into everything else: iPhones, iPads, Xboxes, Netflix. People got their community through Facebook and their jolts of adrenaline through World of WarCraft. They didn’t need to risk their lives, unpaid, with a fire department. And he saw people today taking on second or third jobs just to make ends meet. He saw them too busy to coach their children’s Little League games, and too busy to volunteer with the PTA, and if they were too busy for those things, they were too busy to volunteer to be roused from bed in the middle of the night to drive to the fire station. Instead of twenty-five men per company for a fire, Pruitt might see six or seven.
But now, here it was in 2012, and suddenly, firehouses were again at the center of Accomack County’s social life. Each night as the fires mounted, parades of thankful citizens stopped by with cases of Gatorade, packets of instant coffee and hot chocolate, endless boxes of Nature Valley granola bars, and, once they learned that firefighters used it to clean the hoses—endless bottles of Mr. Clean dish soap.
November had barely passed when the young men of the Tasley station decided that their regular way of doing things needed to be revisited. It didn’t make sense for them to all go to sleep in their own beds when they knew they would just be wakened by their pagers again a few hours later. There were fires almost every night. What would make more sense would be to just sleep at the firehouse.
There were several young men of Tasley: Bryan, who was George Applegate’s son and Charlie Smith’s half-brother, who repaired cars and coached a youth hockey league. Richie, the extra-large brother of Shannon, who hadn’t ever meant to become a firefighter. He’d only gone through the training to keep a friend company, but the friend lost interest and Richie, more and more, liked the idea of having something meaningful to do. A guy named Chris. A guy everyone called “Kitchens.”
Richie and Shannon were both born on the Eastern Shore. Their parents had been, too, but they’d moved to Massachusetts for a spell when Richie was in high school and when they moved back, it was right in the stage of life where everyone Richie had grown up with seemed to have either paired off already, or be interested primarily in going to bars to facilitate pairing off. Richie didn’t drink—he’d never been a fan of the way alcohol made him feel, and he was painfully shy around girls. He hated when people fought or didn’t get along, as they were prone to do at bars. The Tasley Fire Company seemed like a cure for all of this. Instant camaraderie, with people who wanted to volunteer to do good, and a place to go, and engines to fix, and equipment to maintain, and essentially a way of life, ready-made, that would happily suck up as much time as Richie was willing to put into it.
He lived in Onancock, about a five-minute drive away, but he volunteered with Tasley because he knew the people better. After a week of arsons, racing up Tasley Road in the middle of the night to drive the tankers and engines, Richie was the first to move in, with a laundry basket full of clothes. A few days later, Chris and Kitchens and a couple other guys started staying there, too, with their own laundry baskets.
Some of the firehouses had nice bunk rooms, with little nightstands next to twin beds with hospital corners. These were mostly the firehouses that also housed paid EMTs, with a guaranteed round-the-clock ambulance response. Tasley didn’t have EMTs, Tasley’s bunk room was a crawl space with four-foot-tall ceilings, which was mostly used for storage but into which somebody had, at one point, crammed a few camp beds in a hopeful attempt at accommodations.