I Was Wrong.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that those words don’t often spring to my lips.  Borne out over a third of a century of career-required self assurance in the Fire Service,  my  fall back position is generally one of overwhelming self confidence. After all, the fire ground or the scene of a medical emergency are not places where one can afford to dither. You learn to bet on yourself, your knowledge and your experience.

But yesterday, a  group of firefighters from a small, resource poor, Guatemalan Fire Department made me eat my words.  With Salsa.

I recently published a picture on social media of an old fire engine under a tree (above) of which I was kind of proud. It was sitting in the yard of a village mechanic, dusty , partially disassembled, weeds growing between its tires.

The Ciudad Vieja Fire STATION. Yes, they live in this old bus. No, I don’t know why Santa’s sleigh is on top.

The firefighters of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala were touring me around their town and the surrounding villages and wanted to show me what had happened to their only fire engine.  They bemoaned the fact that there wasn’t enough money to repair it, even if they could get the parts, and no one had ever even tried to take one apart before, much less repair one.

An “Expert” Opinion

Let’s be clear. This is a mid 1960’s Fire Engine, built by Barton-American, a small company that went out of business in the early 1970’s. The pump on the vehicle (the heart of any fire engine) was built by American Fire Pump, another now-forgotten company whose demise was also 40 years ago.  That pump, now 50 years old, had failed catastrophically, been removed from the engine and  now lay, disassembled into its myriad components, in the yard. It had clearly been that way for some time.

I took a look at it, decided, in my presumably expert and professional opinion, that this engine was truly a lost cause. It would remain under that tree until its useful parts had all been salvaged and its body slowly rusted away. So I took a couple of pictures. One of those pictures I tried to turn into a small tribute to a formally noble used Fire Engine. Having protected people for a half century, first in an unknown department in the United States and then in Guatemala, it seemed now destined to be forgotten. It was kind of sad.

I titled the picture “Abandoned”.