'The Early Stages of a Bad Sunburn'

“Fire is savage, and so, even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our civilisation is but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old planetary flames. To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature. Nature is still ‘red in tooth and claw,’ though she has begun to make fine flourishes with tooth-brush and nail-scissors.”

The lead story on page one of the March 18, 1981 edition of The Bellevue Gazette is headlined in boldface “Inside an inferno,” with a pull-quote beneath it: “The sensation resembles the early stages of a bad sunburn.” The byline is mine and here is my lede: “Entering a house trailer on fire is like walking into a flaming Molotov cocktail.” No, it’s not. That’s a lousy metaphor and I was probably reaching after cheap drama. I was twenty-eight and had been working for two months as the city reporter for my first daily newspaper. Bellevue is in north central Ohio, about seventy miles west of Cleveland.

The Bellevue and Clyde firefighters had invited me to take part in a training exercise. In a field near Clyde (the boyhood home of Sherwood Anderson and the model for his Winesburg), they set fire to five abandoned house trailers and practiced firefighting techniques. I suited up and entered one of the burning trailers: “I donned fire gear: heavy jacket, gloves, mask, visored helmet and air tank. You feel like a beached scuba diver. The gear is outsized and bulky, and to compensate you develop a swaggering sort of Popeye walk.”

Like most children I had been a budding pyromaniac, burning model airplanes, yellow jackets’ hives and autumn leaves. Walking into a burning trailer was a boyhood dream come true: “There is no air. The atmosphere one is accustomed to breathing has been replaced with searing, pressurized smoke. To breathe without a mask is suicide. When ignited, the plastics which line our environment turned into volatile gas. In minutes, a home is turned into a gas chamber.”

I entered the trailer with a firefighter named Ken Rospert. At one point in the story, for no good reason I can think of, I switched from past tense to present: “Rospert set off a flare and tossed it on a mattress lying on the floor. Vision is already obscured with mask fog. The fire smolders and Rospert ignites another flare.” The feature story doesn’t much embarrass me except for that muddled inconsistency and the inaccurate lede. I remember being frightened for the first time at this point in the story:

“The heat grows in intensity. My ears tingle, even beneath the padded ear flaps in the helmet. The sensation resembles the early stages of a bad sunburn.”

I tasted smoke and started to gag. The mask wasn’t properly fitted to my face. My forehead felt as though it were burning, and a wave of flame rolled  along the ceiling. “The fire caught all at once, exploding like a liquid bomb. We both drop to the floor. [Again, note the arbitrary shifting of tense.]” I like this: “The only instinct is foreward [sic] motion – and deep, agitated breathing.” Another firefighter, a big guy I remember well, Denny Hay, pulled me out of the trailer. I was coughing and sputtering and when I turned around, I could see the trailer was, as they say, “fully engulfed.” That’s when three real firefighters entered the trailer, pulling a hose.

Then I went back to the office, wrote my story and processed the photos. The feature was published in the next day’s edition and won a prize in the UPI newspaper contest for Ohio.          

The quoted passage at the top is from one of my favorite Max Beerbohm essays, “The Fire” (Yet Again, 1909). At its best, Beerbohm’s prose is poetry without being falsely “poetic” – concise, nuanced, ironic, precise. Consider these lines from the second paragraph, in which Beerbohm wonders at how wonderous fire must have seemed when we first saw it as children:

 

“There are so many queer things in the world that we have no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less queer than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been dimmed. We are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a fleeting moment, this thing or that as we saw it when it first came within our ken. We are in the habit of saying that 'first impressions are best,' and that we must approach every question 'with an open mind'; but we shirk the logical conclusion that we were wiser in our infancy than we are now.”

Beerbohm was born on this date, Aug. 24, in 1872.