One time when I was about 12 my friends and I found a smouldering fire in the little woods behind our town's fire station. The conflagration was bigger than a campfire, and seemed to be consuming rags and rubber and scraps of metal, as well as motley scraps of wood. It also seemed to be spreading.
So we pulled it apart, stomped it out, threw dirt over the embers, and cleared brush away from the site. Then, dusty and sooty and inordinately proud of ourselves, we trooped into the fire station to report our feat.
The fireman who met us listened carefully, and then he told us grimly that if ever we did such a thing again he would report us to the police.
You do not put out a large fire. You call the fire department. You come running and tell us about it and we will take care of it. That's what we are here for. You could have been badly hurt. You could have been killed. You could have made it much worse. Do not ever, under any circumstances, do that again, do you hear me? Am I making myself clear?
Yes, sir.
He was large and burly and moustachioed and very angry indeed, and while later I wondered if he was to some degree performing the role of furious firefighter, so as to imprint the lesson forcefully in our minds, I did not think then that he was performing.
I remember seeing the veins bulge in his neck and on his temples, something I had not seen before, being a rare and lucky boy who had not seen rage up close yet. I remember that he wore suspenders, and a firehouse shirt with the badge of the firehouse on it, and that his boots looked sturdy enough to withstand any cataclysm you could ever imagine.
We stood there sooty and disconsolate for a moment after he stomped off, and then my friends withdrew, deflated, and wandered home, detouring around the place where the fire had been, but I stayed in the shadows by the door for a moment, staring at the vaulting silent gleam of the firehouse.
"It's an ancient urge to kill a free fire. I think we are still scared of fires just as we were a million years ago. We are terrified of fires. We want to kill them when they break loose. We're fascinated and scared at the same time."
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