My life isn't always about farming, a glance at my gallery will tell you that. For about 16 years I have been an active member of what you would call the fire brigade. Aside from fires we work a wreck every once in a while, storm spot, and even once searched for a missing child. The latest addition to our equipment is a defib unit(can't spell the entire thing) to restart hearts. Since our ambulance is also volunteer, at times they cannot raise a crew, so the fire service is paged out to heart attack victims.
We can go for weeks without a call, today at about 5pm I went to a housefire, then as I watched the end of our 10:30 news tonight the page went out for a heart attack call. In small towns like ours you know nearly everyone, just some better than others, and this person I knew well, rather I knew his wife very well as she had been head cook at school both when I was in school, and on the school board, and had always been very kind to me. I raced down the gravel road to the blacktop fearing the worst. When I drove my pickup onto the green grass of their yard and saw our crew standing next to the porch, I knew one of two things had happened, either we were too late, or all was fine. My query of "how'd we do??" was met by a very subdued "we were too late". The 82 year old gentleman sat in a chair on his front porch, he did this each evening and watched the sun go down. His grief stricken wife next to him.
America gets a bad rap in the world, that we are greedy, self indulgent, uncaring. That is so far from the reality I grew up in and live now. Our small town is not perfect, but like the thousands of small towns across America, we pull together. Several folks from across the road had come running when they heard the wifes cries for help, and one of the men stood on the porch with his arms around her. The firemen assembled there had all gone to school when the wife had been a cook, and all of us thought the world of her. One by one we trudged up the steps and gave her a big hug and expressed our condolences. Knowing from firsthand experience how thankful you are at a time like this for support, I was still unsure of what to say, my first thought popped out.."I know it is a shock, but you have to admit, this is a fine way to go". His wife agreed, and through her tears smiled and said, "this is just the way he wanted it to be".
We stayed on this cool summer night until the mortician came. Carefully we helped remove him, then stayed for a while offering any help we could, until some family arrived. Whether or not this is appropriate to blog about I do not know, but it is on my mind right now as I have just arrived home, and I thought it worth sharing. When you think about America, perhaps after seeing something on the BBC about the excesses over here, pause and try to visualize a moonlit night in a rural Kansas town, with an elderly man on his front porch having left on his final journey, and a dozen townspeople comforting his shocked wife. That is the America so many of us live in.