Into the Fire

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Life has taken many unexpected turns in the past few years and I now find myself in a new place, with a new life and the desire to write about what I've learned so that someone, even one person in this world, may benefit from my experience. I've heard it said that if you save the life of one person, you change the world. What does it mean to save a life?

A couple years before the tragic events of 9/11, I spent a couple weeks working as an additional costumer on the film "Frequency". In the film, James Caviezel plays the grown son of Dennis Quaid, a fireman who was tragically killed in a fire when his son was just a child. Suddenly, one night the grown son finds that he is able to communicate backward in time to his father, just days before the fire that killed him, using his father's old ham radio. You can predict where the plot of the film goes - the grown son saves his father's life by communicating to him the fatal mistake that he made in the fire, so the father survives the fire, and a young boy who grew up without a father is now a man who has grown up with a father, and his life is changed. That's Hollywood for you. In real life, ham radios don't allow us to communicate to people in our past, and we know that it's not possible to change events once they happen. But, I had an experience on the set of this film that echoes in my heart every year as we approach 9/11.

It was hot, unusually hot, those days in the summer of 1999 when we were shooting the climactic warehouse fire scene of the movie. Doing pyrotechnic stunts in 100 degree heat is never fun, yet there was something rather magical about those days. We had real New York City firemen working as background actors (aka, "extras") in the film, and the men of the FDNY are notoriously good looking - many of them are big flirts. Perhaps, under different circumstances, their behavior would have seemed inappropriate, but any man that can make me feel attractive when the sweat is rolling down my back at 6 a.m., as I hand out 1960's turnout gear from the back of a trailer parked in the lot of an abandoned warehouse in Red Hook, is okay in my book. Even in the heat of the day, there was little grumbling when my fellow costumers and I made the rounds on set, reminding the firefighters to put on their heavy coats and helmets before the cameras rolled. Over the many days and long hours of shooting we began to bond with these men whose lives and livelihood were so different from our own.

One afternoon, we were shooting a wide shot of the warehouse burning. It was all hands on deck - the director wanted every fire truck and firefighter in the shot. He wanted it to look like chaos, so the assistant directors started instructing the men to run around in every direction. As the director called "cut", one of our new firefighting buddies walked over to me and my coworkers saying, "Look at this idiot! He has us running away from the fire. We don't run away from it, we run toward it!" In that moment, I understood what made it possible for firefighters to do what they do - despite every human instinct, they run into the fire.

A couple years later, on a gloriously beautiful September day, over 300 members of the FDNY went into the the two burning towers of the World Trade Center to save the thousands of people trapped inside, and they were killed instantly when those towers collapsed. In the weeks and months that passed, as I paused in front of firehouses all around the City, reading the names and searching the photos of the firefighters who died on 9/11, I remembered those words - "We don't run away from it, we run toward it." I saw names and faces of men that I knew from that innocent summer, just two years before and, while I knew that they died doing what they do, my heart wept, and I continue to weep for their loss.

Many people died on 9/11, some running toward the fire, and some away from it. Many others have died in the years since, from diseases they contracted while trying to clear away the rubble and find bodies, or from wars that were declared in response to the events of that day. But one firefighter saved a life, my life, by giving me words to live by. While I hope I won't be running into any burning buildings, I often ponder what it would mean to live a life where being brave is something you do every day. If I can strive to live that kind of life, perhaps, one day, I'll save a life as well and, in doing so, change the world. If this means anything to you, take this and pass it on. Perhaps you'll save a life too.