Here’s a little update before another edition of Hell Week kicks in
Certified to Be Certified & Spring Break
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| Rangers in the Wildland Fire course. (back) me, Forrest, Brad, EKV, Lauren K., Pat, Owen, Josh, Stan, Arkansas. (front) Lauren H., John, Turiya, Lauren C (LDC), Nick |
The last 2 days of Wildland Fire were looooong and boring. That’s bad news. The good news is our test was TAKE HOME!!! Good thing too because there’s no way any of us non experienced fire people would’ve passed it after just 4 days of learning the material. There was material on the test that we didn’t cover in class, that’s because we covered it AFTER the test. Yup, we handed in our “final” and still had 3 more hours of classroom lecture to sit through. It was awful. It’s bad enough nobody was going to pay attention, considering our test was already in, but this was the most boring instructor yet!
We went through different stations in the afternoon; moderately cool. I loved seeing my class mate, Nick Money, in his element as an instructor; he’s a completely different person. He’s so passionate about it, like me talking about Indy or fantasy football. Yes, his last name is really money. The instructors were impressed enough to offer him a mess load of fire jobs…he’s holding out to see if any of these ranger jobs pan out.
The 4 stations were fire prevention (which didn’t actually cover prevention, just some lady talking to us for 45 minutes), checking out 3 different fire engines/vehicles, “digging line”, and maps. The different engines were interesting…to climb around in. I felt like 2nd grader on a class trip to a local firehouse. My group climbed all over the bigger engine, Type 6 or Type 3 I forget. The back seat had so much room for activities, the driver’s seat was massive, and they left the keys in inside! LoL. The maps station was very detailed. All I can say about it is thank goodness I had a geography major as my partner.
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| Back of a fire engine |
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| EKV loving all the room in back of this bad boy |
At the digging line station, Instructor Money covered 3 things that I had no idea why they were important while learning about them in class until we actually got some hands on time with them. Fusees & drip torches are 2 different types of firing devices. Fusees are basically road flares and a drip torch is just weird. We saw how to use them but I’m still not sure why wildland firefighters would use them. I asked Nick why and he said for “burnout operations”. Uh, what? All throughout the program we heard the phrase “digging line.” Nobody ever explained it, hence my last post talking about the fire jargon they constantly used which more than half the class wasn’t picking up on. Digging line is using hand tools to take away any fuel for a fire to spread…basically you’re digging a wall around a fire to contain it while the hose team tries to put the biznitch out. We walked through the woods like the 7 dwarves, calling out and questionable footing or changes in movements from the front of the line down to the back of the line, until Nick saw a downed tree and gave us a scenario then we started digging. I used a crow’s foot which is a scraping tool used to pull back chopped up turf that the grubbing (?) tools at the head of the line loosened up for us. We did a pretty good job, my group was Unstoppable even in the fire world. Notice I didn’t mention anything about fighting a fire…total bull crap.
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| Instructor Money & his drip torch |
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| 2 J~DuBs...in hard hats |
We got our certs, took a few pictures, and provided feedback both in written form in the classroom and as a group discussion. Brad’s feedback form was hysterical; it talked all about Nick Money who hardly said a word in class hahaha. We also found out the Kathy, the director of the ranger program would be leaving NAU after this semester. I believe the reason is because her husband got a promotion and more full time work at the park they both work at. We were happy to put this program behind us and finally start our Spring Break!
Immediately following the certificate ceremony, Nick, John, Pat, Brad, Josh, & I headed to Josh’s for brats & burgers then we spent the night downtown. I was content with hanging at Maloney’s, the bar I mentioned awhile back that I really liked. It turns out it’s only cool on the weekends. We walked right in; there was nobody there, quite possibly due to their silly drink prices when they don’t have any specials going on. I was very happy with the turnout. All of the rangers in the fire program, some rangers that weren’t in the fire program, and two guys that weren’t rangers but were in the program made it out. We took over a whole room in the bar basically…there was close to 30 or so of us including Jake’s girlfriend from home and her friend who drove 27 hours straight just to see him…awww.
My protective ranger mode kicked in at one point when this suspicious looking fellow made his way over toward our group and tried walking behind some of us which was weird because we were against the wall. He must’ve been a drunken fool looking for the exit because he turned around and walked away as I subtly pointed toward the door. When he left, one of my class mate’s girlfriend’s told me that he was blowing her kisses outside in the street and I jokingly chased him like I was going to beat him up.
Just across the street from Maloney’s is a small theater/ concert hall. There was a line around the block to get in when we drove by; it turned out that All That Remains was playing. We’ve worked them numerous times at various concert venues so I was pumped to see some sort of normalcy around town and I immediately texted my brother Brian. I read the rest of the marquee, haven’t heard of any of the other acts coming up…that joy was short lived. When everybody started grumbling about the drink prices and wanted to leave, I suggested we go to the concert and started moshing...the idea was denied haha. We ended up stopping by Flagstaff Brewing Company. If you like to drink I guess the place was okay, I don’t necessarily like to drink but I made the best of it. It was the first time I hung out with some of my other classmates outside of class and we had a blast, however, I think I ticked the bartender off. I guess as part of the bar’s flare they had a can of soup and a can of Spaghetti-Os stacked with all of the beer they sell behind the bar. When she made our way to Eric & I and asked what we wanted, I told her to get Eric a shot of Spaghetti-Os…she didn’t look very pleased and immediately left to help the group next to us hahahahaha.
I got to play the role of therapist for multiple classmates this evening, so many of us are really missing home but I think I got them to focus on what they needed to accomplish. Ranger Mode kicked in again when I looked outside and saw a dog tied up to some guy’s bike outside. His loser of an owner is inside boozing and the dog is lying with his chin on the pavement staring in the doorway. This type of neglect drives me absolutely bonkers! When I worked the parking lot at the Monmouth County Fair this past summer, one of the seasonals pointed out to me that a dog had been left in a van for a long. There wasn’t much I could do in my position, because the authority I had was almost comical, but when the guy came out to his car I had quite a few professionally used words for him that sent him into an uproar; yelling, cursing, pacing…and I owned him with my “verbal judo”…making him feel 2 feet tall. I didn’t get that involved in this case. I have no authority and a cop who was actually on foot patrol didn’t say anything. I guess I just don’t get how things work out here.
We left Flagstaff Brewing Company because some of my more rambunctious classmates wanted to track down and harass one of our program instructors. We didn’t find him, headed back to Maloney’s because the drink specials were supposed to kick in at 10 but that flopped so we all reunited back at Cues & Brews. I guess this the new place to be. I walked in and there was a group of us playing Apples to Apples I think. It’s a very popular board game but I’ve never played it. This place has a bunch of board games; it has a bunch of drink specials too. Before I knew it, some of my classmates were paying me back for all the hard work I put into getting them a copy of my review sheet answers for the test we have in a week. I appreciated the gesture considering I didn’t even get a thank you from about 90% of the class…last time I’m doing that.
The night went on, I actually drank a bit. The same girl who was having kisses blown at her in the street before Maloney’s came up to me and reported that some strange guy was standing outside the bathroom and was harassing her for her name. The 3rd time Ranger Mode kicked in tonight was the 1st time I acted on it. I walked toward the bathroom, not expecting to see the guy still standing there…he was. I had no plan of what to say to the guy but he started talking to me.
“This is the stalker line, Holmes.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the stalker line. These two beautiful girls just walked out an….”
“Yeah one of them was my friend.”
“What?”
“One of them was my friend.”
“Oh…..well what’s her name (nervous laugh)?”
“She tell you her name?”
“No”
“Well then I guess it’s none of your f_ck_ng business then now is it?”
I didn’t have much of a game plan going into that one but my approach worked (he appeared nervous and embarrassed, went in the bathroom, and we didn’t see him again) & I didn’t get shot so all is good.
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| Curtis Sandwich on Valwardinator bread |
It was a great night but I was super bummed the previous few days leading up to and throughout today. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t with Laura on her birthday. She was going to come out here for a few days for it but then I found out that I had to take the fire course and I knew that she wouldn’t get another chance to come out here. I was basically depressed all of Monday & Tuesday thinking about it so I needed to take my mind off of it and my new found family helped me do so. I’m so grateful for this crew out here but I can’t wait to get home to see my loved ones.
Spring Break
I remember when Nick first told me that we actually get a Spring Break. It seemed like it was forever away. There were so many things that I wanted to do. Now that it’s come & gone, I didn’t do any of them. Wednesday was uneventful. Nick was visiting friends in Phoenix for three days and Jane was gone for the day, I had the house all to myself. The only productive thing I did was make a list of questions to cover if and when I ever get this interview with Delaware Water Gap. The rest was spent watching movies, catching up on the trash on the Jersey Shore, and screwing around on the computer. I’ll put it out there; Buried is possibly the worst movie ever made…it’s definitely in the Top 5.
Thursday was a different story. Uniforms were dropped off at the cleaners and then I headed over to campus to practice running the PEB qualification course. First off, the course is much longer than 1.5 miles. I downloaded a running GPS app to measure it but the lack of Wi-Fi disabled the mapping & measuring ability. I found out on Friday that a ranger in the class before ours had the same idea and came up with 1.8 miles. It might not sound like a big difference but when we’re expected to run a mile and a half for time and this course essentially adds a quarter mile to that…that’s a problem. Regardless, I knocked a minute off my time from the last day in PT, despite having to walk and the wind whipping me around the road. From there I went to The Plex for an awesome chest workout. It was a good day for the bench; I’m only 10lbs or so from reaching my necessary PEB weight. It was the first time I asked a stranger to spot me too…weird hahaha. Got home, put together a protein packed dinner, finished the accident report that’s been hanging over my head all week, applied to a job with Immigration & Customs Enforcement, and then headed to Travis’ for a St. Patrick’s Day dinner.
Travis’ girlfriend was in town for the week from New York. She’s a culinary major at school so she cooked the entire dinner. I don’t remember ever eating corn beef and cabbage before but it was good. She also made these little muffin things called Yorkshires (?) which were basically butter and flour baked to golden goodness. These things were so buttery that you probably could’ve melted one on top of your movie theater popcorn and not run out of butter throughout the entire movie. Jake, his girlfriend +1, Pat & I each brought something and had a fun low key evening. Two of the Laurens from class, Carter & Kopplin, stopped by later in the evening. We sat around watching Cops & Man v. Wild and played different card games until about midnight. Friday was a mix of the past two days. I worked on my long background check form that’s due in class in a week, watched more movies, picked up the dry cleaning, hit the gym hard, grocery shopped, then got myself squared away to return to the range, and packed myself up for my first ever camping trip!
Home on the Range
Saturday was the least fun day at the range so far. It started off slow since Nick & I were late getting out the door and I had to get gas. We’ve been meeting at school and then parading down to the range. We were told we didn’t have to but for some reason I still headed that way. Cool thing about driving to the range today; my Matrix can add the Sedona Switchbacks to the marvels it has seen.
When I checked out the weather earlier in the week it looked like we’d have New Jersey beach weather down at the range, we ended having almost Day After Tomorrow weather instead. It was supposed to be sunny & almost 80 but we got dark, cloudy, intense winds, & some rain drops instead. The wind was so ferocious that it beat the crap out of our targets and target frames. No matter how many staples we used the little paper men were tearing in two and blowing away. We improvised and shot steel targets instead…from behind cover. This was a total mental messer upper. I’ve been shooting pretty well these past range days, but this exercise just crushed my confidence. We kneel behind a barrel, lean out around it and are supposed to shoot these 6 inch plates that fall backwards when you hit them…almost like a boardwalk game. I couldn’t hit these dinky little plates to save my life. I unloaded magazine after magazine just to hit one plate. The instructors tried coaching me but it wasn’t helping. “Line up all 3 sights in the center of the plate” they suggested. My sights were aligned perfectly but still no PING. At one point one of the instructors took my gun and tried shooting it, he missed almost as much as I did. The lead instructor thought it might’ve been the gun, since he had to fix the sights on another one already today, but then the other instructor that was running the exercise took it and “1 shot 1 killed” all 6 of the plates. That sucked.
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| Cover Shooting |
If we ended today on that exercise I would’ve been miserable the rest of the night. The groups (the class was split in half) switched and I headed to the shotgun range for some long-ish distance pistol shooting. We shot from our furthest distance yet over here and, after a slow start, I performed much better. My classmates couldn’t believe my turnaround. We played with some shotguns, cleaned up for the day and then it was time for some camping.
J~DuB Goes Camping
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| Great Group for my First Time Camping. (back) Forrest, Pat, Brad, Lauren H., Owen, Stan, Me. (front) Josh, EJP, Nick $, Alex, Lauren K. |
I was stoked to go camping for several reasons but one of the main ones was that I’d be hanging out with a group of my classmates (they call themselves “The Outcasts”) that I’ve never seen outside the classroom before….changing it up and acting a “uniter” (one who unites people) as Mama Jane likes to call me. The camping area was a wide open desert area that was part of the Coconino National Forest which was across the street and about 1 mile down the road from the range. I got 2 sleeping bags for Christmas and they’ve yet to have been broken out. Sleeping arrangements were getting pretty sketchy, I had no tent and it sounded like I’d be sleeping in my car, but one of the girls let me use her tent and sleeping pad so she could sleep in the back of her truck. Such chivalry. We setup camp, I had a few run-ins with a cactus, and then we headed into town for some food and some brews.
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| Brats & something else Josh was concocting. |
We stopped at the little diner/bar that Nick, Arkansas, & I stopped in at that day we went hiking in Sedona…ironically called Nick’s. I was starving, some people got appetizers, somebody else got some BBQ plate, and I got a club sandwich. Everybody had a beer, mine was of the root variety naturally. We hung out for a little bit, watched some of the NCAA Tournament, then headed to the grocery store to pick up some brats and other stuff to cook on their camp stoves, and then headed back to camp. Nick Money took some pictures; Stan found a saddle to climb to where we could see far off onto the highway, the town of Jerome, and even our shooting range. For most of the night we hung out around the fire…that was until the Bluegrass Dance Party broke out. It was pretty mindboggling that so many of them knew the words to these twangy bluegrass hillbilly sounding songs; but they were having a blast. The dancing looked like a mix of what I’ve seen at the country bar out here in Flagstaff and the moves I’ve seen hippies do when the their grooving to the music at the various hippie shows I’ve worked. Oh you know I jumped in the mix. Somewhere between 9 & 10 we hiked up to that saddle but this time it was dark.
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| Top of the saddle...the 1st time. |
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| Ring of Fire! |
The more experienced outdoorsmen didn’t want anybody using their headlamps & flashlights; instead they wanted us to adjust our eyes to the full moon light. The only thing was the moon was hiding behind clouds most of the night. We took a different route up the mountain, a much rockier & cactus infested route, so there was no way I was going up without my headlamp. I turned off my lamp when reached the top but had to turn it on again when I realized I had about a dozen cacti needles protruding through the side of my shoe. Took care of that and then Brad decided he wanted us to sing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song; oh we totally did it too…all 9 of us that took the hike. The two that stayed back at camp said they could hear us singing hahahaha. The journey back down the mountain was a rough one; loose rocks & cacti galore. At one point I had to jump over a tall cactus during a little slippage…I brought a lot of that cactus back to camp with me…in my leg. Those little suckers HURT and it was very hard to get most of them out of my leg. Just when I thought I had them all out, I found more elsewhere. Little pricks.
People started heading to bed around 1030, I hung out for about an hour longer with Josh and Stan. Some of these hardcore campers slept under the open sky, others in tents, and others in the back of their pickup trucks. I made my way into my tent, which I was just barely fit in long ways. The sleep pad saved my life and I was a bit claustrophobic but I survived. I listened to the wind blow for a little bit, set my alarm, and then threw on my iPod. Nature started calling a little bit after midnight so I had to exit my tent to answer. When I got out of my tent it looked like it was daytime outside. The moon stopped hiding behind the clouds. Somebody said today that the moon was the brightest it’s been in 20 years. It must’ve been, I thought I was late for the range! Sleeping was no problem after that. I would’ve liked to have slept longer than I did but everybody else was up and packing already, at 6:30 in the morning…that’s when I leave home to get out here. It’s a good thing I did get up then because it took awhile for me to pack everything up and by the time I was done it was time to go back to the range.
Range Day Again
I wasn’t looking forward to coming back to the range today but a very sweet text from Laura made the morning much more manageable. I was the first one at the range, that’s something new. We set up for the day and I partnered with Turiya. We did two dry runs of the “day qualification course” in which you shoot 30 rounds from different distances, stances, & grips and you need a 21 to pass. I shot a 23 & then a 25. The 25 totally made me forget about crappy yesterday was.
Now that we got a glimpse of the qualifying course we got to work on some tactics. The next exercise we did was so much fun yet I thought it was going to be the scariest thing in the world. We had to draw from our holsters and shoot right from our hips. I shot better this way than I ever did aiming and matching up the gun sights...of course we were very close to our targets. This practice was to simulate being in close contact with a violator then they suddenly draw a weapon on you and you have to react. We added to this shooting from the hip by shooting at the suspect AS we’re walking backwards. I felt so bad ass doing this and every single shot was dead center.
After lunch we shot on some steel again. On the shotgun range we shot our pistols from 25 yards out. We had to draw hit one target twice and then the target next to it twice. It took some getting used to but I was getting it done in 5 or 6 shots at some points. When we switched groups I was faced with my newest arch nemesis, these stupid little plate targets…all 6 of em. At first we went in pairs and had a race. We had to draw and be the first to shoot your side’s 3 plates. The trick, there were only 3 rounds in our magazines. Needless I say, I lost every time. I improved as time went on and then we went solo, shooting all 6 plates for time…this time with 6 rounds in our magazines. I started off struggling but when my instructor said “front sight on the plate” I hit the plate, when he didn’t...I didn’t. My sights seemed aligned the entire time but I think I was “bitch slapping the trigger” or flinching in anticipating the recoil. Whatever, it was better than yesterday.
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| Nick & I getting it on...the range |
I was pumped on the ride home because I saw TWO cars from New Jersey at different parts of the Switchbacks. I couldn’t wait to get home and shower…that was immediately followed by a nap. When I woke up John was here and he, Nick, & I just about finished our group Power Point presentation on Lake Mead….ah the beginning of yet another “Hell Week.”
Just about a month til I’m home…if I continue blogging there then I guess I’ll have to rename this to “Flagstaff to Freehold.”
Update you in a week or so.
Flagstaff Observation
Pop Goes the Weasel – I think I’m the only person in my class that calls soda “soda”, the rest of them call it pop. Strange thing, some of the other guys call beer pop too. I’m all about opening my mind and what not but every time I hear them say pop I feel like we should be in some sort of diner with a jukebox going, the girls wearing poodle skirts, and the guys should be dressed in leather jackets with high greased up hair.
Oh I love this experience.
MOUNT UP!!!
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