Personal Narrative: Firefighters

I can still remember every single time that my family would visit my dad when he was working at the fire station. Each station had the same layout; the matching couches and chairs that were placed around a television in the lounge rooms, the kitchens with an industrial sized oven, the sleeping quarters which included beds that more resembled cots, and the tall ceiling garages that housed the fire trucks and fire equipment. However, the thing that will be engrained in my mind forever will be the blaring sound of the alarm going off. For me, the louder and longer the alarm rang the more uncertainty I was as to whether this would be my dad’s last call. To the firefighters though, the alarm represented something completely different. Almost as

How fast should I go up the stairs in a burning building? How much heat can I take? Is this dangerous or am I scared? Is that floor burnt straight through? Is that smoke or steam? On any call, thousands of questions such as these must be asked and answered with such celerity that they exist in cognitive form only for a passing moment, if at all. Decisions of risk are made at the physical level and cannot be fully articulated into verbal accounts. The instinctual experience of risk-taking transcends linguistic expression: it is indefinable and temporary. Many sociologists, including social psychologists, claim that risk-takers decide to dive off a cliff only after carefully weighing the benefits of the rush against the possibility of the harm. Even Goffman, in his essay ‘Where the Action Is’ (1967: 238), limits risk to a cost–benefit calculation: “We can begin to see that action need not be perceived, in the first instance, as an expression of impulsiveness or irrationality, even where risk without apparent prize results. Loss, to be sure, is chanced through action; but a real gain of character can occur. It is in these terms that action can be seen as a calculated