September, 21, 2019: The Annoying Volunteer Firemen of Delaware

We moved to Delaware in 1990 for Nancy’s job with a pharma joint venture between Merck and DuPont. I soon had a job with AIG. We bought a nice house right on the edge of a very middle class neighborhood north west of Wilmington, in a little development called Lindamere.

Down the street was a very nice park with ball parks, picnic tables, wide meadows, and a view of the Delaware River, which we could also see from a sunroom on the side of our house. It was quite pretty, especially in spring; unlike North Carolina, where we had been living, the spring blossoms lasted a month in the cooler air. One neighbor had a hillside of azaleas the colors of which were stunning.

There really was only one downside to the neighborhood. Not too far away was the volunteer fire station. At any time of the day or night, the fire whistle might go off. It was loud, unrelenting, a real siren. And it would blast away for a minute or so, until, at three in the morning, you were wide awake. In case you were able to drift off, it sometimes blew again.

The blare, which always surprised us, also annoyed our old English sheepdog/terrier mix, Miss Beatrice Marple, and she’d howl until it was done. And she had problems enough as it was.

I asked a neighbor about it; “Why? I’ve never lived in a place where a fire whistle went off all the time. Do they just have old equipment?”

The neighbor stared at me, expression blank. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never noticed.”

That was the end of that conversation. I have to admit that we lived there about nine years, and I never got used enough to it not to notice.

The phenomenon troubled me, and I didn’t understand it. Why rely on a fire whistle when volunteer fire departments can use pagers, radios, or, I suppose now, cell phones (this was in the 1990’s)?

Finally I called the fire department. “Why do you rely on this really loud siren when you could use pagers? It’s really annoying in the middle of the night.”

His answer was unintelligible. I am not being politically incorrect, because I was then and now incapable of determining what that accent was. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. I gave up, thanked him, and hang up, no further along in my quest for knowledge.

We had little experience of volunteer fire departments. I did a little Internet research and

found that Delaware and Pennsylvania have extremely high percentages of volunteer firefighters, much higher than North Carolina, where we’d lived before.

But why did that mean that they were suffered to blow their sirens and disturb anyone when, clearly, it wasn’t necessary? This was something I didn’t understand.

At AIG, I had to do some work with an insurance brokerage called Volunteer Fire Insurance Services, or VFIS. They were insurance brokers, which none of the lawyers in my department could be, because we’re not stupid, and we couldn’t play that much golf. They represented the fire departments in their purchase of insurance, and they had a lot of power: so much so that I had go drive to Pennsylvania one weekend and engage in foolish sports and drinking though also softball, but, even then, I pulled my hamstring. For those of you who think that rednecks exist only in the south, VFIS is Exhibit A to our essay explaining that just no. The conclusion is to think how many volunteer fire departments there must be in Pennsylvania for the brokers to live as high as they did.

Yet why the siren?

More facts: Delaware’s liquor laws back then were strange, though not as bad as Pennsylvania (and I should know. I should do a 50-state survey). You didn’t have to purchase your booze from a state store, but the privately-owned stores were the only places to buy alcohol, and they weren’t open on Sunday. Another fact: they were staffed by members of the fire department down the street. Obviously they had managed to get their buddies on the payroll. There should have been a stove in there on which they could have warmed their feet in the winter as they gossiped and bragged.

Another fact: Once we were driving up to the main road and slowed to a halt at the stop sign. The fire department was across the street. An old guy in a flannel shirt was standing out in the intersection. He raised his hand to stop us. What? Why?

Then I looked to my left, up the hill: a fire truck was approaching us, slowly, at least two football fields away. There was no danger in pulling into the intersection. Yet this old guy was holding us back with his hand. It was going to be at least a minute or two before the fire truck wobbled down to us. In my typical Jarecke blood-boiling way, angry already at the noise these people made, I yelled “You don’t have any authority!” at the guy, and drove past him, turning left, leaving him yelling and red-faced. We passed the fire truck without incident, a good solid block up the street.

It took me years of not getting it before I began to understand why these guys acted like this, and it all comes back, as most matters like this do, to Trump. It’s tribal. It’s a bunch of lower middle class guys who work in a liquor store trying to create some status for themselves: we’ll wake you up in the middle of the night, and send an old fart in a flannel shirt out into the intersection to hold you up beyond reason, because we’re volunteer firefighters, and that’s who we are. That’s about as much sense as it makes. Turn the screw a little farther, and maybe these guys are stalking down the street in Charlottesville with big guns. (What, I wanted to ask those neo-fascists, are you planning to do with those guns?)

I don’t know all of it, of course. Maybe they’re decent guys who wouldn’t vote for Trump. Delaware is a reliably blue state, and its politicians are pretty blue. Every blue state has its rednecks; leave Seattle in any direction and you’ll find them. But maybe these guys don’t fit into that pigeonhole? Not provincial, not sullenly resentful? So there’s still a mystery.

And I can still hear that siren, and I can hear Miss Marple howling, and I still wonder, why?

Miss Beatrice Marple