Saturday, April 9, 2011

And the Sirens Wail

There are a lot of things that separate small town and/or rural living from what others experience in larger towns and cities. As I've mentioned before, I live in a small hamlet with NO stoplights. Our sister city, Raymond, which is about 5 miles east, has 4 stoplights on the highway, but none anywhere else in town. In the south part of the county, Long Beach has 2 or 3. All told, in a county of 933 square miles, there are no more than 10 stoplights.

I was reminded of another major difference yesterday afternoon when the town siren began to wail. Every fire department in the county is of the volunteer variety. Because we have no staffed firehouses, each town and community has a siren that is used to announce that the volunteers are needed to go fight a fire somewhere.

It really takes one back a century or so when most fire departments were of this kind. At least our engines are no longer dependent on horses!

2 comments:

  1. I too grew up in a small town with a siren, something that escaped my memory over time.
    Not sure it still exists in my old hometown anymore.

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  2. At first this post seemed to be in a category with your occasional rainfall calcultions, but actually there is a great Taoist point made in it.

    I was recently at an event with our municipal fire chief, a high ranking, political position, which has less to do with actually fighting fires than administration of budgets and policies and personnel matters. (Though the Chief is a very cool guy, and firefighters on the whole seem to be more attractive specimens than the functionaries you find in the tax collector's office.)

    But my observation is that when society gets so big, out of touch with the (dare I say rural) Tao, it comes to depend on organized fire departments and traffic lights--law and politics, budgets and regulations. No more spontaneous bucket brigades and easy going natural traffic flow.

    Not clear that your point was intended, but there it is. Bravo!

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