The One with the Fire Station

It's 7.15pm and pouring down with rain. I'm standing in the middle of King Street outside Boone Fire House. Why? Only one explanation - Larry.

I had to blog about my Pop Culture class today because I was yet again truly in awe of Larry and the things he tells us and the places he takes us to and the people he knows. We get to the usual classroom, and we take attendance. Then Larry talks for about five minutes about 9/11. He used to take students to NY city on trips and they had a loft a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center, which they sold in 1998. He lived there from 1972 to 1996 as well so he is pretty attached to it. He joked that he wanted some of his ashes in Boone, some in his hometown, some in New York City, and some in Graceland. He's got so much character about him.

Then Larry says that every year around the anniversary he shows students a documentary called 9/11, narrated by Robert De Niro and it won the prize for the best 9/11 documentary. It was made by two brothers from France called the Naudets. They were originally filming a documentary about a rookie NY fireman, but it turned into a documentary about the firefighters of 9/11 when they were caught in the middle of it. Their footage was the only footage from inside tower 1. Larry said that we were going to watch it in the Boone Fire House on King Street. We walked up there and were greeted by fire chief Reginald Hassler and fire marshall Ronnie Marsh. We were taken to their briefing room where they talked about what they do in Boone.

It was amazing because they had so many connections to the town. Larry my professor used to be Mayor of Boone at one time, and the fire chief's son actually helped out with his election campaign. The fire chief's whole family (brother, wife, two children and himself) were Appalachian State graduates, and one of the other firemen we were introduced to, Kent Brown, had a grandfather who was also Mayor of Boone in the 1960s, and when he died at the age of 101 last year, Larry actually spoke at his funeral. It was weird that they all had so many connections to the area, and it was obvious that they loved their job, seeing as most of the men who work there are volunteers. Reginald Hassler was actually the first paid fireman in Boone, 17 years ago. It was really good to meet them, they obviously care a lot about the students and the town, and would do anything to help us out. It was also nice to see the shiny fire engines :)

We watched the documentary, which was quite upsetting and sombreing, and I think that no matter how many 9/11 documentaries you see, they never get less upsetting to watch. It was interesting to see a documentary from the perspective of a filmmaker caught up in the middle of a nightmare. He focused on the firefighters of Ladder 1, and to see them in action as they tried to make sense of what was happening was scary but inspiring to watch, because the comeradery and team spirit of all the firefghters was immense.

The scene that sticks in my mind the most is when the firefighters get called out to a routine gas leak. They are standing over the manhole cover testing with an instrument for gas, and you can see that people on the street behind them all look up into the sky simultaneously, and then a ginormous roar is heard, which sounds like a plane but really close, and then the brother who was filming with a hand-held camera pans up to the first tower, and everything seems normal, then apparently out of nowhere comes a plane. It is surreal, and if it wasn't on a hand held camera you would have sworn it was fake. The way the situation went from a routine gas leak check to a complete nightmare was scary.

A scary fact from the film was that a fire fighter with about 60 pounds of gear takes one minute to climb a single flight of stairs in the World Trade Center. Those firemen had to climb 80 flights of stairs to get to the crash site. That's a long time. It was good to see it, because the theme of the class was about events that defined our generation. 9/11 was definitely the defining world event of my teens, and visiting New York made me think about it even more. The rest of the world can forget more easily, but the impact of 9/11 is still seen today throughout the whole of America, even here in North Carolina.