To get the low down on what’s happening on the Island, my advice is, take a walk with a fireman.  Actually I am beginning to think it might be hard to take a walk without a fireman since all the men seem to have signed up.  Anyway, after my walk I know about the controversy surrounding children of the feckless poor playing in the fire pond, and that the guy who called 911 (999) the other night is just fine, and the sad reason for the power outage on Sunday morning.

This is America where, it seems, walks start with drives, and on the drive to the walk we swung by the fire pond next to the low income housing to see if kids’ toys were still there. We parked in front of the sign that said, “Fire Lane: NO Parking”.

“So you are going to park here?” asked the firefighter’s wife. (Not the firefighter who got me into my locked house. Different firefighter, different wife.)

“We are the fire department,” said her husband, which wasn’t strictly true, but the spot was conveniently close – clearly we weren’t going to waste any walking on the driving part of this walk.

On the walking part of the walk he mentioned he’d driven the driving part of the walk the night before, responding to a call out.

If you dial 911 the firefighters will come right over.  In the old days they were called out by a siren from the fire station.  Nowadays they all have pagers, but the siren still blows, waking the whole island along with the firefighters.  The next day everyone goes around asking everyone else what happened until everyone knows. 

If you ask a firefighter he won’t tell you, on account of the Vow of Silence or something, but their wives are good sources of at least the outline details, like, “Oh somebody just took their medicine and then got worried when it worked.”

I used to think this was a remarkably accident prone island since the siren blows a lot, but it turns out it always blows on Thursday evenings to summon the firefighters to their regular meeting.  Or when they go out on manoeuvres, which they do pretty often, boys being boys.

The previous night’s emergency was a guy feeling dizzy, apparently.  The paramedics came, said he was okay and everyone went home.

The dizzy man was the fire department’s second call out in 24 hours and that’s when I learned that the reason we had no electricity was because an eagle brought down a power line on the shore road.  The poor bird lay – I guess this is the right moment, if ever, to say spread-eagled – dead on the ground, its wing span as long as a tall man.  The firefighters closed off the road and, as my firefighter friend put it, “secured the scene” until the power department came to fix the cable and the county took the eagle away.

Except for my next door neighbour, the Fire Chief, these guys are volunteers with other jobs  – or in the case of my walking companion, retired.  And judging by the way he huffed and puffed up the hill, I would say this really is a land of opportunity, where every little boy can grow up to be a fireman.