Larry Brown’s book On Fire revolves around his seventeen years as a firefighter in Oxford, Mississippi. In the last week, wildfires in Brantley County, Georgia, burned almost twenty thousand acres and destroyed over one hundred homes. Seeing smoke lingering in the air from the still raging fires barely thirty miles away, your humble correspondent revisited Brown’s On Fire this morning.
Early in the book Brown wrote: “Fear. The fine line you walk where what you have to do drives you to do it up against what your better judgement tells you not to. A firefighter cannot be a coward.”
The Memphis musician Jim Dickinson told me in our 2008 interview (Insured Beyond the Grave) about Bob Dylan visiting Dickinson in Mississippi during 1999: “We talked about Larry Brown. Dylan said, ‘You know Larry Brown?’ I kind of made light of it, and I said ‘Yeah, he’s this drunk guy that hangs out at this bar where my kids play.’ And Dylan looked at me real sternly like I said the wrong thing, and he said, ‘I read every word he ever wrote.’
On page ninety-six Brown reveals: “They (firefighters) have to be ready as they can be, but sometimes they can’t be ready enough. Eventually they will run into something that no amount of training can prepare them for, because there are situations that are not covered in the books, things they cannot read about and learn how to handle, things that must be taken care of when they are encountered, in the dead of night, when most of the town lies sleeping, or at any hour, for that matter.”
We need rain in Georgia. Much respect to all the firefighters.
RELATED CONTENT