1 The Horsepower I Drove In
She's a Ford F450 chassis with a Type F ambulance box on the back. Her clearance is nine feet, six inches with the air-ride set to cruise. I know because one evening, an hour before shift-change, I found myself on a ladder, measuring her. I call her Bertha, because she is the biggest beast in the fleet.
Bertha is the same truck body as 343, a Type 6 brush truck, a fire truck designed for fighting fire in fields and forests. 343 rolled off the assembly line in 2010, two years after I first certified in firefighting and emergency medicine. She still serves my old fire department with her counterpart, 305, an F550 which saw her first day of service around the time I graduated high school in the early 2000s and ditched my Midwest hometown to blaze my own trails out in Montana.
That was long before I fell in love with Fords.
Back then I drove a Celica, a little Toyota coupe that saw me through the first years of college and my first internship in California as a park ranger in the Mojave Desert. But it was the Jeep Grand Cherokee which saw me through eleven years bouncing coast to coast and border to border working seasonally as a ranger, firefighter and a dozen other jobs as I chased a career in outdoor recreation and resource protection.
Then one day the Jeep died. After a year, my dream careers and my life as a wanderer followed it into the ether of the past.
The grating whirr and throaty roar of a first generation SuperDuty Ford still heats my blood in a way that sirens no longer will. But when I slide up behind the wheel in Bertha, now and then I get that old rush that sharpens my senses and awakens all the reasons I still get up in the morning.
I no longer drive the fancy fire trucks, neither am I recognized as one of the people who saves lives. The medications I give most often are throttle and a safe ride, off-road, on-road, on clean pavement and clear weather the same as in blinding fog and blizzards. I'm rarely recognized, and that's fine. I'm not in it for the recognition. I'm here to make a difference and get the time to tell a few stories when I get the time.
