The Fire Dragon
What of this Dragon called Fire...
The Story
The Links
Intro
For me the fascination is linked to a long association which not too long ago was intensified by a pretty close encounter.
When I was a kid I read in National Geographic about smoke jumpers and of course as an avid reader of Ranger Rick magazine I took in the regular features on Smokey's message to the American Outdoorsman. I always wanted to be a smokejumper and I loved the stories of lone look-outs in their smoke towers.
I moved away from the US at age 10 so no smoke jumping for me. But the fascination lingered. Fire, the most inhospitable element. Capable of inspiring such intensities of feeling, fear and hatred, agonies of loss, and yet so ultimately needful for life. Fire, the comfort of the hearth, the inferno of the hot hell.
The Dragon's Kiss
So what is the love of this dragon? For me, I came to understand this in a most intimate manner when I was involved in an accident which left me with some tissue loss and a whole new view of fire.
I was in a confined room when a can of hairspray ruptured and sprayed onto the glowing heat element of an electric heater. There was a short time while the hairspray and butane propellent (Yes, butane since cfc's were banned...) gushed into the atmosphere. Then the gas hit the element and a spike of flame jetted from the can all over my hands and onto my legs. (I was sitting cross-legged and wearing cotton tights and cotton socks and so the flame only caught a band above my ankles...) As the flame played over my hands I experienced what I have heard call, "The Dragon's Kiss"... It was both cold and hot, and very very sharp and tight, I felt only my hands at this point...The touch was like nothing I had ever felt before.
Of course we all get little burns from radiant heat sources, the iron, an oven element, but pure naked flame in a directed jet was quite something else. The mere second it took for me to get out of the way, lasted a long, long time...I was enthralled, I have never experienced anything so pure, yes it sounds strange, but that was the way it was. It was so pointed and so sharp, so "bright". My adrenaline and endorphin levels soared. The most extreme hit of pure blue ice, pinpoint in its precision. Unendurable.
I managed to get out of my position and to the door somehow and got my fire extinguisher from the car and ran back in to put out the fire in the room. Then I kicked the still hissing and burning can outside. Eventually, I looked at my hands, realising at last that damage had been done.
The Searing
My left hand was worst, the skin was hanging off the first joint of my index and middle fingers, blown off by the blast of the flame, the nail varnish was evaporated away, the skin of all the fingers of the left hand was seriously damaged. The right hand was deeply reddened, some of the nail varnish had gone and all the hair on both hands and arms was gone, with long licking burns up each forearm. I walked from the room, where the blast had blown the window off its hinges, and sat down. I pulled the cotton tights up and saw the red of both my legs, but there was not much pain there...(later I learned that this was because the nerves had died...oh I had plenty of pain there later...plenty...)
Then I began a long night. There was no point in going to ER because I would just have to sit and wait for hours and the treatment was obvious. Immersion in cold water, for a long time... Entering my hands into the water was a new agony and I shivered with it, now reacting to the incident. I thought I would burst... The icy water antagonised the nerves that were already flayed raw and it was only that it was worse to take them out that kept my hands in there.
A strange thing happens when flesh burns. Even when the heat source is taken away, the cells start an odd exothermic reaction that actually keeps on doing heat damage...this is why sunburn radiates heat in the evening after you have gone in for the day. And so it was with me. During the next hours my hands warmed a dozen buckets of cold water to luke-warm and each time the water would have to be changed and my skin exposed to air, this was agonising, for air is an extreme antagonist to burned flesh, as I would later read as I researched the mechanisms of what had happened to me.
And so it continued. I could not leave the water long enough to even contemplate leaving for home. In the mean time I had also draped wet socks over my legs and here on each leg there grew a large single blister, dripping off the side of each leg like a sac. Again and again the water had to be changed as my flesh heated it to useless luke-warmth and so each time I set myself for the pain, breathing, trying to stretch around its sharp invasion. Then the water would come and I would plunge hands in once more, even worse for a moment with the new cold.
Eventually, 8 or 9 hours later I could comptemplate leaving. A girl took my car keys and we got me into the car with wet socks over my hands. That relief lasted all of 2 minutes and soon I was being stretched and swollen by the crescendo again...she suggested putting my hands out of the window to let the wind cool them. This was pure bliss and so we rode to my house, 20 minutes relief. Once home I could not hold a key so she opened and led me in. Then left. I lay in bed, hands on the pillow, every 10 minutes the pain would rise too much and I would be at the wash basin running the cold water over them until that pain was greater than the heat and then back to bed. Slightly longer each time.
Tending
After about 2 more hours I got up and began to have a look at bandaging these mangled digits. The left hand was by far the worst, so I got some spenco second skin and covered the index finger in this, wrapping around with white athletic tape. This eased me very much and I did all the fingers of the left hand and the index and middle fingers of the right. The legs I left alone as I still did not feel much pain there.
By dint of peculiar circumstance my Mother was coming over the next day and we went out to shop for melonin bandages for my legs which had begun to weep through the skin sacs. I also went to the doctor and told her what had happened and showed her my bandaging. She gave me some strong painkillers and sent me home, satisfied with my efforts.
The hands stayed under wraps for a week until they started to smell a little funny, as white tape does when you leave it on a long time. I gently cut off the tape and found a white soggy mess of dead and dying skin. Very far from ready for the open air, so I wrapped again in spenco, adding a liberal dose of concentrated vitamin E oil, puncturing a capsule of Vit E food supplement oil to get the sterile stuff onto my skin. Then the spenco and micropore tape over the top which would allow the whole to breath better. This was left on for another week. By this time I was able to drive again, if somewhat clumsily. When this came off the dead skin had sloughed off and it came away with a rather satisfying peel, which put any sunburn peel to shame. Bright and shiny new skin gleamed underneath and I fed this with Vit E every day for about a month.
The legs however, were a different matter. First the nerves grew back into the burned bits with horrible and painful effectiveness and they wept, and wept and wept. The skin that had formed the sac lay against the raw flesh and, being dead, turned grey and horridly slimy, causing me to have to wipe it away with the non-stick absorbant dressings, rather painfully agressing the raw bits and their new nerve endings.
Eventually after literally months of buying melonin in bulk and having the fluid soak through the dressings up to twice a day, the flesh finally granulated and very very gradually healed over. The new skin of course was rediculously fragile and the slightest touch would break it and cause it to come adrift and die, but after about 3 months the legs finally healed leaving two non-pigmented straps around my lower legs (total sunblock needed!) and a little tissue loss locally.
So What?
So why do I write all of this? Am I sad this happened, do I regret not being capable of a full body tan ever again?...No, in fact I view it as a unique opportunity to receive the "Dragon's Kiss" in a way that did not threaten my life and has left only cosmetic damage, the mark of its passage. My fascination with fire and my respect for it has only deepened. And I will never, ever forget. And sometimes when I meet another who has felt that fierce embrace, I smile and we know...
And so today I write this story in honour of those who do battle with the Dragon. Some of them will scorn my tale as insignificant and trivial, others who see the Dragon in the blazes they battle and go back for more, they will know that no such encounter is without impact. And it brings thoughts, self-immolation, purification by fire, hot-shots and smoke-jumpers...
We have no raging forest fires on a grand scale here in the UK but every summer, the heathlands and moors are closed due to the fires that sweep the hills, and again, volunteers like you and I go out and do our bit when and where we can...We are currently working to establish a call-out list for local volunteers in the most endangered areas...
Look around the links below and tell me that you don't feel a little flicker of fascination rising inside of you...
The Links...
One hot summer
Firefighters-bushfires
Hotshot Photo Journal - Ken Roberts
Ken Roberts Forest fire links
Alberta helitack program
Smokey Bear home pages
Canadian Wildfire Network
10 orders and 18 situations ACT Bushfire Fighter’s Newsletter
Smokey Bear Pages @ Geocities
Back to my main page
My Links Page...must see
© 1997 kayaksalmon@oocities.com
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