“My crew is mostly UVA students; there are some townies, and people who are older, experienced, some who have graduated, some who are doing their master’s and their doctorate program, and we’re like a family,” he said. “We’re friends – we play games, we go to dinner, we train together.
“It is a fun place to be, but I didn’t realize truly the gravity of what we are doing until I ran some really bad calls. And that kind of kicked me into gear, and I see it happening with my new members. We go on a bad call and it’s like, ‘We actually do things here. We don’t just hang out and run minor calls. This is something actually serious that I am doing.’ I go deep. And I have no regrets. It is one of the best decisions I have made in my life.”
On a recent Friday night, Jordan Althoff, a fourth-year kinesiology student who has gone through the fire academy, came back from a shopping trip to restock the kitchen, telling a tale about a man she encountered at Kroger. The whole table started discussing strange encounters they had had in grocery stores.
Althoff was planning to cook salmon for the firefighters’ dinner, and she was halfway through a question about the food preparation when an alarm went off – a call to aid someone suffering from a seizure. Half the people in the room evaporated, and the meal was delayed for two hours.
Later, after a dinner of cheesesteak sandwiches, substituted for the salmon, several of the firefighters broke out laptops to complete reports, while others got engrossed in Perplexus Epic puzzles, in clear plastic globes, watching a silver-colored ball bearing roll around on tracks. After two minutes, Althoff groaned in disgust and put her puzzle back on the table. “I quit,” she said. Five minutes later, she was twisting it around again.
“She’s hooked,” Bozzone laughed. “Two o’clock in the morning and she’ll still be playing with that thing.”
“Each crew has its own culture,” said Nixon, who usually works Sundays and was filling in on a Friday night shift. “You build some closeness. Each one is different.”
Nixon is happy with his double life.
“I have a long way to go,” he said. “I have a lot to learn and I have learned a lot at this point in my life. I am doing what I want to be doing. I love it. Some nights I have something horrendous happen and I get back thinking, ‘I never want to do anything like that ever again. Why am I doing this?’ And then I go to bed and wake up the next morning and think, ‘OK, when can I go back and do it again?’”