“Race car driver?”
“No,” his mother responded.
“Police officer!”
“No.”
“Pyrotechnic?”
“No!”
“How about firefighter?”
“That’s all right.”
So he went with firefighter. Oddly enough, being a firefighter
is a bit like being a race car driver, police officer, and pyrotechnic all
rolled in one. Byrd remembers his very first fire vividly. “It was two
days after I got certified to go into fires. It was a residence where no
one was home. It burned half of the residence down. Thankfully we
got there just in the nick of time. Their furniture, their clothing, and
all of the family pictures...we saved all of that,” he said proudly. “It’s
arush,”headded,“it’salmostsurreal,becauseit’slikeyou’rescared
because you know that this can go bad at any time. But you also know
that this is the job that you have to get done.”
It seems amazing to be able to rush into a chaotic situation
and know exactly what to do. Training helps, I’m sure, but
I wondered what stops him from freezing in those situations.
“When that bell rings and it’s time to go on a call, I’m not doing
this for me,” he explained. “Other people are depending on me. My
crew is depending on me. Families are depending on me to save
their life, homes, and their property. So I’m doing everything that
I possibly can in order to protect that. And I feel like when you
freeze, that’s more about yourself. Whatyouneed. If you focus on
a purpose greater than yourself, then you are able to move.” And
when you move you have to snap into action very quickly.
“It’s awesome. You go from 0 to 60 because you literally go
from being dead asleep to waking up and jump into these trucks
where we don’t know what we are going into. Sometimes you can
see a big puff of smoke from a distance and that gets you even more
excited because you don’t know what you are getting yourself into
but you know it is real. And you don’t stop until after the fire is out.”
Byrd scored 10 out of 10 on thrill- and adventure-seeking
and his hobbies reflect that. Hiking, rock climbing, and he dreams
of skydiving (not tandem because he wants to do it himself). On his
days off he enjoys first-person shooter video games likeCall of Duty
and other stimulating kinds of fun. “I guess you can say I have an
adventurous lifestyle.”120 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge