The Bay We Stopped Parking Anything In

The room nobody wanted

We consolidated in the spring of 2023. The borough shifted our second engine over to the station on the other side of the creek, which made sense on paper and still makes sense now, and it left us with a bay that had nothing in it but air. Sixty two feet long. Two overheads that we kept cycling once a month just so the chains would not seize up. A concrete floor with a trench drain running down the middle of it and forty years of oil laid into the slab in shapes you could almost read, like a map of somewhere.

I am forty seven. I have been a fire captain at this station for eleven years and I worked out of this building for nine before that. I know the sound the compressor makes when it kicks on at two in the morning. I know that the diesel smell in a bay does not leave. You can pressure wash, you can degrease, you can put down two coats of epoxy, and on a humid August afternoon the bay will still smell like an engine idling in 1994. That smell is in my coats. My wife says it is in my hair. I have stopped noticing it except when I come back from vacation, and then for about ten minutes it is the strongest thing in the world.

For a year and a half that bay held a broken folding table, a stack of pallets, and three cases of expired flares.

Rick

Rick Duarte was fifty one. We came up together, more or less. He was a year and change ahead of me and he never let me forget it, which is a thing you do at a firehouse instead of saying you are glad someone is there.

In November he had a cardiac event on a call. Not a fire. A lift assist, a woman down in a bathroom on a second floor with a stair turn you could not get a stretcher around, and we did what we always do, which is carry. He said he felt off in the truck on the way back. He said it exactly like that. Off. He drove himself, which I still think about, though the ER was four minutes away and arguing with Rick was never a productive use of a shift.

He did not die. I want to say that plainly because I have noticed people brace when I start this. He is alive. He is at home. He did not come back to duty and he is not coming back to duty, and there is a version of that sentence that sounds fine and a version that is the whole thing.

What I did instead of talking

The shift got very quiet. Not sad exactly. Quiet in a way that made everyone efficient. The apparatus floor got mopped more than it needed. Somebody reorganized the SCBA bottles by fill date, which nobody asked for. We ate dinner and watched whatever was on and went to bed.

I did not know how to say anything. I still do not, particularly. Twenty years of knowing a man and the best I could produce in the hospital hallway was a hand on his shoulder and the word buddy, which is not a word I use.

So about three weeks after, I stood in the empty bay with a coffee and thought, we could put a rack in here.

That was the whole thought. It arrived like a work order.

The part with the paperwork

You do not just put a rack in a municipal building. I filed a request with the chief, who was supportive and immediately told me it would need to go past the borough. Insurance had opinions about occupancy classification. Somebody wanted to know whether this constituted a change of use. I sat through two council meetings in a folding chair in the back of a room with bad acoustics, waiting for an agenda item that was listed as Station 2 Facility Modification Request, sandwiched between a stormwater discussion and a complaint about a neighbor's fence.

When they called me up I had one page. I said the crew is required to be physically capable, we have no fitness facility, we have an empty bay, and I am not asking for money for equipment, only permission and a look at the electrical. A councilwoman asked why now. I said the space became available. That was true and it was also a lie by omission and I think she knew it, because she looked at me a second longer than the answer needed. They approved it seven to zero.

Nobody said Rick's name in that room. I did not say it either.

Buying dented steel

We had about four thousand dollars, most of it from the relief association and a chunk from a pancake breakfast. New commercial equipment was never on the table. A single new selectorized machine would have eaten the whole thing and left us with a leg press and a room full of nothing.

So I spent maybe six weeks of evenings looking at used gym equipment, which is a world I did not know existed and which turns out to be enormous. Closed hotel gyms. Corporate fitness centers that folded when everyone stayed home. College weight rooms cycling stock. Estate liquidations, which are their own kind of sad. I got good at reading a listing photo. If the shot is only from one angle, there is a reason it is only from one angle.

I looked at a lot and drove to see four. What I learned inspecting used commercial gym equipment is that the upholstery lies to you and the cables do not. Vinyl looks terrible and is cosmetic. Split seams, sun bleaching, a bench pad going amber at the edges: none of that will hurt anyone, and reupholstery is cheap if you know a guy, and I know a guy who does boat seats. The cables are the whole inspection. You run your bare hand slowly down the length of the cable and if it bites you, there is a broken strand under the coating and that unit is a maybe at best. You look at the pulley grooves. You check whether the weight stack falls or whether it drops the last two inches like a dead thing, which means bushings. You look at the frame welds and at the feet, because a machine that sat in a damp basement will tell you at the feet first.

We got a half rack with a bent J cup, an old plate loaded row that weighed as much as a compressor, a pair of adjustable benches, three of them if you count one I would not let anyone sit on, dumbbells from ten to seventy with two gaps, and a rower that needed a chain and a new seat roller. The rack came from a place that was clearing an entire floor. A guy who had done nothing but move gear for fifteen years watched me press on a frame joint and said, that one is fine, worry about the other one, and he was right about both.

The ramp

Here is the part that took the grief out of me for a while.

The bay has an apron with a grade to it. The rack came off the truck at the bottom of that apron on a rainy Tuesday in March. Plate loaded equipment does not care about your feelings. We had straps, a pallet jack that fought us the whole time because the wheels wanted the smooth floor and the apron is broom finish, four guys, and a lot of stopping to reset.

Molina is twenty three. Probie. Molina has a specific kind of stubbornness that I have decided is an asset roughly sixty percent of the time. He would not let go of his corner. I told him twice to swap out and he said he had it, and he did have it, but his forearms were shaking and he had that flat look people get when they have decided something. On the third pass up the grade the rack slid maybe four inches back toward him and he set his feet and held it, and I heard myself yell at him in a voice I did not enjoy hearing.

We got it in. He sat on the drain grate for ten minutes afterward not saying anything. Then he asked me how much the whole thing weighed and I told him and he nodded like the number settled something for him.

The oil stains are still under the rubber. We put down horse stall mats, three quarter inch, because gym flooring is a racket and stall mats are the same thing with a different invoice. Under the mats the floor is exactly what it always was. When we cut the mats around the trench drain I stood there looking at that drain, which has swallowed forty years of hose water and melted snow and whatever came off the trucks, and I thought about how nothing about this building has ever been designed, it has only ever been added to.

His kitchen table

In April I went to Rick's house to bring him a form he could have received in the mail.

We sat at his kitchen table. Yellow oilcloth. He had a pill organizer, the big kind with the days on it, sitting out where you cannot not see it, and I watched myself decide not to look at it and then look at it anyway. He made coffee he is not supposed to drink. He asked about the crew. I told him about Molina and the rack and the ramp and he laughed at the right part, and then he asked what we ended up finding, so I told him about six weeks of scrolling through listings of used gym equipment for sale and about the guy with the cables and the bushings and the boat seat upholstery.

He said, so that is what you have been doing.

I said yeah.

He said, Danny.

And I said, I know.

That was it. That was the entire conversation. He looked at the table and I looked at the table and neither of us said the thing, and then he asked whether the borough gave me trouble and I said seven to zero and he said figures, and we talked about his daughter's car for twenty minutes.

Driving home I had to pull into the lot behind the Turkey Hill for a bit. Not for long. Then I went and got groceries.

What it is now

It is a fair room. It is not nice. The mats smell like rubber and diesel because everything here smells like diesel eventually. The rower is loud. The half rack has a J cup we straightened in a vise and it is fine and it is also crooked and it will be crooked forever now.

Guys use it. Not all of them, not every shift, and I have not made it a thing, because the fastest way to kill something at a firehouse is to make it mandatory. Molina is in there constantly and has developed opinions about programming that he shares whether or not you have asked.

I do not think a room fixes anything. Rick's heart did what it did and a rack of secondhand iron in a bay we do not park in would not have changed one minute of that November. I know that. I built it anyway, because it was the only thing I could pick up and carry, and carrying is the part of the job I actually know how to do.