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| Les Pompiers arrivent! |
CRASH! Early Tuesday morning at 5 am, I vaulted out of bed at
the sound of a heavy UFO hitting the bedroom balcony as it hurtled past la porte-fenêtre. The smashing sounds in
the street below echoed with the thud of wood and the shattering of pottery. We’ve
become accustomed (well, not really) to the sounds of bottles breaking, loud laughing, and rowdy
drunks singing in the early hours of the morning. But this clatter was during
the usually quiet twinkling before the 5:30 am appearance of the garbage trucks
that noisily empty les poubelles several times a week.
When I looked below, I could make out chunks of broken clay and
pieces of rotted wood in the street, and the roof of a late-model parked car was
covered in debris. From above, I was imagining not only the fresh pockmarks that must
lay hidden under the rubble but also the ire of the owner who knew it would be time
for a new auto paint job. Then I noticed the same bits and pieces on the
balcony at my bare feet. I turned and leaned back on the railing and craned my
neck to see above. Overhead, I spied a 5-foot-wide section of missing fascia in
an area that now revealed what appeared to be a hotspot for bird nests. This 18th
century building is disintegrating, and pedestrians had better look out below!
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| Birds' nests revealed |
I returned to bed, but not for long. At 6:45, the hubbub dans la rue again demanded another step
out onto the balcony for a peek. There below was what looked like un camion des pompiers, an Agde Renault Aerial.
(I looked this up.) Owing to the driver’s incredibly
masterful handling, the truck
negotiated the tight left turn from 1 one-way street to the next. Le chauffeur de camion de
pompiers stopped at our building,
and the brigade (same in English) got
out of the truck. They looked up at the hole in the building, and one lucky
fellow was assigned to the bucket.
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| The pompier ascends |
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| Helping hands above our apartment |
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| Lord Vader outside the window |
After
about an hour, the pompiers deemed it safe to leave the ancien bâtiment. The bucket was lowered, and I incredulously
watched as one of the firefighters swept up the flotsam in the street and
loaded it into one of the green recycling bins. (Even the revered defenders of
our safety don’t always pick the right bin.) Then, the unfortunate car owner's voiture was rinsed off by one of the street cleaners who had been called. To
keep pedestrians off the sidewalk below, security tape was put in place, but it predictably disappeared by the
next morning.
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| They do it ALL! |
The
firefighters in France wear many hats besides the shiny Darth Vader helmets that protect
them from the perils of fire. The official name for these brave servants is sapeurs-pompiers, coming from sapeur, the first official firefighting unit that
Napoleon I created, and pompier, originating from the manual pumps that were first
used to fight flames. Twenty-one percent of their time is taken up with
non-fire-related incidents, such as investigating gas leaks, unsticking stuck
elevators, securing the multitude of crumbling French buildings, and retrieving
des petits chatons from trees. (I made that last one up.)
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| Grenoble's Team |
To my
sleepy surprise, the sapeurs-pompiers had arrived surprisingly vite
(quickly), but now that August (read vacances [vacation]) is here, I don’t hold out much hope for a speedy repair of
the danger overhead. I’ll just don my helmet from my old football-playing days
and take my chances strolling down the street.
la porte-fenêtre: French
door
les poubelles: trash cans
dans la rue: in
the street
le camion des pompiers: the fire truck
le chauffeur
de camion de pompiers: the fire truck driver
Madame, pouvez-vous appeler le syndic et leur dire
ce qui s'est passé?: Lady, can you call the management company and tell them what happened?
ancien bâtiment: old building
voiture: car
des petits chatons: kittens
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