Coalgate, OK: Why We're Doing This

Coalgate, OK Police & Fire Dept.

The cartoonish Coalgate Fire & EMS logo painted on the glass front door looked like an invitation if I ever saw one. We knocked anyway. Twice.

No answer. Twice.

We stepped inside. It was cool, dark and quiet. Sooty yellow turnout gear for a dozen men, maybe more, hung in a row along one wall. Helmets rested neatly on the shelves above. Below, big rubber boots stood in pairs. On the frames of the red metal racks were names written in black marker.

A hand-drawn memorial banner, dedicated to the New York Fire Department, hung on the wall at the top of the stairs.

Out of the silence came the sound of footsteps, followed by a lanky man in a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and the thickest moustache this side of Wyatt Earp. He smiled as he walked up to us. “Can I help you gentlemen?” Roger Wilson was off duty but still welcomed our odd intrusion with the kind of warmth you just can’t fake.

“How ya doin’?” Jon said. “Sorry to bother you like this, but uh…we want to show you something.”

Understandably, Roger looked a bit confused. He stroked his moustache and asked what it was we had to show him. Ten seconds of explanation and that confusion turned to intrigue. Mr. Wilson followed us outside.

“Man, we gotta show this to the rest of the guys! They’re just down the road! Come on, let’s go!” Three minutes later, in the parking lot behind the Family Health Center of Southern Oklahoma, we met with as good a bunch of guys as you could possibly imagine.

They spoke earnestly with Jon. They spoke quietly with each other. They held pieces of paper against the sides of their trucks or on their bent knees, writing notes and messages.

‘After 9-11, you know, all across the country and all across the world, we were brothers.’ On paper such a statement can come across as contrived, but when a guy like Berney Blue speaks you know it’s coming from the heart. ‘It means so much to us that you guys are here,’ said Assistant Chief Aaron Blue, Berney’s brother. 

On the edge of town Jon pulled over. “I gotta do something,” he said. The urgency in his voice made me think he had to take a whiz. The spark in his eye said he had something else to let out.

Jon dug into the pile of stuff in the back seat of the cab, pulled out a long blue sack and walked to the back of the truck. In that sack was an American flag tethered to a four-foot long flagpole that fit perfectly in one of the holes along the top edge of the side of the truck bed.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to do that,” Jon said to me as we pulled back out onto the road.

“Put the flag up?”

“Yeah. I’d been thinking about it but until now it just didn’t feel right. I felt like it would look like, I don’t know, some kind of political statement. And I didn’t want this trip to turn into some big Rah-Rah USA thing.”

“So why now?”

“Because I think that this is bigger than 9-11.” Jon paused, staring out at Route 75. “I mean, not that what we’re doing is bigger. Or more important or whatever because it’s not. But at the same time, you know, this is for all the people who died, obviously, but I feel like it really is for all the first responders who went down there, to Ground Zero, and then never came back. It’s for people like that who make this country great. And these guys we just met, they’re risking their lives to help other people. Maybe they’re not running into a hundred-story building that just got hit by a plane but still, all these guys are putting themselves on the line. That’s the attitude, you know, the spirit that made this country what it is. It ain’t about politics. It’s about people. And I kind of knew that when we started, I guess. But meeting all these people, and then talking to those guys back there… It all just came together.”

Jon’s words hung in the air. There was nothing else to say.

We rolled on, Jon’s flag whipping around in the breeze.