09/25/2026
The fire truck that comes when you call in most of Texas is driven by somebody who was asleep in their own bed four minutes ago. 🚒
The large majority of fire departments in this state are volunteer. Not paid, not on shift, not sitting at the station waiting. They are welders and teachers and nurses and guys who run a feed store, and they carry a pager or a phone that can go off in the middle of a shower, a birthday dinner, or a Tuesday at two in the morning. Then they drive to the station, pull gear that is still damp from the last call, and go.
They pay for a lot of it themselves, or the county pays what it can, or the community does it with a barbecue plate sale and a raffle. The trucks are often older than the people driving them. And the calls are not only fires. They are wrecks out on the highway at night, grass fires running with the wind, water rescues, and cardiac calls where the closest hospital is fifty minutes away and the volunteer EMT kneeling on the floor is the only medicine in the room.
The hard part nobody outside it talks about is that in a small town you know the address before you get there. 🙏 You know whose kitchen it is. You go anyway, and then you go back to work in the morning like it was nothing.
