Grace

A couple of days ago, when it was time for my daily cache, I decided to go after a Letterbox Hybrid that I hadn’t yet gotten. The biggest reason I hadn’t gotten it up to that point is that it was located in a fairly affluent part of town, and I’m a little leery of wealthy parts of town for some easy-to-discern reasons. But I was already in that part of town and decided, why not? What’s the worst that could happen? I didn’t dwell too deeply on that question lest I have scenarios overflowing into the streets. I wound past obviously expensive houses and parked at a dead end. At the guardrail of the dead end began a path into the greenbelt abutting the neighborhood. The cache description read that I should go down that path several hundred feet until I found a shrine devoted to the namesake of the cache, so I did.

Kristin McLain was a helicopter rescue nurse who fell to her death from a hoist while rescuing an injured woman from the greenbelt. One of our local cachers knew her as a member of his extended family and placed a Letterbox Hybrid up in the trees behind a memorial to her and the tragedy. The stamp was a sugar skull in memory of her fondness for them.

Calvin Broadus Jr. once noted that “nobody ever made a song called ‘BLANK the Fire Department'” (which is no longer true since someone made a song with that title just because it hadn’t been done, but that’s beside the point). It was meant as a statement about the police, but it also stands on its own. While first responders get an amount of hero worship, I think it is somewhat reflexively given without thought or consideration. It sometimes boggles my mind that there are people in this world who choose to put themselves in harm’s way to save people’s lives. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe first responders (or any group of people) should be fawned over by default. They are regular people who do a job, have good days and bad, and are sometimes bad people. But some people end up in situations where they rise to the occasion and perform heroic acts. For the people involved, the day is often the most important day of their lives. For many first responders, air or otherwise, it is just Tuesday. And to give the last full measure in service to another?

I didn’t know Kristin, so I don’t know if I would call her a hero. But I will happily give her the benefit of the doubt.

And I had one answer to the question I had avoided. I could have been the injured person needing rescue. I could have fallen to my death in the trees. I guess that’s why many people say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”