This morning, I woke to the sound of rain drops rapidly dinging on my air conditioner. It was a soothing sound, not unlike white noise. The air conditioner kept humming amid the metallic pings, and I kept lying in bed, taking full advantage of a Sunday morn. Relaxing.

Then, all of a sudden, FLASH! went a light outside my window. BANG! went a sound, almost on top of the flash. Bwwoooooo. went my air conditioner as the compressor and fans spun down. Beep Beep Beep! went my computer’s UPS. A veritable symphony, it was.

I got up to go and turn my computer off. Unfortunately, my UPS isn’t exactly the most powerful on the market, so when I turned my monitor on to guide the shutdown, things fell apart. The UPS let out a painful death groan then turned itself off. The monitor and computer went with it. Well… mission accomplished, if not exactly as intended.

Silence washed over the room. With no electricity, there are very few things to make noise in a modern home. The rain had stopped, and all of the motors had slowed to a halt. I lay in bed listening to the nothingness.

My ears strained for any sort of signal, as ears do in extreme quiet. A gentle susurrus from air moving in my ear became almost deafening in the absence of man-made noise.

Then, in the distance, I heard them. Sirens — several of them. Was somebody injured? Had the lightening beget a fire? Gradually, the wails grew louder and nearer. A couple of deep horn blows revealed the mystery emergency vehicles to be fire trucks. I lay in wait, concentrating to hear the Doppler shift that would indicate the trucks’ passage. But it never happened. The sirens grew louder, then stopped. I heard the distinct hiss of air brakes and the rumble of a diesel. The trucks must have been close.

The night before, I finished reading Working Fire, the autobiographical story of an Ivy-league graduate becoming a career firefighter in Oakland, California. It’s a good book: a captivating quick read. My knowledge of the real life of firefighters was heretofore limited to some sound bites tracing (at least according to my fuzzy memory) to Grandstaff‘s days as an EMT. I found the book’s description of firehouse dynamics quite interesting, and the bits of firefighting technique scattered through the book provided pleasant garnish.

For a while now, I’ve toyed with the idea of becoming a “volunteer” fire fighter. There are several barriers to me doing so, most notably that I live in St. Paul, which (as a major city) doesn’t have a volunteer fire department. Still, I think the idea has merit. I think it would be an exciting, worthwhile, slightly adventurous endeavor. I like the idea of helping people. I like the idea of confronting a powerful enemy, like fire. And, of course, I think fire apparatus are really cool. In fact, aside from all things Porsche, I think that big aerial fire trucks are some of the best-looking machines ever made. If I ever move to a location conducive to volunteer firefighting, I’ll pursue the opportunity.

After listening to the fire frequency with my scanner, I learned that the call had been a false alarm. The trucks pulled away, leaving me once again with silence. A few moments later, the electricity returned, and with it, I was pulled back into the sounds of modern life.