There are times when Luke Garcia is climbing along the side of a mountain in Idaho, a 45-pound backpack strapped to him, smoke billowing on the horizon, when a thought flashes through his mind.
"I think 'How did I get here?'" said Garcia, of Kankakee. "A lot of the guys have the same thought."
Then the thought disappears. For the 25-year-old Garcia there is no place he would rather be.
A member of the 20-member Midewin Interagency Hotshot Crew for the past two years, Garcia is part of a team that hikes into forest fires and battles tree by tree to contain the flames.
Garcia returned to his home in west Kankakee on Wednesday after an exhausting two-week tour of duty helping protect property and lives in Idaho's Beaver Creek region, an area that has been ravaged by raging fires.
The homecoming was brief. The 2006 Kankakee High School graduate was flying back to Boise, Idaho, today to begin yet another fire-squelching campaign.
No comments:
Post a Comment