I have no idea what it’s like to douse a fire in the middle of the night and still make it to a day job on time.  

I can’t tell you how it feels to race against the clock to extricate victims of a motor vehicle collision.

If you want to know what it takes to run into a mess of smoke and flames to save lives and property, I can’t help you.  

As a reporter I’ve attended many fires and many collision scenes, but I’ve never had a whiff of what it’s like to be on the front lines.

The only way to understand those things is to live them, and to live them you need courage and toughness – traits I do not have in large supply.

To live them, you give up chunks of your life without getting much in return, and take risks many people wouldn’t think of.

I had a vague sense of this before I spoke to retired Exeter District Fire Chief Cameron McLeod last week, but the notion sunk in after we parted ways.

As reported elsewhere in this week’s Times-Advocate, McLeod spent 27 years as an Exeter firefighter, many of them as deputy chief or district chief.

We had spoken frequently over the last three years, but never for long. Most of our encounters lasted less than five minutes, as I gathered information about a blaze or a crash for a newspaper report.  

McLeod was always respectful, always helpful, always as forthcoming as he could be.  

He seemed to approach interviews as part of the job, and never treated me like a pest or a vulture – descriptors that often pulse through my mind when I attend the scene of an emergency.  

When we spoke last week, I wanted to know why someone would stay with the job as long as he did, and McLeod listed camaraderie and the fact he was helping people.  

I asked if there’s anything he won’t miss about his time with the South Huron Fire Department, offering 3 a.m. calls as an easy target.  

“I didn't mind that,” he said. “It's part of the commitment.”

McLeod told me he’ll miss the job, then caught himself and admitted he already missed it.

"They're just a wonderful bunch of guys,” he said of his colleagues at the department. “I just can't say enough. The dedication is just absolutely amazing.”
Which is entirely true, as far as a reporter can tell.  

It takes tremendous stuff to fight fires at all hours of the day and night, and to help save lives in the wake of a collision.  

There are men and women in every community who do this, people who do not ask for credit and rarely receive their due.

Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be them, and most don’t bother to guess. We take them for granted and think of them only in a pinch.  

There are many like McLeod who give long stretches of their lives to this part-time profession, dropping everything when an alarm goes off and racing to help solve someone else’s problem.

It takes a great deal of courage, toughness and dedication to do this. What we see from the side of the road is only the faintest clue.