EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

I Love My Life

Today I had a rather interesting thought about my life. I was thinking about everything I've done over the years, the places I've been, the people I've known, and the rather unusual circumstances that have brought me to where I am today. At some point, I caught myself thinking, "Emily... I turned out to be pretty cool in the end."

I actually laughed.

I'm forty-seven years old. I've traveled all over the country, met some fascinating people, and had experiences that occasionally sound completely ridiculous when I try to explain them. I've also managed to get myself into some rather interesting situations, many of which were entirely my own doing.

Fortunately, I kept a diary.

Last night, I had dinner with Maddie at Texas Roadhouse in Queensbury. I had spent twenty-two days at Mom's, and we had quite a bit to catch up on. I told her about my time away, and she told me about some of the things she's been working on at her job.

Maddie works in cybersecurity—I find her work fascinating. I don't know exactly what she does, and I'm certainly not going to pretend that I understand the technical details of her job, but what she was describing involved a great deal of systems thinking, which happens to be one of my favorite intellectual pursuits. I met her through a mutual friend on a day-long trip to Massachusetts where we explored abandoned buildings, which have been a lifelong fascination of mine.

I've always been interested in understanding how complex systems work. Not simply what individual components do, but how they interact, how one thing affects another, and what happens when something doesn't behave the way it was supposed to.

This is something I spent much of my career doing in emergency services, although my professional experience involved considerably more physical danger and occasionally required me to crawl into places that no reasonable person would voluntarily enter.

In firefighting, much of what you do eventually becomes muscle memory. You practice until you can perform certain tasks without having to think about every individual movement.

High-risk EMS and specialized rescue are different. Those disciplines require you to understand an entire situation, recognize potential problems, anticipate consequences, and make decisions based on information that is frequently incomplete.

Sometimes everything works exactly as expected. Other times, somebody neglects to mention something important, and the situation becomes substantially more complicated than anyone anticipated.

I was rather good at dealing with the latter.

One of the things I enjoy about my friendship with Maddie is that our conversations can go practically anywhere. We can talk about something completely ridiculous, discuss whatever has been happening in our lives, or spend a considerable amount of time discussing a complicated technical subject.

At some point during dinner, we started talking about taking spontaneous trips together. We discussed going to Plattsburgh, which is about two hours from the farm. That's close enough to make a day trip without having to spend the night somewhere, and it's somewhere we could easily decide to go without making much of a plan beforehand.

In fact, I'd prefer not to make much of a plan at all.

Some of my favorite photographs have come from circumstances where I hadn't planned to take a photograph at all. Sometimes I'll see an old building, an interesting storefront, or something completely ordinary that happens to catch my attention.

I've spent much of my life going places without knowing exactly what I would find when I arrived. During my career in emergency services, this was often because the information provided by dispatch was incomplete, inaccurate, or occasionally bore almost no resemblance to the situation we encountered.

There were times when I arrived expecting one problem and discovered three others that nobody had thought to mention. I became accustomed to making decisions under those circumstances, and after enough years, I actually became rather comfortable with the uncertainty.

Of course, there's a substantial difference between approaching uncertainty as part of a rescue operation and deliberately seeking it out because you want to have an interesting afternoon.

I spent years working in a profession where nearly everything was governed by policies, procedures, training requirements, and the expectation that I would be available when something went wrong. I took those responsibilities seriously, although I occasionally found myself questioning whether the people responsible for writing certain policies had ever attempted to follow them in conditions outside a well-lit office.

When I was sixteen, I had some very definite ideas about what I wanted my life to become. I was at summer camp in the Adirondacks, writing constantly, listening to music, and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I knew I wanted to write books. There were numerous other things I wanted, too, although some of those plans worked out considerably differently than I expected.

I couldn't have anticipated the people I would meet, the friendships I would make, or the rather extraordinary set of circumstances that would eventually become the subject of my books.

I also couldn't have anticipated how much my priorities would change over the years. Things that once seemed enormously important eventually became irrelevant, while other things I barely considered when I was younger became some of the most important parts of my life.

My friendship with Maddie is one of those things. I never would have imagined that, at forty-seven, I'd have a best friend with whom I could sit at Texas Roadhouse discussing tentative plans to drive around northern New York without any particular destination in mind. Yet somehow, that is exactly where I find myself.

This morning, my friend Trevor and I installed another solar Meshtastic node for the town project that the two of us are working on. We met at his house, then we drove to the end of Fitzgerald Road. Trevor held the ladder while I climbed to the peak of the roof to attach the node with decking screws.

Then we drove to the end of Hemenway Drive to relocate a previously placed node to a tree to provide better line of sight.

I love my life.

I am having some of the best days of my life again. This hasn't happened in a very long time.