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| FACING DANGER: Paul recounts her
adventures and struggles in a recent book. |
As a girl, Caroline Paul was a star swimmer who defended her younger brother against bullies. As a teen, she tried to set a Guinness world record for crawling, giving up after covering 81/2 miles on her hands and knees in the rain. As an adult, she’s worked as a whitewater raft guide, competed on the U.S. national luge team, acquired her pilot’s license and tried bungee jumping, hang gliding, paragliding, sea kayaking and glacial skiing.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Paul now finds herself nine years into a career as a San Francisco firefighter, assigned to a unit that specializes in difficult rescues. "It was another adventure I could do -- and get paid for," she says simply.
But it’s not that simple. Paul, ’86, isn’t exactly the firefighter type. Raised in a prototypical wasp family in Connecticut (her father was an investment banker, her mother a social worker), openly lesbian and the twin sister of a former Baywatch babe, Paul had planned to become a documentary filmmaker or perhaps a journalist. Pulling victims out of collapsed tunnels, charging into burning buildings and fishing distressed boaters out of the Bay were not part of the plan.
It was while working as a reporter at Berkeley public radio station kpfa in 1988 that Paul decided to take an entrance exam at the San Francisco Fire Department. It had a reputation as sexist and racist, and she hoped to produce an exposé. But she detected no bias in the test, dropped the story -- and ended up joining the department. Now she has written a book about her experience, Fighting Fire: A Personal Story. In it, she describes how the old-guard institution she set out to change instead changed her.
With sirens still wailing, the red engine jerks to a stop at an angle to the curb. Paul and the other firefighters pile out, scrambling to be the first in the building, the most coveted -- and dangerous -- position. They could step through a floor, or open the wrong door and ignite an explosion. Paul gets her gloves on first and grabs the nozzle from a guy still pulling his gear on. "No gloves?" she says with a glint in her eye before turning to hustle into the burning building first.
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| DEEP END: Paul trains for surf
rescues at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. |
Inside, the air is thick and hot, "a cloying, leaden heat" that makes Paul feel "that the very walls are moving inward." Even with a flashlight, the smoke is impenetrable, though she knows somewhere behind her there is an unseen firefighter feeding out the hose. Inside her air mask, she allows herself a grim smile. She loves the danger, the excitement, the adventure. Later, after the blaze is out, she learns that the fire got between her and her exit -- dangerous, since she could have become trapped. She is safe, but another firefighter, who was not so lucky, fell through the roof.
From childhood, Paul envied "men’s" adventures, says her mother, Sarah Paul. "She always wanted to be able to do those things." The young Caroline was stoic and determined -- even when her risky undertakings went awry. Her mother and father recall the Christmas when all three Paul children received sleds as presents. Caroline was 6. "She had to go right out on the hill behind our place and try hers out," says her father, Mark Paul. "She didn’t realize until she’d started down the hill that it was solid ice." She crashed into a fence at the bottom and ended up with a half-dozen stitches. But she never cried. "I winced every time the doctor took a stitch, and she never blanched," her father recalls.
As a teenager, Paul had her own way of testing limits. At 15, she decided to set the world record for crawling. It started to rain, and the judge made her stop because her knees were bleeding from rubbing against her wet jeans. Afterward, she tried to talk Guinness officials into creating a separate category for women (she’d covered 81