“I had the best experiences, and I fell backwards into each one.” — Joanne Greenberg in an interview, October 16, 2024

The Prologue of On the Run, author Joanne Greenberg’s memoir of her 13 years as a volunteer EMT in the Colorado Rockies, starts off placidly chronicling the seasonal run of families renting empty semi-trucks for the westward journey to California in late winter and returning with trucks laden with produce as summer turns to fall. Closely narrating the action, the pace of the storyline dramatically and rapidly speeds up to track the trajectory of the gruesome ending to this scene as a driver loses control, and his truck plummets down the eastern slope of the Rockies. On the way down, the trailer with its heavy load starts to push against the cab, then:

“Panic. Any gear—no gear will work now. Eighty-five, ninety. … Steering takes all the attention, moving between cars, horn letting people know that the rig is in trouble. … women and children in the back of the rig are screaming. … At one-ten on such a curve … physics declares itself in the name of the law. The semi-trailer, tons and tons, yards long and with eighteen heavy wheels, rises, goes airborne, flies, flies above the cars passing under it and the whole of it begins to turn over in the air….”

Out of all this devastating wreckage, Greenberg, a volunteer emergency medical technician on the scene, finds the only survivor—a tiny baby, who falls into her arms when she untangles a mound of blankets and quilts from the rear of the trailer. Much later in the book, Greenberg writes, “Our miracles came in quarters of an inch, in halves of a second.”

Joanne Greenberg, https://rosegardenwriter.com/

On the Run is a “reluctant” memoir. When Greenberg conceived of how she was going to narrate this book, she intended to tell stories about the characters but not include herself. “I originally wanted to say this is about them not me. I originally didn’t want me in there. To the best of my ability, I put myself in there,” Greenberg said in an October interview. Her presence, of course, is essential as she constructs a binding narrative that shuttles between events describing her involvement in fire rescue and various autobiographical episodes of another sort. Greenberg’s stories about fire service and EMT span over 13 exhilarating years during the 1970s into the ‘80s. These are studded with autobiographical elements comprising the warp and weft of her existence through time and space.

When I asked Greenberg why she had chosen to write On the Run, she said, “I think you need at least ten years after a big event to write about it. I never thought of doing writing that wasn’t fiction. Then I thought well, enough time has passed. And I had kept notes [both fire rescue logs, and also personal notes].” The immediate catalyst had been an invitation to the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Genesee Fire Department, which is part of the fire and rescue network in Joanne’s area of Colorado. She couldn’t attend, but a reunion was arranged between her and Lori Poland, who had been kidnapped at age three in a nationally publicized crime. Greenberg was one of the main rescuers to recover Lori from the bottom of an outdoor toilet in a deserted park where she had been abandoned by her kidnapper. During that ordeal and the trip to the ER in Denver, Lori and Joanne had strongly bonded, but hadn’t seen each other for over 30 years.

The kidnapping and rescue incident as well as witnessing the bravery and intelligence of three-year-old Lori was the apex of Greenberg’s career as a volunteer EMT. The narration of this horrendous crime and its aftermath occurs toward the end of the book but could be regarded as the fulcrum upon which all the other stories are balanced.

Greenberg does not see herself as a literary writer—one particularly concerned with style and verbal expression. She cites many writers, “who said that we [writers] are bearing witness. I don’t bear witness, I just tell what happens,” she said. There is an immediacy to Greenberg’s writing as she chronicles events. Readers are propelled into situations instantly and directly. Scenes are perceived through action and dialogue without much introspection or analysis. Even compassion is treated as action rather than emotion. Greenberg likens writers to the Greek titan, Antaeus, who drew his strength from touching the ground. Chronicling situations firmly embedded in reality, she asks: What happened? How did it happen? What happens next?

The narrative arc of On the Run begins in 1972 when Joanne and her neighbor, Pippa Stone, approached their local fire department with the idea that they could be available as volunteers with minimal training to protect the neighborhood during the day while the men were at work. What they found was a “men’s club.” Immediate objections to their plan were raised and enumerated by the Lieutenant at the time, a man named Ralph:

“[He began], surely, we could see that what we proposed was impossible. For one thing, it was illegal for non-personnel to operate equipment that belonged to the district and was paid for by tax dollars. For the second, we were women and were … uh … more sensitive to … more emotional than … a woman seeing a person burned, or even dead, might … well  … scream or faint. And then there was the matter of foul language that men used in moments of stress.”

In the end, Ralph quit, saying, “I ain’t reeling in no hose with no fireman that wears gold earrings.” However, the department did relent, specifying that Joanne and Pippa had to take the full training for prospective volunteers. Despite approval, they got off to a rocky start when Joanne and Pippa discovered that the dispatcher had been instructed to re-route emergency calls and leave them out of the loop. That omission was remedied once they complained.

Colorful and engrossing stories of challenge, achievements and acceptance follow this introductory section. Greenberg details happily working at rock concerts every summer—the Rolling Stones, Heart, REO Speedwagon and others who played at Red Rocks Amphitheater. She also outlines some of the changes in the department, but ultimately, she’s satisfied that the presence of women no longer stands out. “People had joined and others had left, but those who came learned to see middle-aged women as part of the package, integral to the service,” she writes in On the Run.

There were also unforeseen benefits of being a rural mountain EMT. Early in the book, Greenberg not only describes awakening to a deep sense of place through her fire rescue work but how her growing familiarity with the land around her validated feelings of belonging:

“I felt myself sinking into the local geography and climate as deeply as though I had spent my childhood there. We began to know, within the limits of our district, the ten or fifteen mini-climates of the hills we lived in, places where the snows melted earlier, or the wind made the way crusty and precarious, pockets of chill, pockets of calm. I was being offered a kind of belonging to a place that I had never thought to have. That belonging offered a serenity I never knew I had missed all my life. I was home and I was learning deeply what home was.”

Some of Greenberg’s most striking sensory passages detail the Colorado experience of nature and climate. For example, here is a description of the Continental Divide:

“… and then the land lifted and there they were, rim to rim, starker than the tree-clothed mountains of the east, the clean-boned sculptured ribs and spine of the continent. They were rise on rise, ending in the snow-heights miles away. I felt the shape of them like polyphonic music, sound on sound ….”

Or, this humorously accurate statement about Colorado’s aridity: “We fought the usual brush and grass fires: some were pretty large, fearsome in this climate, where humidity is often less than that of a soda cracker.”

Another reality about volunteerism versus professionalism described in On the Run is the tension between the professional specialists of Emergency Room staff and EMT volunteers. The contrast between the two cohorts is one of the leitmotifs throughout Greenberg’s narrative. This attitude even extends to terminology. “We weren’t allowed to call them patients. Doctors had patients. We had victims.” Moreover, ER personnel were often contemptuous of volunteer EMTs’ methods and lack of professional training. Underscoring this difference even more, Greenberg deploys irony and wry humor to stress the contrast between them.

“We weren’t hospital staff either, and our needs were different. [During EMT training in a hospital setting] I was asked to pass equipment and I violated the sterile field. The doctor raged:

‘Where do you work?’

‘The highway, Sir.’

‘How do you treat a patient with an open wound?’

‘We usually blow off the dirt so the dressing will stick.'”

Or when rescuing a car crash victim in sub-zero weather:

“…we were sending vitals to the hospital’s ER—pulse, respirations, level of consciousness—in her case, low with sluggish pupillary reaction.

‘What’s the b.p.?’

‘Unavailable.’

The radio voice in the warm world of the ER sounded snappish. ‘You can’t get a blood pressure?’ (What a bunch of incompetents).

‘No.’

‘Can’t you take a blood pressure?’

‘My gauges are frozen.’

‘Oh.’

The street is not the ER. They were always standing in clean, well-lighted rooms. We were calling from the cold, snowy and dark, or windy, hot and dusty, sometimes besieged. We were often unable to see what we were doing.”

Empathy and compassion toward victims is on every page of On the Run—similar to how those attitudes and behaviors on behalf of others saved the protagonist in Greenberg’s most famous book, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the fictionalized version of her recovery from mental illness as a young woman. These themes manifest in her insistence on positioning herself in the ambulance so that she could see “eye-to-eye” with a victim not only to monitor vitals but to also offer a compassionate lifeline to someone who was frightened, in pain and suffering physically and emotionally. In refuting an esteemed doctor’s dismissal of a psychotic victim as one who will never recover, Greenberg counters by referring to her own past experience of mental illness. She credits her illness and recovery as fundamental to how she moves through this world—how she behaves, her attitude toward others and the truth in her writing.

Advocacy for victims is apparent throughout the book. A surprise to some may be the extent of Greenberg’s support for deaf and blind people confined to and marginalized within mental institutions worldwide. Wherever she goes, for example to Sweden, she seeks out deaf people institutionalized in various mental hospitals. Her campaign is to create awareness of the deaf and their isolated loneliness, to canvas resources and identify methods of communication (signing is high on her list), uncover possible misdiagnoses, encourage surveys of former residents about the positive and negative aspects of their experience and engage local organizations supporting the deaf. Her persistent efforts in this area of advocacy earned her an honorary degree from Gallaudet, the University of the Deaf, in Washington D.C.

When I asked Greenberg what was the driving force behind her commitment to being an EMT, her response was aesthetic: “… the sense of bringing order out of chaos.” Another reason appears near the beginning of the book. Pondering a conversation with her husband, Albert, she writes:

“I couldn’t then, and still can’t explain why I loved fire and rescue … It wasn’t heroic to me … Something in the sense of being at the heart of life and exerting my full capacity in the face of people’s need. I’m here. We’re here. You are safe now. You are with good people.”

The cover image of On the Run in the style of Thomas Hart Benton, perfectly conveys the intrepid spirit of Joanne Greenberg venturing forth in her sturdy little Opel:

“… my little red gumball and air horn were all I needed. As I sped to an accident scene in my little Opel, looking like a tricycle in a temper. It must have been comic, the blaring horn clearing the way for a half-sized car with the whirling gumball light on its roof.”

The cover illustration captures the spirit of On the Run with its stories of immense courage, wit and ample optimism. On the Run is Joanne Greenberg’s 21^st book, published last year when the author was 91. Visit Greenberg’s web site here.