I wish I’d never met Harlin and Rita Hanson.
Don’t get me wrong. These are two of the finest people I’ve ever had the privilege to know. The memories of the time I spent with them in Roanoke last year are among my fondest and most powerful. But I wish I’d never met them.
You see, as a member of the Austin-Travis County EMS Honor Guard, I first met the Hansons at their son’s funeral. Eric Hanson was a paramedic for Marble Falls Area EMS, a department that serves a community by that name about thirty miles west of Austin, Texas. Eric was tragically killed in a motor-vehicle collision involving the ambulance he was driving. As a small department, Marble Falls had no Honor Guard of their own to confer department honors so our team was proud to help. I helped carry his casketed remains to their final resting place and fold the flag that draped them. It was in this capacity that I met Harlin and Rita. I saw them again at the National EMS Memorial Service in Roanoke last year. I never met Eric but I have spoken to many people who knew him well and by all accounts he was an extraordinary individual.
And he’s not alone.
Every year EMS professionals are seriously injured, become seriously ill, or are killed in the line of duty. We daily face violence at the hands of our patients and the public and risk life and limb working on or alongside busy roadways. We collectively drive millions of miles a year on streets and highways that we know, probably better than anyone, are not populated by the safest of drivers. Some of us respond by aircraft that, in an instant, can find themselves at the mercy of bad weather or simple mechanical failure. We are exposed to communicable diseases and the extreme risks associated with swiftwater, high-angle, confined-space, and vehicle rescues. Some of us even don the same protective gear as the SWAT team and are ready to follow them, unarmed, into the tactical hot-zone. All this because we want to serve our communities.
Police officers and firefighters can pay their respects at permanent memorials that honor their brethren who have made the ultimate sacrifice and visit museums that honor the proud history of their professions. Every year, after the National EMS Memorial Service, the EMS memorial, called the Tree of Life, is crated up and put into storage and there currently is no national EMS museum. I am riding to honor my brothers and sisters who have given their lives in the service of their communities and to raise the public’s awareness of the EMS professionals in their own communities who may not get to go home to their families tonight because they were striving to get someone else home to theirs.
For Those Who Gave, So That Others Might Live.
That’s why I’ll ride…
