My friend Jen awoke Sunday morning to a nightmare. She looked out her bedroom window to see her barn ablaze. The horses were in the fields, thank God.

Within a few minutes fire crews from Westside, Mardela, and Hebron were vainly trying to stop the flames. Tanker trucks kept running down Tyaskin Road to the river in order to refill. The heat was so intense that it melted the vinyl siding on a shed 50 feet away. But the firefighters were inside the inferno until the roof began to collapse. Despite their efforts, within an hour the barn was a roofless ruin of twisted aluminum siding and charred wooden beams.

One of the firemen dressed so quickly, he forgot to put on socks. He was limping from the blisters until Jen gave him a pair of garishly striped knee highs, the first socks she grabbed. Another showed up later that day searching for his cell phone that had fallen from his pocket somewhere in the rubble. If we ever find it, it’ll probably be a melted mass of plastic and microchips.

Not only did those three fire companies rush to respond at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning – and on holiday weekend at that, but Sharptown, Delmar, and Salisbury fire units mobilized to cover for the departments working at the barn.

And these men and women are volunteers. They aren’t getting the big bucks; they are getting no bucks. They don’t get a pension or paid vacation or any other reward. They donate time they could spend with their family or enjoying hobbies or many other things for training. They organize fundraisers to collect enough cash to pay for their fire engines and equipment and training. They leave comfortable houses at weird hours to put themselves at risk. Why? They’d probably never talk about things like commitment to their community or responsibility to their neighbors; to them, it’s just the right thing to do.

Stop and think a moment what it’d be like if the volunteer fire departments weren’t there. And when your stomach unknots, be grateful. And do a little more than that. Go to the bingo nights, eat at the oyster and ham roasts, buy the roadside BBQ chicken, visit the carnivals at Hebron, Sharptown, Chincoteague and any others that are out there. Or if none of that works for you, pull out your checkbook and consider what your taxes would be if you had to pay for this service or worse, if the service wasn’t there.

The Westside firefighters know the people at the barn; the others, probably not. But that didn’t matter to them. They were there when they were most needed. Volunteer firefighters are the definition of decency and community.