Remembering fire fighter, historian Dave Hilton

  By Virginia Woodwell / York Independent

  York fire fighter Dave Hilton died last Saturday after a week in a coma induced by a heart attack and stroke. Dave loved everything about being a fire fighter and, as an avid amateur historian, delved deeply into Maine fire fighting traditions. York Independent writer Virginia Woodwell met with Dave many times over the years for articles about him. Here are some of the lasting impressions he made.

  Memory tells me that I first met Dave in the fire tower atop Mount Agamenticus, from which the view, when you were in his company, was not just of forests and ponds and steeples and ocean, but of the lore-filled past that he'd so passionately and capably chronicled in his book From York to the Allagash: Forest Fire Lookouts of Maine.

  The book was a natural for Dave to write for he had spent a big chunk of his life atop that tower on Mount Agamenticus. He had volunteered his services as an unofficial fire watcher ever since he was a boy and used to meet U.S. Forest Service watcher Jon Chamblee every morning outside the old Cape Neddick Post Office and ride with him up to the mountain to spend the day in the tower. Every evening Chamblee would drop Dave off back outside the post office to go home.

  In 1991, when the state stopped staffing its fire towers it was Dave who organized a band of volunteers, Chamblee himself among them, to resurrect the service, which continues to this day.

  Dave's interest in the culture of fire towers led him to travel widely about the state, taking pictures and recording data about the experiences of other fire watchers, all of which went into his book.

  When he talked about days spent in the tower atop Mount Agamenticus it was his infectious love of the experience for its own sake that came through.

  "You can't be afraid of heights" he told me.

  You couldn't be lonely or inattentive or self absorbed either, and Dave was none of those.

  And you couldn't be afraid of a breeze or two.

  "The wind shimmies and shakes and rattles and rolls and makes its own little song," he told me.

  Thereafter, I almost welcomed seasons of high fire alerts as an excuse to visit Dave in the tower. Not that, with him, I needed an excuse, for he assured me I'd be welcome any time.

  As much as he loved history, he did not dwell in the past. Gently wise about the power of the press, he never took the opportunity of my presence to pat himself on the back, but instead and always, had words of praise for his fellow firefighters. For the work they did every day or for something they'd just done he felt was worthy of note.

  "Just to let the guys know they're appreciated," he would say.

  His mind was also busy thinking up improvements that might be made in fire fighting procedure, equipment or communications, anything to let the public know how it might make itself safer from fire.

  There are other images of Dave too; of him clamming, all by himself on a cold, raw, gray day, on the flats by the Wiggley Bridge, graciously stopping to chat with me at length because I wanted to include that impression of him in "York Corner"; of Dave at his computer at DNH Collectibles, finding me a California buyer for some 61-year-old Model-A parts I had unearthed in our barn; of Dave, helmeted and jacketed among other firefighters on a curve in the road adjacent to our farm where there had just been a horrendous accident.

  I had to get a picture of the grotesquely mangled car; he was kindly solicitous in helping.

  Stored in my computer is a record of the police scanner he recommended I get, and, in my memory, his promise to program it for me when it arrives.

  He once asked if he might dig for bottles on our farm. I said no, because I wanted to reserve for myself the discovery of any hidden treasure.

  Dave himself now seems to me the real, and greater, treasure.