Life can take you in some strange directions, sometimes.
“Strange” doesn’t have to mean bad, though. Take Columbus Fire and Rescue firefighter Kaelan Brownstein as an example.
Brownstein, 23, has been with CFR for about seven months. Born in Vicksburg, he lived in the Florida Keys and Natchez before his family arrived in Columbus when he was in second grade. After high school he enrolled at Mississippi State University but with no clear major.
“In high school I enjoyed writing,” he said. “I had a fascination for good language. When I was at MSU I dropped a history class and needed something to replace it. I had just converted to Catholicism, and so I decided to take a Latin class.”
Brownstein enjoyed it so much that he emerged from MSU with a degree in foreign languages with a Classics concentration — four years of Latin and three of ancient Greek.
“(The COVID-19 pandemic) was in full swing,” he said. “I decided I needed to make a change and do something that would be good for me.”
Brownstein knew he wanted to stay in Columbus, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do.
“When I was a kid I moved around a lot,” he said. “Columbus is kind of my home. It’s the area I’m most used to. I like the people here, and it’s what I know.”
Then he saw the city was hiring firefighters.
“I thought it sounded really cool,” he said. “Everybody looks up to firefighters, and I thought it would be a good way to challenge myself in ways that I hadn’t before. I saw that the city was hiring, and once I saw it I wanted to jump for it.”
The service angle was also appealing.
“I liked the idea of public interaction, and being there for community members when they need help,” he said.
The culture shock starting out was considerable, he said, starting with the work schedule: 24 hours on shift, followed by two days off.
“The first month, it was very difficult,” Brownstein said. “Not sleeping in your own bed, getting up in the middle of the night to go to calls. After about a month I started to adjust, and now it’s normal, but it was definitely a big change from other jobs.”
The communal atmosphere is attractive, he said.
“We work here (at the fire station), but we also live here,” he said. “It’s like a family. You eat meals together, you work out together. While it’s a job there’s definitely a family aspect that overlaps with it.”
The challenge is there, as well, and in some unexpected ways.
“The (emergency medical technician) training was a challenge,” Brownstein said. “Even though my dad’s a doctor, medicine was not something that came naturally to me. The medical side is a lot of the job…I had heard it, but it’s one thing to hear it and another thing to experience it on a day-to-day basis.”
Brownstein is still in his year-long probationary period — he can’t go into buildings while fighting fires and can’t work overtime — but said he would eventually like to pursue hazardous materials training.
“There’s a lot to it,” he said. “Hazmat incidents are a little slower. You get there, you analyze, you think about things and collect a lot of information before making any decisions. I like that aspect of it, I like the analytical.”
Chief Duane Hughes said firefighters like Brownstein dispel the myth that firefighters are blue-collar.
“Firefighters are highly trained, and have a skill set that would rival that of any white-collar worker,” Hughes said.
Knowledge of Latin is useful, too, he said.
“It’s been a big help to us trying to decipher chemical abbreviations, and point us in the right direction with some of the substances we have to deal with up here,” Hughes said.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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