For the past eight years, as my career satisfaction batteries reach a low ebb, I’ve been part of a tradition where a group of friends meet in southern Colorado on Columbus Day weekend for a few days of shooting, laughter, good conversations and even better food. Aside from the ballistic mood improvers wiping away a year’s worth of accumulated stress, the other highlight of the trip is interacting with the residents of Baca County.
They’re warm and genuine folk, farmers and ranchers mostly; the kind of folk for whom the word “neighbor” carries a far deeper significance than for most of us. Baca County is harsh but beautiful country. It takes hardy folk to live there.
Four years ago, our host happened to mention to the regional EMS coordinator that one of her shooters that weekend was an EMS person he may have heard of. When she told him my name, he asked hopefully, “Do you think he might come give a few talks for our volunteers?”
Thus began another tradition — of me spending an extra day in Baca County teaching a seminar to the volunteers in their EMS squads. I met Rick Hartley at one of those first seminars, and for the past two years he has hosted me at Southeast Colorado Hospital District, where he was EMS director. Rick was a local boy, Springfield born and bred, and he dedicated over 30 years of his life to providing quality EMS care to his neighbors there.
A paramedic and educator respected around the state, Rick was the consummate professional. In 1988, he founded the Springfield EMS Association, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to fundraising and education supporting the local EMS squad. For 25 years, he scratched, clawed, begged, wheedled, cajoled, filled out countless grant applications and taught countless CPR classes so that his hometown — with no tax base or run volume to speak of — could have quality EMS care when the need arose.
And he succeeded.
When some of my less-enlightened colleagues speak of volunteer EMTs as unsophisticated rubes, EMS hobbyists holding back our profession, I think of men like Rick, who embody the ideals of servant leadership and service to community. They provided EMS where it could not otherwise exist.
Men like Rick Hartley aren’t what holds our profession back, they’re what EMS was always supposed to be.
I was at the Colorado State EMS Conference in Keystone Friday night when my phone rang with the news that Rick had been killed in an ambulance accident, and his partner, Larry Miller, seriously injured. I had just run into his deputy walking back from the conference center a couple hours before, and she greeted me with a warm smile and a hug, because she’s from Baca County, and that’s how Baca County folks are.
My first reaction was to see to it that she didn’t find out via Facebook or the local news, so I spent most of the night on the phone with the conference committee, trying to track her down and break the news as gently as we could.
And as I sat by the phone that night, I wondered, “How will they ever replace Rick?” A man of his caliber is a loss to any community, but it is devastating to a squad and a town as small as Springfield.
On the one hand, you cannot replace a man like Rick Hartley, yet on the other, you don’t have to.
The Springfield EMS Association and the Southeast Colorado Hospital District EMS will weather the blow. They’ll survive because Rick Hartley taught them, mentored them and inspired them. He was a living example of a professional paramedic, and pay or volunteer status has nothing to do with it.
He built something bigger than himself, and Springfield will continue to have a dedicated EMS squad long after he’s gone. And somehow, I suspect that’s what would make him proudest.
Rest easy, Rick. Your people have it from here. After all, how could they not? They’re your people.
