An Impressive Performance by an Unlikely Person

Passing the Common, we saw a couple of park rangers struggling with a man on a bench. The man was huge--well over six feet tall and certainly more than 240 pounds. I didn't know what the man had done, but the rangers, who are not armed, obviously needed more hands.

The ambulance jumped the curb. We rolled past startled tourists to the bench. I asked one of the rangers what had happened.

"He's emotionally disturbed," the ranger said. Motioning to a woman standing nearby, he said, "That's his counsellor over there. Something set him off, and he attacked her."

The man was kneeling on the ground, the top of his body bent onto the bench. Each of the rangers was holding a wrist. The man dripped sweat from the struggle. "Are you going to put handcuffs on me?" he asked. He sounded as if he knew the routine.

"Yeah, we are," I told him. "The better you behave, the sooner they'll come off. Okay?"

"Okay."

I applied the handcuffs. My partner brought the bed to us. The man did not struggle as we rolled him onto it. After we'd lifted him into the ambulance, I asked the counsellor what had happened.

"We're here from New Hampshire as part of recreational program. It was a good day. We rode the trolley, saw some of the Freedom Trail, had lunch. Then, while we were sitting here, he said he wanted to pee on me."

I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly. "He wanted to pee on you?"

"Yeah. I don't know where that came from. When I told him he couldn't do that, he got angry and tried to choke me."

The man was quite cooperative as we brought him to the emergency department for evaluation. The counsellor rode in the ambulance with him, on the bench beside the stretcher. She made small talk with him as if nothing had happened.

I couldn't help thinking as we travelled about the way some people freak out over the smallest things. A cut on a finger, a brief fainting spell--it doesn't take much to send the average citizen into complete panic.

This woman had been told, by a potentially unstable man twice her size, that he wanted to pee on her. He'd become violent when she wouldn't let him do it. She'd fended off his attack. Some people would need psychotherapy for years after such an experience.

But this young woman stayed calm. She didn't appear the least bit scared or upset. She didn't even resent the guy. She remained supportive, reminding him that everything would be okay, that as long as he could behave himself, the rest of the trip would be a good one. She joked with him as we backed into the ambulance bay, "Well, we certainly did get to see a lot of Boston today, didn't we, John? We rode the trolley, and then we rode in an ambulance. We saw the museum, and now we're going to see the hospital."

This counsellor deserves a lot of credit. I told her how impressed I was that she had reacted so well to the whole thing. She thanked me for the compliment, but mostly she just shrugged it off as part of her job. If only she knew just how quickly some people call 911--for absolutely trivial problems--then perhaps she'd understand why I was so impressed.