told her she couldn’t be on the team because she was a girl. That wasn’t enough for her, so she tried out again next year. She made the team, and was on the allstar team for two years after that. “Maybe that ‘You can’t do that because you’re a girl’ idea kind of motivated me to be like, ‘Oh yeah? I can do it if he can do it’’’ she said. Being a firefighter wasn’t always the plan for her, though. She was seeking something exciting; something active; something in the public servant field. Originally, her plan was to go into law enforcement or criminal justice, but this job at the fire station opened up and she thought, “Why not?” “One day I saw they had an opening here, and I said, ‘Wow, that looks neat.” She tried out with no prior experience, and went through an intense academy and emergency medical technician training. “They’re trying to get you ready for a lifetime of doing this,” she said. Part of the training, of course, was running into live fires. She said they would set up donated old houses to be ready to burn, room by room, and they’d run straight into it for training. To some, that’s terrifying. To her, it was just pure excitement. “It’s not like the movies,” she said. “You’re basically blind crawling around. It was always exciting.” Now she works 24-hour shifts — 7:45 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. — and spends the day checking reports, taking emergency calls, exercising, doing employee trainings, cleaning equipment, sleeping a bit, and staying on her toes for a possible emergency. “It’s just a normal shift to me. 8-5 is normal for someone else, but this is just normal for me,” she said. After her shift ends at 8 a.m. — typically with coffee in hand — she goes home to take care of her two children. However, she used to go straight to yet another male-dominated field: construction. “I enjoyed working in male dominated fields. I excelled at that because I felt very confident in my mental and physical abilities and the challenges of it, too.” But, after 22 years with Greenville Fire/Rescue, Davis-Christ said the fact that she works in such a male-dominated job doesn’t even cross her mind. “They look at me as just one of them,” she said. “And that’s what I’ve always wanted.”
Her — December 2018
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