Whether it is jumping out of airplanes to fight wildfires or standing behind a stethoscope, these two local Fourth Friday writers give their audiences a behind the scenes perspective of medical and public service professions.

Port Angeles resident Jan Adams, 72, has been a physician for 40 years in the fields of family practice, urgent care and currently works as an emergency room physician at Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles.

Adams said she always has been a writer since she won a national essay contest in high school but has only been reading her work at Fourth Friday Readings — a public gathering and reading of local authors’ work — since March of this year.

The poems Adams shared at Fourth Friday Readings tell the stories of her experiences as a physician and the interactions she had with patients she served long ago. She gives her characters all different names than the original inspirations and said most would not be able to recognize themselves in her work.

“They all gave something to me in the interaction of being a physician and being a patient,” Adams said.

“They made me smile or laugh, caused me joy or they made me feel wonder at the circle of life.”

Adams added she kept a list of many of these interactions and stories of her patients so she could write about them one day. She said so far she has written about 40 of these poems.

One interaction Adams wrote about that she said she always will remember was a patient who was involved in a shooting at a dance hall and came to the emergency room.

“The one that I will not forget was a young woman whose breast was swollen,” she said. “An X-ray showed she was full of shrapnel on one side and the other side was fine.”

The woman insisted she couldn’t have surgery because she was out cheating on her husband that night, and when Adams left to put the woman’s name on a list to have surgery, she came back and the woman was gone.

She said in the poem she wrote, ““Whatever happened to this gal with the cheating breast?”

Fourth Friday facilitator Linda Myers described Adam’s poems as “good dark chocolate; you always want another piece,” when Adams first read her poems at Fourth Friday Readings.

Adams also is known for her published memoir “Football Wife” about her experience being married to Karl Kassulke, a professional football player that used to play for the Minnesota Vikings. She said reflecting back on the time she was married to Kassulke, writing allowed her to decompartamentalize experiences she shut away for so long.

“The divorce and marriage was kind of in a box put away and I realized at his funeral how much I had not dealt with it,” she said. “The book was basically a reexamination of that whole life and what happened, and it was very cathartic.”

Since, Adams said she has continued writing but between her career, being out of work for four years due to cancer and then returning to a physician job in the emergency room, she got busy.

“This is probably one of the first times I have ever been reading my poems publicly,” Adams said. “My husband encouraged me to go to this because he wanted me to get back into writing.”

Adams said she hopes to continue reading her poems at Fourth Friday Readings. Her poems also will be included in an anthology of local authors called, “In the Words of Olympic Peninsula Authors.”

Smokejumping

For Sequim writer Howard Chadwick, 85, writing has been a way to give a historical perspective on his service as a smokejumper, U.S. Army veteran and his experience in the U.S. Forest Service, among other personal topics.

Chadwick wrote for a living writing various natural resource studies for the U.S. Department of Interior such as “The Oregon Trail” but also had some of his creative work, such as his poem, “Blaha’s Roman Candle” published in 2010 in the National Smokejumper Association Quarterly Magazine.

He was a smokejumper — a wildland firefighter that parachutes out of airplanes into remote areas to fight wildfires — for one season in Missoula, Mont., and wrote about several of these experiences through poems he published in his book, “Frog Legs.”

“It’s unfortunate people don’t hear more (of smokejumping) because there are people in the Forest Service Administration that would like to cut the budget for smokejumping,” Chadwick said.

He added the emphasis lately has been on big fires in “the urban interface” that have been getting all the attention.

“But what they don’t seem to realize is that big fires start small and a certain percentage of those small fires smokejumpers can get there quicker than anyone else,” Chadwick said.

Chadwick said as a smokejumper, “we jumped out of planes and had suits designed to protect us if we landed in trees,” he said.

When he was jumping, the suits were made of heavy canvas with a high collar and he wore a football helmet with a catcher’s mask. The suit also had a big pocket in one of the pant legs with a let down rope to get down from the trees.

“And hope we didn’t run out of rope before we hit the ground,” he said.

Chadwick also wrote written poems about his experience in the U.S. Army as an explosive disposal officer. His poem, “Crash Site,” discusses his experience responding to a devastating United Airlines flight that flew into Medicine Bow Peak, Wyo., one of the worst civilian airline disasters to date.

“The one that’s probably most interesting to people is the plane crash,” he said, because it has historical significance.

“It’s kind of fun now to write about things I used to do that I can’t do anymore,” Chadwick said. “It’s a way of reliving it.”

Chadwick has been reading his work at Fourth Friday Reading since its inception. His work lately has been reflecting on many of his life experiences, such as his book called, “Time Out,” full of narrative poems about the time he spent with his wife Emily.

The Writers on the Spit hosts Fourth Friday Readings monthly at the Lodge at Sherwood Village, 660 W. Evergreen Farm Way, Sequim. For more information visit https://www.facebook.com/events/284504471978596/.