SPS students transform a Saturday morning into a lesson in leadership, teamwork and compassion at a city food pantry.
September 25, 2025
St. Paul’s School Spanish Teacher Meredith Finch spent part of her summer fighting wildfires in Alaska.
BY JANA F. BROWN
In the summer of 2006, after completing her first year at Tufts University, St. Paul’s School Spanish Teacher Meredith Finch was mobilized to her first wildfire in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. To reach the remote destination, Finch and her firefighting crew had to paddle canoes to the site along the Canadian border. When they arrived, however, there was a problem — their camp was on fire.
Fast forward nearly two decades to this summer, when Finch spent two weeks in Alaska confronting the 12,000-acre Bonanza Creek Fire. It was a return to a familiar pursuit after a 12-year hiatus to earn her master’s at Boston College, build her teaching career and raise her daughter.
Finch inherited an affinity for firefighting from her father, who joined the Meriden (NH) Volunteer Fire Department after the family relocated from Massachusetts when Meredith was five. From a young age, Finch’s routine included accompanying her father to the station to wash the red fire engines, and as a student at Kimball Union Academy, she started her formal training as a member of KUA’s student Fire Brigade. At 16, she joined the Meriden department as a full-time member. Each time the pager pinged, she was dismissed from class to respond to calls. Sometimes she would catch rides with teachers who knew to pick her up on their way to the station, where emergencies ranged from chimney fires and gas leaks to saving neighbors’ homes.
“For me, it turned into, ‘Of course, this is what you do,’” she says. “This is part of living in a small town. This is part of living in a community and being an active participant.”
A fire lieutenant in Meriden suggested Finch might enjoy wildland firefighting and arranged for her to complete three certification courses at her home station. While completing her degree in Spanish and dance at Tufts, Finch moonlighted for the State of New Hampshire, deploying with 20-person crews called up on as little as eight hours’ notice to combat fires throughout the country. She was a member of the first New Hampshire crew ever sent to Alaska, where she helped to battle the Rex Creek sector of the 630,000-acre Railbelt Complex fire and in 2010 worked as a seasonal employee for a federal Hotshot crew based out of Illinois. While also working as a substitute teacher, she spent three years as a wildland firefighter with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources before enrolling in graduate school.
After more than a decade of focusing on her teaching career and child, Finch decided it was time to return to the fire line. She passed her fitness training on Mother’s Day 2025 and, by July 16, was in Ester, Alaska, outside of Fairbanks to fight the Bonanza Creek Fire.
I’ve been doing this so long that firefighting is a part of my identity, of who I am at my core.
— Meredith Finch, SPS Spanish Teacher
Alaska’s terrain presents distinct challenges for firefighters, Finch explains, as crews encounter thick undergrowth and highly flammable spruce pockets; they must pull back moss with hand tools to expose root networks and eliminate heat that threatens to travel and reignite.
“You take off your glove and stick the back of your hand in there to make sure there’s no heat extending into the green,” Finch says, describing the critical boundary between scorched areas and unburned vegetation.
The 2025 mission in Alaska was strategic, Finch adds, mostly working the edges closest to Fairbanks to eliminate smoldering areas that could potentially creep toward the city.
“In wildland firefighting, the fires are so big that we’re not putting them out, we’re stopping the spread,” Finch says, noting that the approach varies dramatically depending on terrain, fuel type and access to water and equipment. The firefighting community is also varied, drawing from many walks of life — teachers, construction workers, forest rangers, college students. “It’s a strange bond you build with folks on the fire line,” Finch notes. “We scatter to the winds but run into each other somewhere along the way.”
As a teacher at St. Paul’s, Finch appreciates how her summer work offers valuable perspective for her students and herself. When the worst outcome in firefighting is the threat to life, everything else gets put into context.
In a 2023 chapel talk, Finch shared with the SPS community the firefighting guideline of LCES (Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes and Safety Zones) as a framework for approaching life challenges. “Do you have people looking out for you?” she asked. “How do you communicate effectively with people above you, people next to you and below you in the hierarchy? Do you have a place where you can go if you need to disengage?”
Despite the inherent danger of stepping into the unknown, Finch isn’t typically afraid of the fire itself. What’s more unnerving are the times when she finds herself on a ridge at 8,000 feet or paddling across a lake in a metal canoe during a lightning storm. Instead, she maintains a healthy respect for the dangers posed by the unpredictable whims of nature. Genuine fear, she asserts, would be incompatible with doing the work.
“If you were to go to sea and you were terrified of water,” she asks, “would you be able to do the job effectively? I’ve been doing this so long that firefighting is a part of my identity, of who I am at my core.”
And, for that reason, Finch already knows where she wants to be next summer.
