There’s no one who hasn’t experienced it who understands how serious it is when the bells stop ringing, who can comprehend what it’s like to take that last available breath and feel the facepiece of the mask smack in hard against your face like a dry-cleaning bag, your breath caught and stopped cold by something out of your control. It’s impossible to describe the abrupt and panicked slap of being stopped halfway through a breath, so that your diaphragm is still trying to pull air inwards even though there’s nothing left for your lungs to draw. Your body is trying to breathe, and in the process is using so much of its musculature that the sudden stop actually hurts. It’s almost like falling and knocking the breath out of yourself, except you can feel the effort flexing your ribs.
One of the things training officers sometimes do—one of the things I’ve done—is to creep up behind a rookie firefighter in the smokehouse, when his mask is blacked out and he can see nothing, and turn his tank valves off. You want to see what the firefighter will do, how he will react, whether he’ll check the override valve on the front of the regulator—it’s a different shape and feel than any of the other valves—and whether he’ll take the time to reach back and find the main valve behind his back before giving up. It takes tremendous self-control not to simply stand up and tear your mask right off your face and suck in a great heaving breath of whatever’s out there in the air all around you.
That first dream—that first needling dream—started to prick a small hole in my confidence, in my belief that I had everything under control. Later on, that lost control would start to prick holes in my days as well as my nights.
An early June morning and the pager had gone off, because there was a car in Healey’s Pond and no one had any idea how long it had been in there.
A new-looking Tempo had gone up and over the guardrail and down into deep-enough water that we could only see the dome of the roof from where we stood, looking down through water from the bank. Standing by the guardrail, I wondered just how anyone even saw it down there, or at least saw enough through the peaty brown water to stop and look more carefully.
We couldn’t tell if there was anyone in the car, and we didn’t want to wait for the divers. You call for divers and they’ll suit up, the cold-water rescue team from St. John’s, but it takes time for them to track down the whole team and get the gear on the road. So Mike Reid put on one of the floater suits from the rescue and walked into the pond, and every time he kicked himself down under the water, he bobbed back up again like an orange cork.
Once we knew there was no one in the car, we were busting up laughing, all the time trying not to let anyone see in the cars that slowed down every time they came around the corner and spotted our lights.
Finally, Mike got himself completely inside the car, and the flotation suit held him stuck tight up against the roof like an air bubble, so that he had to pull himself around by holding on to the car’s interior. He managed to get the registration out of the glove compartment, and the police called the woman who owned the car, and she said that her son had had it the night before but he was home asleep in bed now, thank you very much.
“So, is your car in the driveway, then?” we heard the police officer ask her on the phone. We couldn’t hear the answer.
NINE
When I graduated from university, it was suddenly time to move. Time to find work, even if that meant moving hundreds of miles to Toronto. At least that was the plan, and I thought it was a good one.
After we left Wolfville, I didn’t plan on ever fighting fires again. I’d only been in the department for a little more than a year and a half, on call every single night, but leaving the department was actually more difficult than leaving my family and heading off to college had been. I’d married my high school sweetheart, we’d finished college together, and like many people in the Atlantic provinces we were heading for Toronto. Barby was going to go to art school and I was going to find a full-time job—any full-time job. By then I was the only arts graduate in my family, with an honours degree in philosophy and not very much in the way of solid prospects.
I’d changed, too. For months, as Barby watched me get more and more involved with the fire department, I had been telling her less and less about the most serious calls. It just didn’t seem important. Well, that’s not true. It did seem important, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through all the detail of explaining why it was so darned important to me, and why that should have anything to do with us.
But that was only half of it. I was already aware that nobody else in the department ever seemed to have the need to talk about anything, to work through anything. I needed to explain how hard it all was without feeling foolish—that I loved riding the truck through the town and along the back roads, but that when we reached a car accident I thought I was the only one who felt like a fraud. But there just didn’t seem to be any way to tell that to anyone. I couldn’t explain that I had all the training, knew exactly what to do, but still had a lingering fear that I was somehow just going through the motions, that someone else would do a far better job.
At twenty-two, I wasn’t aware how many people spend a lot of their life feeling exactly that way, whether they’re journalists or firefighters or cops. I didn’t let on to anyone that I could be jarred enough by the sight of blood on my latex gloves that I could stand by the side of the pumper, waiting to head back to the station, and just stare at the scattered scarlet drops on my hands. I didn’t explain that torn-up cars have a kind of ragged, savage newness that barely lasts overnight before the shiny, exposed metal begins to cloud over with fine rust.
I preferred the idea of a clean break from the fire department, getting away from all that before anyone figured out I was a fake. But it turned out that the break was full of jangly edges and unfinished business, full of a sense of loss that nagged at me at the oddest times.
Another firefighter, Peter Jadis, left the department at the same time I did, heading for a career in the RCMP, and our colleagues got us drunk and left us wandering on the fire chief’s lawn. I saw the chief look out between his curtains, shake his head and pull them closed again. Laughing, we urinated on the mailbox post, while the firefighters who had brought us there climbed in their cars and drove away. The chief hadn’t come to the party, too used to recruiting and training young firefighters only to have them move away after college.
Turning in my gear, initialling the list of equipment I was returning, and handing over my pager and the key to the fire station was brutally hard, especially for someone who hadn’t yet experienced much of the change that life usually brings. I was barely out of school, my family was still living in the same Halifax house I had lived in almost all my life, and I wasn’t familiar with the draining idea that there is a point at which scores of things suddenly exist only in your memory. It wasn’t until my parents retired, sold the house and moved to Victoria, B.C., that I realized a home could just disappear, moving from the concrete to the intangible in a mere moment. Suddenly, everything that had been our family home became just scattered electrons zipping around my head as memories, and I couldn’t even be sure I had the order right.
But I certainly felt a sense of loss the instant I left the fire department in Wolfville. It came with a sinking awareness that the situation couldn’t be undone, that we already had airline tickets to Toronto and plans that wouldn’t be changed. Handing in my key to the station, I felt that a thousand things were slipping away.
I realized that, while I would certainly never forget putting out a huge pile of burning car tires in the middle of a rural road on a freezing cold Halloween night, there wouldn’t be anyone who would know exactly what I meant when I said the night was so dark that the smoke was invisible, showing itself only in the negative when thick curtains of it snuffed out the stars in a rising column of inked black.
That no one would understand the strange, light, feathery feeling I had in my chest as I walked back from the fire department and down a dirt road to the universi
ty’s rugby field, the fall sky streaked with long fingers of orange cloud.
That no one would know there had been a highway crash in Canning where a dump truck loaded with asphalt had rolled over a stalled car at an intersection, the edge of the dump truck’s box clipping off the doorposts and both the heads of the old couple in the car. Some firefighters looked for the heads, others shovelled hot asphalt out of the car and away from the slowly cooking bodies. The couple had been married for decades and were just out for a drive from their Kentville retirement home.
That I’d have no one left to talk to who would understand how a whole fire department could be overcome by laughter talking about a chicken farm fire—a fire that the chief thought was arson at first because there were so many points of origin. The barn was burning, then the front porch caught, then a small fire started under a truck. But it was far simpler than arson—and I still smile thinking about it, and still think that smile is cruel. Burning chickens run and hide. It’s a sight that’s both absolutely horrible and, in its own way, uncontrollably funny. The smell was like burning pillows, the sight like small, angry meteors rushing along the ground in straight and urgent lines.
That no one I would meet could possibly know about the time Captain Stewart got run over by a 300-pound burning sow at a pig barn fire when he broke open the barn doors too quickly; or how, directing firefighters at another barn fire, he sank to his knees in what turned out to be a grassed-over manure pile.
Don’t get me wrong: I was happy in some ways to close the door. I was still having nightmares, mostly ones where I repeatedly messed up simple tasks. I’ve always been bad with knots, and I’d have nightmares where tying the right knot was both essential and impossible, where the only thing in my vision was the rope I was working on. Sometimes it was nightmares about car accidents and barn fires, nightmares that left me disoriented and out of sorts when I woke up, covered with sweat, a newlywed in a downtown Toronto apartment hundreds of miles from any barn.
That little old lady is still one of my most terrifying dreams, and I’ve been having it for twenty years now, six or eight times a year. I have it so often that there’s even a strange familiarity to it, as if the dream can move much more quickly through its opening steps now. I stand next to the car in the heat, listening to the disordered birdsong from the chattering starlings hiding up in the high branches of an elm tree that isn’t even there anymore. In the dream, once I get to the side of the car, her face is like it has always been: still, slightly annoyed, smooth-looking. And for most of the rest of the dream I just wait, smelling fuel oil and gasoline and the fresh, sharp scent of new hay—and there’s no one there but me, because all the other firefighters have left.
Just me, standing by that car with the hose.
Then she opens her eyes, and those eyes look angry and black, the pupils over-large and staring.
That’s all. And I scream myself awake every time.
The nightmares made leaving seem like the right decision, even more so when I heard that my crew from Wolfville had fought a fire at a pesticides warehouse in Canning, and that they were now getting regular blood tests to see how many different chemicals were still in their system. That testing went on for months while provincial health officials tried to determine if there would be lasting effects, the kind of time bomb no one would want to be carrying around inside him.
I had left when I was right on the verge of wanting to look for a job in Wolfville and never leave the department, taking the pieces as they came, choosing something close to a surfing bum’s existence, hopping from short-term job to short-term job in order to be able to stay in the department and keep the wonder of the fire calls. I continued to feel that I’d gotten out just in time, even though our Toronto apartment backed onto an ambulance station and late at night the urgent blurt of the sirens would wake me and I’d feel I should be trying harder to find my gear.
The move didn’t last. The colours couldn’t compete: Toronto, grey and dingy, the work every bit as grey. I spent eighteen months working as a researcher for Southam News at the Queen’s Park legislature, but in my memory it was like you could pack that whole time into less than a handful of Wolfville fire calls.
So, as quickly as we could, we left Toronto so I could take a job in Newfoundland. Barby hadn’t liked art school and was tired of painting in the sunroom of a one-bedroom apartment. She missed her family, and I had a chance to work as a reporter at a new weekly newspaper in St. John’s.
Flying to an interview for the job, we stopped in Halifax for only an hour or so, where my mother had driven out to see us at the airport with a sad expression and a bouquet of hydrangeas, the flowers weeping pale blue petals onto the slick floor. She was close to tears herself, convinced that the move was a step backwards. “Are you sure you really want to do this?” she said.
There’s a question I’ve spent half a lifetime playing in my head.
We ended up in St. John’s anyway. I started working at the Sunday Express, was handed many of the police and fire stories because I knew what they were talking about on the police scanner. I knew the emergency services shorthand, knew that 10-18 meant police and 10-6 was a radio check. That a 10-45 was a report of a dead body, and I’d been on those, too.
Just a few months in at the paper, I was sent out to a Saturday afternoon explosion in an eighteen-wheeler’s gasoline tank trailer. It was a big truck with the company’s name stencilled down both sides of the silver-grey trailer, and by the time I got there it was surrounded by fire equipment and police cars. There was already a crowd, mostly comprising people who stopped when they saw the emergency vehicles; on the edge of an industrial park, the area had been empty when the explosion occurred, and few people knew what had actually happened.
There had been two men working on the tanker trailer, either cleaning the tank or doing some kind of repairs to the inside. The truck was supposed to have been properly vented and clear of gasoline. Apparently, it hadn’t been. One of the workmen was seriously injured, the other dead. One was inside the tank and the other had been on top, over the open hatch, handing in tools.
Standing behind the police tape, I could picture the way it must have happened—enough vapour for an explosion, then a spark as simple as a sharp finger of static electricity, and then the giant wave of plum-coloured flame rolling over the man inside the tank, the pressure building inside the long silver tube, the crushing weight of the explosion collapsing his chest and squashing his stomach, his lungs.
I could even imagine the brief, final, finishing thud of it—the way the trailer would ring like some sort of sonorous explosive bell—and the exact types of injury the man inside the tank would have. Crushed internal organs, especially the lungs, and the deep-tissue tearing that thoracic surgeons call avulsion. Deep flash burns on the exposed skin of his face and hands, the skin charring in an instant, blisters bubbling up later if there was still any circulation at all. If the victim was breathing in when the tank blew, flash burns to his lungs and a virtually instantaneous death. Breathe in, and out, in and out—a 50 percent chance of being caught doing the wrong thing when the explosion hit, swimming towards him like something jellied and well defined.
Firefighters often talk about confronting the “red devil” when they fight fires, embodying fire with some sort of malevolent presence. I always found the whole idea hopelessly overwrought and melodramatic, except I could never shake the notion that there was really something out there, waiting for you. Not an intelligent presence as much as an amorphous, shadowy thing, the kind of black cloud that exists on the edge of your vision in the evening in a darkening house. The sort of thing you glimpse but that always vanishes when you stare straight at it.
I didn’t think the man in the tank could survive. Neither could the onlookers, milling around there outside the fire line. The police issued a two-paragraph press release, but no one would talk about which man had died. I wrote my news story without a doubt in my mind—and it turned out that I was com
pletely wrong. My editor was furious with me: the man on top of the tanker had been killed, thrown clear by the explosion, while the man inside the tank had somehow lived. Explosions are fickle, and timing is everything. Breathe out and you get to live. Breathe in and you die.
In just a few years I’d learn first-hand just how fickle an explosion could be, how it can wrap around you while you’re powerless to do anything but watch. How I could know just how deadly a fuel explosion can be but realize at the same time that there was no chance to run. This knowledge would change the way I looked at everything, from the fire service to my own life. It would be a piece of the puzzle that I would find I could not ignore, exactly because it made perfect sense, and because I would miss every single clue that it was coming.
Years of preparation, and I would not be ready.
When Barby and I moved to Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s, a small town just outside St. John’s, it was to a small, slate-grey house with plenty of mice and so little insulation that we couldn’t afford to keep the heat turned up in the winter. We were seventeen minutes from the nearest fire department, and our insurance company knew all about that and made us pay for it, too. So when the town council decided to start a volunteer department, I found myself at the first meeting, and at every meeting afterwards.
One of the few firefighters in the department with experience, I was picked to be deputy chief right away, and soon we were a department of three pumpers, a rescue truck and a whole bunch of new ground to try to work through. I showed some thirty firefighters how to make chimney chains and packs for chimney fires, and I found myself slingshotted right back to where I had been. Talking about portable pumps and the ponds in the town where we could set up and draft water, about hard suction hoses and fire load and how many backpack water tanks we’d need for brush fires in the heavily wooded town, I was suddenly preplanning all over again.
Burning Down the House Page 8
