The big mistake I made was not talking, not to anyone. It was choosing not to talk even when the moment offered itself.
I can remember deciding in grade seven that I would never cry in public again, no matter how hard I got knocked down on the playground—and after that I didn’t cry anymore. Red Rover was banned at my grade school because Mark Dykstra had lost one of his front teeth, but we went ahead and played it anyway, and I got knocked down repeatedly and hard, trying to break through the other team’s linked arms.
I cried a lot, until the day I decided not to.
I have no idea when I decided I couldn’t take the risk of having someone say, “If you can’t take it, just quit fighting fires.” I don’t know when I decided I just couldn’t explain how hard it was all hitting me, or when I began to think that there was no one left who was interested enough to listen to it all anyway. Bottling it all up seemed to be the best choice, despite the developing nightmares.
Nightmares there were, and nightmares there are: Accident victims who stand next to me while I yell at them to call for help, but they can’t dial the telephone because their thumbs have been ripped off. Dreams where I’m trapped at a fire because a burning cargo net has fallen on me and the ropes are carefully burning stripes into my skin. Dreams where people I’m carrying keep slipping out of my arms and vanishing in front of me in the smoke.
With my Newfoundland department I had hints of what would eventually become regular and terrifying daytime fugues: I’d be sitting in front of my newsroom computer and the words on the screen would vanish. In their place, I’d be watching an accident scene unfold as clearly as if I were actually there. I had the distinct feeling by then that it was too late to start explaining, that any sensible person I talked to would have to decide I was going crazy.
The newsroom scanner would bark out that a fire station somewhere in the city was going to a “Code-4 medical,” and I’d automatically search my pants for my gloves, seeing someone prone on a floor instead of my keyboard, preparing to do CPR.
As reasonable as keeping it all secret seemed to me then, I know now that it wasn’t the right decision. In fact, it was clearly my own personal wrong turn. Even three years in, it was ingrained, and getting worse. Daily.
Now I can go through a pamphlet on post-traumatic stress disorder and recognize every single symptom. I have the sleeplessness and the cinematic nightmares. I’ve got the memories that unroll in my head like movies I can’t walk away from, complete with sound and colour and smell, day or night. It’s like living with movies that sometimes sneak up on me out of the blue, and that are, at other times, triggered by a familiar sequence of events or even a particular stretch of road. I’ve got the unfathomable irritability and the sudden, inexplicable flashes of anger, and most of all the constant need to crawl away from conflict. I’ve walked out of arguments at home and found myself a block and a half away, walking along the sidewalk in my socks, my head spinning with words that just won’t come out.
I’d become an unlikely poster boy for a kind of mental illness I knew nothing about when it first fingered its way into my life. And the irony of it is that I thought it was only happening to me. I should have known better. I was a person who spent plenty of time observing that people not only have remarkably similar physical reactions but remarkably similar mental ones as well. I thought my problems were unique, that I was unique.
When I started on the trucks in Wolfville, it all seemed simple enough: you did your job, and then you hung up the stress at the same time you stood in front of your equipment stall and hung up your bunker gear. We were tough guys, all. The injured and dead were supposed to be gone when the ambulance doors slammed closed, or when the doctors took over doing the chest compressions. Wipe off the dirt and the sweat and the pain, and don’t think about it anymore.
Even in Wolfville, I had scattered terrifying dreams, ones where I would wake up with my chest heaving, drenched in sweat. I just thought I was a bit different, that things might be affecting me more because I was overly sensitive. Besides, I’d always had frightening dreams, so it wasn’t really a surprise to me that I’d found something new to be afraid of, something that now wasn’t likely to be hiding under the bed.
But even then—especially then—I kept a careful cap on talking about it. I felt I’d gotten one chance, despite everything, to be a firefighter, and I wasn’t going to mess it up. You can, if you’re not careful enough, cut yourself out of the herd. You can single yourself out, make yourself a target for ridicule, just plain focus too much attention on yourself.
I’ve spent a lifetime on the path of least resistance when dealing with people emotionally. I’m not good at confrontation. I choose hard silence over explanation, and while that can sometimes seem like the best route, a point arrives where suddenly, dramatically, it isn’t. I know that point intimately now, the point where that path suddenly ends, and I also know that, once you’ve reached it, there’s so much stuff piled up in the back of your head that you can’t expect ever to come close to digging yourself out from under it.
The dreams were the most disturbing part because, even though they started slowly, they developed a kind of super-reality that’s hard to explain. Their scenes and colours would flare inside my head, flare and then stay with me for days afterwards, bright and convincing, like flashbacks of real memory. Sometimes the fragments felt so real that it actually seemed as if I had dredged up a memory of something I had been forcing myself to forget; sometimes I’m unsure if I can dismiss all of them as dreams.
They’re like a roar, like flesh and screaming steam whistles, and you feel like you have to press your hands over your eyes and ears and just hold everything back—but you can’t. They unroll anyway, frame by vicious frame, sharp as razors touching in spots where they already know you’re soft.
He’s always very matter-of-fact, that auger-trapped farmer, always matter-of-fact, whenever I see him again. He carries on a conversation with me as if we were standing at a bar, no auger in sight, but he’s next to a wall, and it’s not until I look around behind it that I see his arm is as knotted and wound as an old piece of rope, and his fingers are pointed in the wrong direction, as if they had been put back on haphazardly or upside down.
I’m pretty certain, in real life, that he would have lost most of those fingers. I can’t imagine how he wouldn’t have, even though you often don’t get to hear how things turn out, months or even years down the road. I wouldn’t be surprised if he lost the arm below the elbow: two hours is a long time, and his arm came out limp and shattered, raw meat wrapped up in torn fabric and still oozing blood steadily, as if it didn’t ever intend to stop. But in that dream he shows me his hand, his arm, turns it over, shows me the front and back, let-tingme know just why it’s my fault. I’m not allowed to explain that it’s not. I back up and back up, but never get far enough away that I can’t smell his breath and the funky lead-pencil aroma that comes off his torn jacket.
Sight and smell, touch and sound: I’m sure firefighting sank so deep into me because it is so utterly visceral. The metal scent of blood, the dark orange of oxygen-starved, darkened-down flames, the heavy thunk of something exploding near you, hidden in thick smoke. I think it wormed into my head on almost every level, from the ethical to the practical to the descriptive, crawled in there and then just wouldn’t come back out. It’s the sharpness of colours, the strength of smells, the feel of flesh, warm or cold or clammy, that lets these sensations burrow so far in, spreading doubt.
The problem is that, to do the job right—to really be the kind of professional firefighter people expect to find on the other side of their front door—I knew I had to feel safe and carefully distanced from everything that happened around me. Not distanced from compassion and understanding, but able to have a small-enough serving of that compassion to do every single thing you expect a firefighter to do—so that you can throw up all over him and not be embarrassed, so that you can cry and not think that somehow you’re being
measured or judged.
Most of the time I did have enough of that professionalism, at least until something suddenly pierced the cocoon and drove me to my knees.
I’m ashamed to say I had no control over what caused it or when it would happen. Knowing that the right circumstance would just stop me in my tracks—and it absolutely will, even now—leaves me perpetually on edge, always waiting for the penny to drop. Sometimes the trigger was as simple as someone accidentally phoning the telephone number that activated our pager system and then hanging up. I would spend hours wondering if there was someone out there waiting fruitlessly, trusting that we would appear.
But worse: I’d arrive on a crash scene and feel that pull, the pull I was sure very few other firefighters ever had to deal with, that strange point/counterpoint of light and colour and image that would certainly and finally disconnect me from the thing I was supposed to do. Distraction, I suppose, but distraction in the way a person can focus on ripples on the ocean and lose sight of the boat cutting through the waves.
I was already starting to do it away from fire scenes, my head locking up on a familiar image while my feet kept walking, my hands held still in mid-air while everyone went on with dinner. At family meals, especially during the holidays, it felt like my body was detaching from the world, the celebrations and presents and meals going on while I spun in a small personal orbit, convinced that the fact I was clearly in trouble should be as obvious to everyone else as if my skin had suddenly peeled off and dropped at my feet, leaving only raw flesh and nerve endings behind. Someone else cutting the turkey—small family disputes arising the way they do in any extended family—but with me screaming in my head that none of this was really happening.
A walking open wound—like third-degree burns.
Sometimes it was a simple dream. One starts with a pair of wheel tracks heading through wet snow across the shoulder of a road and down a steep embankment, where there are two cars almost out of sight. When I get to them, one driver is slightly injured but safe enough in his car, while the other driver is missing. There’s a star of cracks in the windshield, the point where his head hit the glass, but the driver is just plain gone. This driver won’t be found, and I keep getting caught up because things are sticking out of the ground and grabbing at my feet.
I know where the dreams come from, but that doesn’t always help. I know that often there are pieces from particular fire calls built into the dreams, so that they’re a collage of fact and fiction. Sometimes there’s more fact. Parts of the lost-driver dream must come from a night we found a driver dead and lying on his back in a huge bed of green raspberry canes, the fruit bright red in the light from our big sealed-beam flashlights, forty feet or more from his car. The car was on its roof, and when we got there all the doors were closed and locked, all the windows rolled up, too, as if the driver had climbed out and carefully made sure everything was sealed up tight before he headed on his way.
But the windshield was starred where his head had struck, and his eyes were open when we found him, looking upwards in the pitch-dark, as if he had just decided to lie down and look at the stars. The last thing he must have seen was the North Star and its slowly turning dipper. I remember standing over him and then turning my head to follow his gaze upwards. Hardly a mark on him, just a reddish blotch above his left eye. He hadn’t been thrown from the car: he had walked. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like in his head, neurons misfiring, switches opening and closing, lights on—then, all at once, nobody home. He didn’t even know that the connections weren’t being made anymore. Maybe everything around him was just disconcertingly wrong, and maybe he felt lost without ever knowing why. Little mental flares, small suns erupting, sharps and flats appearing in songs that you should already know really well.
Disconcertingly wrong. And how familiar to me is that.
Sometimes you get only a handful of clear words on the pager, and often the message is hard to understand. Sometimes it’s wildly misleading. Sometimes it’s a green house and other times a greenhouse.
Eddie Sharpe and I raced the rescue across from the St. Philip’s side of town for a structure fire in a green house on Cart Road, only to find that the building was a ten-foot-square backyard plastic greenhouse, and that the fire had been brought under control with a garden hose before we got there.
We had hauled the great big truck around the narrow country roads, lights on and siren howling, taking the turns loose and yanking on the chain for the huge twin air horns when a car in front of us hadn’t pulled over onto the shoulder fast enough—only to find, as with so many situations at a fire, that we were working with dangerously incomplete information.
Another pageout for a greenhouse fire, not that long afterwards, and it turned out to be a huge blaze, one you could see from miles away. I saw it as soon as my truck made the corner onto Old Broad Cove Road and I was on my way up the hill heading straight towards it. It was a big commercial greenhouse—hundreds of feet of heavyweight plastic sheeting, the whole thing burning from end to end and dripping down inside with fat blue-burning drops that made zipping noises as they fell to the floor and set other things ablaze.
We were fighting the fire for ten minutes or so before one of the other firefighters noticed that one end of the building was filled with large plastic bags of agricultural ammonium nitrate fertilizer, cheek by jowl with two tanks of furnace oil—the kind of combination that, mixed right, can make for a massive explosion. If the tanks or their lines had failed, we could have faced an unexpected and huge explosion, the kind that snuffs out whole departments and flicks heavy pumpers aside like Dinky Toys. The plastic bags on the fertilizer were already peeling back, and we had attacked the fire harder than we might have if we’d known what was in there.
Sometimes it’s the sort of thing you really only put together afterwards, when you’re rolling up the hose and the whole world smells like burned plastic.
I remember standing in the remains of that greenhouse, just the burnt metal structural members left arcing up over our heads, the winter wind blowing through. I stared at the long rows of blackened and curling plants—nascent poinsettias all, preparing for the Christmas season—and wondered how the owner would ever make up for all the damage with no time left to get plants started again before Christmas. I hadn’t had a moment to consider that a freighter of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil blew apart Galveston, Texas, and that the same combination of chemicals had destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
FIFTEEN
The last fire before Bill Weagle’s heart attack was a barn fire in Waterville, a good half-hour from Wolfville even up on the open highway, running flat out with the siren wailing the whole way.
I had ridden the back of the big pumper to get there, and I had gotten on the big square truck so late—the truck already rolling— that the driver didn’t even know I was on the back until we got to the fire. Pumper Eight had a bigger water tank than our other Wolfville trucks, one thousand heavy gallons, so it was tall and square across the back, providing more shelter than the other trucks. The shelter also meant you didn’t know where you were going, so you came upon fires and accidents with no clear idea how you’d gotten there.
That’s how it was at this barn. I have absolutely no frame of reference beyond the fact that it was in Waterville. I remember that the farmyard was all churned up by trucks from several departments, that the barn sat in a dip in the land with what looked like a small frozen pond down in the valley behind it, and that there were hoses snaking all over the place by the time we got there. Other than the buildings and pasture caught in the white puddle from the spotlights, it was pitch-black. I can still picture it, a simple diagram of the insides of the fences and the long, sloped ramp to the big double doors, but in my memory the whole farm exists in isolation, like an island you’re taken to by boat, blindfolded.
Bill Weagle had been in one of the jump seats on the front of the pumper, so he wasn’t much warmer, but h
e was at least out of the wind. The fire captain paired us up as soon as the truck stopped, telling us to get into the Scott air packs and be ready to take the Stang into the barn.
The Stang was the big water cannon off the top of the pumper, a huge spiral of metal designed to take the torque out of the rushing water and straighten the current inside the hoses. It could put hundreds of gallons of water a minute on anything you pointed it at. You attached it to its heavy base and then set it up anywhere its trailing hoses could reach. It took twin two-and-a-half-inch hose lines through its intakes, and the column of water it shot could reach the ridgepole of a barn from the floor. It could knock a firefighter over in an instant. Not only that, but the water rushing around its open spiral pinned the Stang to the ground; it was immobile once you had it set up. The weight of the fully charged hoses and the unit itself was more than two firefighters could haul, so our job would be to drag it well into the barn before the pump operator turned the water on. Once inside, we directed the water by turning or raising and lowering the nozzle, but little else: the pressure was up to the pump operator, back at the truck, and we’d be stuck wherever we set up unless we could radio back to shut it down and let us move.
Even with radios, it’s hard to be understood clearly on the fire-ground, especially when there are six or more departments using the same mutual aid frequency, and especially because Bill and I were wearing the big old bubble mask of the Scott air packs that night. The Plexiglas masks jutted out well away from our faces, so we’d have to hold the microphone as close to our mouths as we could and then scream at the top of our lungs, trying to get some sound out over the deep hiss of water boiling through the nozzle. The Stang made a noise that overwhelmed and pushed away all other sounds. Its nozzle is like a waterfall but worse, somewhere between a thunderous shower and the sound of endlessly ripping heavy cardboard.
Burning Down the House Page 13
