Each piece magic and different, as sharp as cut glass in your memory, set in place all the deeper because of the excitement and fear and apprehension that accompany it. Small triumphs, small miracles, and sometimes just small pieces of chance that save people too. And me—not knowing that I was less than a year away from hanging it all up anyway, from turning in my gear and just walking away. Despite the way everything was fragmenting, I wouldn’t have believed I was about to leave then if someone had come right up to me and said it to my face.
The day before Christmas Eve we were in a new subdivision in Portugal Cove. It was pouring rain and something had gone wrong where the electricity came into one of the houses.
I was late getting there, all the way on the other side of town, and a firefighter came up from the basement and said the rainwater was pouring straight down through the breaker panel and puddling on the floor. When I got to the top of the stairs, I could smell something high and electrical, like burning paint, only sharper.
I told the homeowners I was going to have their power pulled, and they’d have to be out of the house until the panel dried and an electrical inspector could come in. While the power crew was up working on the pole, the woman pleaded with me to reconsider, because their extended family was supposed to be coming over for dinner the next day. She argued, saying it isn’t really that bad, is it, and couldn’t we just wait and see?
But I wouldn’t let them stay, not with the thought that someone could be electrocuted or that a short-circuit might somehow set the house on fire. It wasn’t much of a Christmas present, because I was sending them out of their own house and it was going to cost them money for repairs, both having an electrician in and then getting the power company to come in and hook up the service again.
I stayed long enough to see that they were getting packed up, loading presents and clothes into the back of their car in the pouring rain. It was getting darker and we used the big spotlight flashlights to help them get around the rapidly cooling house as the rain turned back into snow.
I could afford to be stubborn, because I got to go home to my own bed.
TWENTY-FOUR
There are few firefighters who haven’t been called out in the middle of celebrating Christmas. For me, the one that sticks out was a structure fire where the roof of a house had burned because a chimney pipe for a wood stove got too hot. It was a stark contrast: leaving my own house, the living room still stuffed with the wreckage of unwrapped and excessive presents, and ending up in an undecorated three-room shack whose only resident was a tattooed man with no shirt who had recently been released from prison.
Inside the house, there was no sign whatsoever that Christmas even existed.
I’d left turkey and gravy at home, cooling on my plate in the sunlit dining room. The man sat in the rescue, shivering slightly, while we ripped down the entire ceiling in his living room to make sure the fire hadn’t spread. He said thanks when we left, standing next to the pile of fibreboard ceiling tiles we had swept into one corner of the living room. No reason to say “Merry Christmas.”
Sometimes it happens at the grocery store or on the way to pick up Chinese food, or even when you’re on the beach throwing rocks into the ocean with your kids. Sometimes your pager goes off in the middle of an argument, or when absolutely everyone is crying. Sometimes it’s more of an escape than an emergency.
Next thing you know, you’re saying you have to go, regardless of the situation, and it’s like having an unfair and altruistic advantage over everyone else—you have to go, even though, deep down, that’s just exactly what you want to be doing anyway.
I remember a cold, snowy morning, Barby still nursing and tormented with the pain of mastitis, Philip a three-year-old and Peter an infant, both howling at the top of their lungs. The bedroom was bright with mid-winter light, hard and electric and blue-white, the morning sun breaking through the cloud on and off and reflecting off the snow, up against the white of the ceiling.
It was the rolling nightmare every family has at some point or another, when you want to hold your head in your hands, cover your ears and wish it would all stop for a moment or two, just so you’d have time to gather even a handful of your thoughts. And my pager went off: a car off the road and overturned in a ditch on Old Broad Cove Road, just up the hill from us. Motor vehicle accident with injuries. Barby, through tears, saying “Do you have to go?” and me already into the countdown in my head, already thinking about my bunker gear and the sorts of injuries there always are in rollovers.
I also remember, just then, the distinct feeling of being torn raggedly in half—of knowing that I should really be in both places, that there was no way to justify leaving, and at the same time no way to justify staying. It was the kind of moment that’s almost solid in your memory, nothing moving, as if someone has just poured fixative all over you, so that you’re glued in place with clear, hard plastic.
It seems to me that I can remember exactly where everything was in the room—the Navajo blanket across the foot of the bed, the blond dresser, the big staring eye of the bedroom mirror, even the angle of the curtains and the rumpled cream duvet on the bed. And although time seemed to be ticking impossibly slowly, I was already moving towards the fire department radio, a decision I had made without ever clearly going through the process of making it.
Backing down the driveway, the tires of the truck left tracks through the snow to the gravel, as if someone had come to visit and left.
It would have been far easier if the accident had been more serious, or if the 911 operator had come back onto the radio and called us off. A more serious accident and I would have had some independent justification for my actions. If they’d called us off, I could have turned around and spun right back up the driveway.
But neither happened.
The car in the accident was a small red Fiesta, a Fiesta in a winter when we’d already seen three of them roll. It was upside down with its wheels straight up to the sky, the front wheels slightly turned, and snow starting to collect on its underside. The roof packed tight into the narrow ditch, a snow flurry blowing in across the bay and pouring down all around us. On the side of the road as I pulled up, Angela Collins, our only female firefighter, was dragging on the pants to her bunker gear, the snowflakes settling in her long red hair and onto her shoulders, and she was jumping on one foot, trying to force her other foot down through the quilted inside of the pants, so that she almost defined the urgency of the moment.
At that point the accident was the fixed image I was getting used to seeing, frames that flashed by as individual, locked images. But in hindsight, there were a number of pieces that I missed, and that I should have seen and found a way to put together. Like the fact that the snow was covering the bottom of the car evenly instead of melting on a still-hot exhaust system, a sure sign that the vehicle had been in the ditch awhile. Like the fact that the only footprints around the car were obviously made by the boots of the other firefighters, none by an occupant.
As it turned out, the car had rolled before the morning had even brightened from dark blue, an accident created by the combination of snow, dark and someone coming off a night shift. The driver had simply climbed out and walked to a nearby house to phone her mother, closing the car door neatly behind her.
So we checked the car out thoroughly, and then started the mandatory secondary survey, working out in a circle from the car to make sure no one had walked away only to topple over from their injuries.
There was no one to find, and that should have been it. I should have been able simply to head home then—but the car was leaking gasoline into the ditch. I could see the slight sheen on the water, moving slowly downhill, so a tow truck had to be called, and someone had to wait, and the trucks had to be ready in case another call came in, because the snow was still battering fatly down, the road greasy now with the passing cars, morning traffic packing the slush into hard white ice.
So I stayed with my pickup, the flashing light
twirling on the dash, until the tow truck got there. Then I directed traffic while the big steel cable played out and the Fiesta rolled back onto its wheels and came up, dented, out of the ditch. In my head I was trying to figure out just where one set of responsibilities ended and another began.
I realized then that, in my own way, I had crossed some sort of Rubicon, that I had made a choice I was unlikely ever to be able to undo, a choice, embarrassingly enough, about just where I wanted to be. That I’d rather be dealing with the external battles of fires and accidents than with the internal battles of everyday life. That I’d rather have things imposed on me than have them surround me, growing like guilt-filled vegetation.
It was a choice I was already making subtly anyway. Often I was the last one out of the fire station, ostensibly to make sure the doors were properly locked, but also because I liked to be there alone in the quiet, surrounded by the big trucks hunkered down and waiting.
If anyone knows this, I do—I know there are lots of things that can’t ever really be undone, honest apologies or not.
Break someone’s ribs doing CPR and you know you’re running the risk of puncturing their liver with the jagged ends of bone working up and down. But you can’t unbreak those ribs, and you can’t stop either, so you work with what you’ve got, and tell yourself that they’re old anyway, that their bones were probably frail and thinning.
Things get rationalized. Forgotten, if you’re lucky.
But never undone.
If I see a crumpled duvet, especially an off-white one, cotton, I’m right back in that bedroom, doomed to make the wrong decision either way. Stay, and maybe someone dies. Go, and maybe something else dies instead.
You’re supposed to be a professional firefighter, the one who never lets anyone—or anything—die. You don’t get to just give up.
Afterwards, you’re supposed to let it run off you, let it blow away like ash. The awful part was that, more and more, I didn’t believe I was ever going to let any of it go, because the person who had to do the most forgetting was me, and I couldn’t even seem to do that right.
Sitting on the edge of a bed on the second floor of a house above St. Philip’s, I remember watching a man’s face go pasty grey and then greasy wet with big balls of sweat. That’s the only way to describe it— suddenly they were all over his face, the size of chocolate chips, just tumbling down from his hairline like he’d sprouted tear ducts all over his face and found something to cry about.
He’d been complaining of chest pains, and he was probably having a small heart attack. All the symptoms were there, including his urge to deny that it was even possible.
Outside, I could hear the other trucks arriving, and the guys coming up the stairs with the oxygen kit. I think he had figured out what was going on, and I was already trying to get him flat on his back before the shock hit and he passed out on me.
I remember thinking: If he’s going to code, if his heart is going to stop, couldn’t it just wait until it’s someone else’s responsibility?
Suddenly it was incredibly important that if he was going to die, that he didn’t die right there in my hands.
TWENTY-FIVE
A summer night, six years in, and time was ticking down, only a month or so left for me in the department, the beginning of the end of firefighting for me.
We were down behind a big three-storey farmhouse on Round Pond Road in Portugal Cove, behind a house that was encircled by an ever-increasing ring of burning grass when we arrived. Captain Dave Lambert dropped the breathing gear and its loose straps in a pile on the blackened grass in front of me and said, “Just put it on.”
Aiden Denine was methodically walking the whole burning circle, shuffling his feet and stamping out the flickering grass, while we tried to figure out how much water we were going to need to try to put the house fire out. The building was burning the way buildings burn in the movies, fire shooting out through every window, and since all the windows had long since been broken out of the place, the updraft was sucking the smoke out as quickly as the flames made it.
Dave and I wound up together around the back of the building with a couple of other firefighters, and every few minutes the wind would bring the smoke down on us, a heavy, sooty blanket full of burning roofing tar and wood and everything else. We were standing among piles of rusted metal from old farming equipment and wire fencing, and the smoke was coming in waves, heavy and dark. Down below the grade, we were looking through a back basement door, the only opening in the building that fire wasn’t coming out of, holding a charged inch-and-a-half hose line, not even sure yet where it would be best to put the water.
We had wrestled the hose around the back of the building and down the slope, but there was only so much water in the pumper, and the water pressure kept dropping off as the pump operator cut it back, waiting for the other truck to trundle back up with a full tank from the hydrant on the main road.
In through the basement door I could see that the whole back of the room was ablaze, and I could make out square shapes, the room packed tight with leftover items: a couple of fridges, mattresses and a blazing box spring. Dave and I yelled back and forth for a few minutes about whether we could really expect there to be anyone left inside. He didn’t think so; I wasn’t convinced he was right.
It was an abandoned building on the edge of a small pond at the end of a narrow road, not even electrical service to the place anymore, and the fire had gotten a healthy head start before we were called. Some places you’re familiar with, because you drive by them every day or so, but this was different. Out at the end of a dead-end road, it was a big old solid place, an older farmbuilding with a square four-throat chimney almost exactly at the middle, the sort of place that sports finishing work—round-edge shingles, for example— that modern builders have given up on completely because they’re just too much work. I could tell there wasn’t anyone living there, but I knew that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone inside.
I suggested to Dave there might be teenagers inside. The place looked as if it could be a drinking spot, and there was always the chance that someone had passed out or gotten caught up or lost in there. So we pulled our masks on and went in. Going through the door, I felt the patter of flaming droplets of burning tar from the roof falling onto my helmet and shoulders. Black and permanent, they would stay on my white helmet for as long as I had it.
As soon as we were inside, my neck felt like it was burning, right through my fire hood and the long flaps of helmet liner that hung down over my ears. It was hot enough in the basement that embers were popping off the beams like fat, hot chunks of popcorn, shooting across through my vision, black in front of the flames but glow- ing when they caught on my gloves and sleeves. The roar of the drafting flames was incredible, constant in my ears like an aircraft taxiing. It sucked air into the building around us as we went through the door, a great, constantly inhaling breath, rippling the fabric of my fire jacket, helping me forward—teasing me forward—with each step. The embers would sit on my arms for only a moment before the wind plucked them away again, surreal in their pecking appearance and disappearance.
We went straight into the basement, and the heat from both sides went from making me sweat to giving me steam burns in my armpits almost immediately. Turning back, I could only see part of the black doorway, because the flames were lapping out over it. We were only steps inside, but it felt like miles.
Dave put his mask next to the side of my head. “If there’s anyone in here, it’s too late anyway,” he yelled.
I could see his lips moving far more clearly than I could hear his words, and we turned to head back out. By then the building was starting to creak and groan, and the heat was a solid wall we had to force ourselves into.
Walking felt like swimming, as though we were forcing our bodies forward through air as thick as stew: the fire was pulling air all around us, the intense heat sapping our strength. We were barely back outside when we heard the crashing sounds of kitchen
appliances coming through the floor into the basement we had just left. Over my shoulder, great towering sprays of sparks shot up through holes in the roof, brilliant for an instant against the sky.
The next morning, the arson squad found a distinctive pattern of burn marks on what little part of the outside wall was left. The constable scraped at the wall for a few moments, smelled the blade of his knife, then folded it and slipped it back into his pocket. “Gasoline,” he said. “Right about here.”
There was nothing left by then but three vertical storeys of brick chimney, straight up in the air like an index finger pointing at the sky. The police didn’t ever come close to finding a suspect, and the fire only saved the owner from eventually having to tear the place down. Later, a hired backhoe knocked the lonely chimney over with its bucket.
For months afterwards I was violently angry about the whole thing. Flashes of it would come back to me all at once, about how stupid it had been for me even to be in there. Me, with a wife at home and two little boys, angry because I took a foolish chance, and an arsonist I didn’t even know—would never know—had come precariously close to killing me with the plunging weight of a refrigerator crashing down from an upstairs kitchen.
I had conjured up the idea that there might be some missing teenagers down there in the basement so I would have some reason to go in there. That was a fact: I didn’t go in there because I had to, but because I wanted to. Dave was right—there was no way anyone inside could have had the faintest chance of being alive. Even if, by some extremely remote chance, there had been someone alive in there, they would have been so badly burned that they wouldn’t have wanted to be rescued anyway.
But I needed to take the chance that there might be someone there. Because I wanted a reason to go in. This is another kind of secret that I’m not really in a rush to share. Sometimes you do something wrong because you can’t seem to find a way to stop yourself from doing it. I couldn’t avoid it: there was a simple physical charge, a thrill, the rush of being in the house while the fire roared around me, embers spitting.
Burning Down the House Page 19
