Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  We entered a sprawling two-storey brick plant in Rüsselsheim by a back door. I dragged my camera bag up steel stairs to a catwalk high above the factory floor. The beginnings of an Opel sedan inched forward beneath my feet. I followed the line below me, taking pictures. Over thousands of feet I watched robots seize components, passing them to other robots that placed them, so that more robots could dart in and spot-weld the pieces. As the line crept forward hundreds of additional robots fetched, placed and fastened. This mechanical ballet assembled a slithering train of small sedans with neither a soul in sight nor a sound. Only at the line’s end did a handful of small men appear to peer under hoods, adjust a hinge and test components before the autos slipped out of the plant like a train of shiny ants on a forest floor. Here was a future.

  At the day’s end I joined a group at head office for an executive summary of the operation. Its future? They planned to raze the plant and erect one more modern.

  2015

  Fifty years have passed since Viljo Revell’s vision for a new Toronto City Hall opened for business. There is to be a celebratory event in the saucer-shaped council chamber. As I’ve known members of Revell’s family for many years I get invited. The evening unfolds smoothly. The architects’ tributes to Revell are polished — successful architects are salesmen. Two former mayors, Crombie and Miller, introduce each other as David the First and David the Second. They are heartfelt and funny. The evening is a successful tribute to an architect and building that gave Toronto a new vision of itself.

  I make a late departure from the event, exiting the building into the evening coolness of the huge square fronting City Hall. Walking south toward Queen Street I see a lone figure on a concrete bench by the pool. He’s taking in the plaza, the new and former city halls, the glittering office towers and the whole urban grandness of it all. For the second time in recent months City Hall makes me regret not carrying a camera at all times. The first was seeing the life-sized bronze of Winston Churchill being hoisted by his stomach off his plinth on the western edge of the square. The second was this night’s encounter with that lone little man hunched by the City Hall pond, at that moment, the world’s most famous living architect — Frank Gehry.

  Ten

  Fire

  “Flagror non consumor.”

  I am burned but not consumed.

  motto of the Huguenots,

  16th century

  “Wretched excess is just barely enough.”

  Mario Batali

  1963

  My first summer logging on northern Vancouver Island is not proving easy. Some weeks into June the super feels pity and pulls me off an interior-bound crummy at dawn. A stumping fire beside the settlement is on the move. The camp is threatened.

  I join an old skidder operator in gray woolen long johns and we toss canvas fire hoses into the bumper box of a former fuel tanker truck. It’s been painted red with a brush and equipped with a diesel fire pump. We drive to the edge of town where a field of stumps smoulders. I drag heavy hose toward the tall stump I’ve been ordered to heroically climb. Balancing 10 feet above the ground, legs akimbo, big bronze valve handles in my hands I confidently nod to the driver a hundred yards away. He cranks the diesel. The canvas hose convulses toward me and I pull the handles. A writhing serpent lifts me off the stump and snaps me around like a flag in a gale. It beats me to the ground and writhes off across the field of shattered brush and splintered stumps. Smoke rises.

  ***

  Where the river meets the inlet there’s a cabin called Henry’s. For reasons long forgotten this modest little camp had been built with the footprint of a house trailer — long and narrow. As his retirement loomed Henry decided to fix it up. He worked hard. He even gave up fishing. For an entire summer he went at his place giving it new siding, windows and a coat of paint. As I’d boat by I’d shout, “How’s it going, Henry?”

  “Super, just super, Mike!”

  One fine September day that year while I ran upstream I saw a happy man. Henry lounged in a kitchen chair tilted back against his newly finished siding. The little building glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. And Henry glowed too. He had finished. We shared a wordless greeting.

  After I’d passed him by I glanced backwards to the west. The declining sun balanced on an advancing black squall. Several miles upstream I chanced to look behind again and saw lightning. When I returned a week later Henry’s perfect cabin wasn’t there. Two scorched propane tanks stood above its grave.

  For a few days two middle-aged couples in rental canoes have been moving about the inlet. I hear their voices but can’t tell what language they speak beyond the sounds and cadences of central Europe. Each night they camp in a different spot, find it lacking in conveniences and move on. Finally they move out to the mouth of the inlet, the big water coast with its long rocky foreshore. They retreat slightly inland to be inside the treeline that offers fuel and shelter from the relentless westerlies. They set up camp.

  After they leave the following day I head out in my little motor-sailer to visit friends far to the south. I see smoke, then flames, then a conflagration. One of my favourite ancient white pines has become a crackling torch. The fire races through the mid-summer dryness, moving east on the west wind, devouring trees. I put in an emergency call but one of my few neighbours, an army recruiter from Sudbury, has beaten me to it. She, knowingly, has gotten straight through to the firefighters.

  We all own gas-powered fire pumps. Soon at least a half-dozen of us are out at the site being amateur forest-fire fighters. It helps contain the damage. Within 20 minutes a spotter plane arrives from Sudbury. Minutes later a water bomber arrives, flying just a few feet above the treetops like a glider. It banks and descends, running out through the shoals skimming the surface, taking up water. It climbs, banks and makes a run for the fire but can’t drop because we’re all still there, shutting down our pumps, retrieving hoses and trying to get out of the way. The water bomber makes three futile passes while we’re scrambling. More trees go.

  Finally we’re across the inlet and the plane can do its work. The pickup runs and the low banking and dumps over the fire are impressive. These guys are very good at what they do. When they finally depart we are left with a long scar and my special tree is bone. I move back across the inlet and walk the fire zone. The perpetrator lies at the western and upwind end of the burn zone. The canoeists’ breakfast fire is still cheerfully burning away. The eggs and toast long ago consumed, the paddlers have moved on, oblivious to the devastation they have left.

  Some years later nothing has grown back. It’s a dead zone, an ash pit, a bone-yard.

  1985

  I’ve promised to help the boys at the old No. 7 fire hall at Dundas and Parliament with illustrations for the fireman’s cookbook they hope to publish. At the time it was the busiest fire hall in North America. The kids in the projects across the street would watch the firemen cooking their suppers. As soon as it was on the fire hall dining table they’d pull several alarms and the crew would have to get up from the table while food steamed on their plates and go suit up before starting the trucks. If it was a false alarm, and it usually was, they’d be back at the table in half an hour. As soon as they sat down to their congealing diners the alarms would sound again and off they’d go. Supper could take four or five hours and a great deal of patience. Often when they were gone on the call the kids would cross the street and steal personal stuff from the open fire hall.

  If there was a real fire it was often the mattress trick. The kids would stuff a mattress in one of the subsidized Regent Park high-rise elevators, set it on fire and press buttons for every floor. Those fires were somewhat harder to fight, being a moving target with quickly closing doors. The firefighters’ suppers were then cold and solidified, soggy or stolen.

  Those men were almost saintly. They not only cheerfully put up with this kind of shit but they also had to deal with incredible bureaucracy a
nd insane inefficiencies. When the Toronto Fire Department began to hire women one of the first was assigned to No. 7.

  This immediately raised a number of issues that the guys accepted with equanimity.

  New recruits become backups for the experienced guys. A veteran would head into a burning building dragging a heavy hose along with a lot of other gear. If they fell through the floor or got overcome by smoke, their backup was supposed to haul them to safety. That’s why these guys are big and work out. They’re generally much fitter than cops.

  Once women joined, the men knew their female backups would never be strong enough to carry a 250-pound man to safety. The men assessed the risk and accepted it. In the case of No. 7 they also had to deal with a washroom issue. It was deemed unacceptable in those days for women to share a washroom with men so the sole woman got the hall’s only washroom all to herself while the men had to trudge down the street to the gas station a block away.

  I spent weeks visiting different halls doing free food photography. As far as I know that cookbook never got published. This was probably a social good: it probably saved many from heart attacks. Take hamburger pie, a hall No. 7 special, for example. Try to imagine a coffee-table-sized piecrust containing a dozen pounds of cheap ground chuck. Imagine the amount of clogging tallow formed when it cooled as the guys fought phantom fires across the street. Vegetables were for rabbits.

  Most of the firefighters I knew were hard-working but unambitious guys. However, one of them studiously hit the firemen’s study books to move up the ladder. He got to be a fire hall chief, then a district one and finally got the plumb assignment as captain of Toronto’s only fireboat, the William Lyon Mackenzie. This was a handsome, twin diesel-powered little ship built by Russell Brothers in Owen Sound up on Georgian Bay. Russell Brothers were famous for their alligator tugs built for the early days of the logging industry. Those tough little tugs would drag themselves overland through the woods from lake to lake.

  My pal W became chief of the fireboat just as some joker photographed the William Lyon Mackenzie and listed it in the Boats For Sale section of Auto Trader magazine. The fireboat station phone rang off the hook for days as guys called in thinking what a neat thing it would be to have a fireboat for their kids to play with at their Muskoka cottage.

  As a thank you for cookbook and firemen’s fashion photography I got invited down for a cruise on the Mackenzie one summer Saturday night. I was told to get into the lift bucket as we headed toward Polson Quay on the east end of the harbour. We tied up to the seawall and the crew boomed me out over the courts to watch girls in bikinis play beach volleyball. Next we went into the quay beside the huge Redpath Sugar refinery. As baffled Filipino ship hands shoveled raw sugar into bucket scoops way down in the bilge of a huge bulker salty I suddenly appeared out of the sky hovering over the giant hatch openings with my cameras. The crew looked terrified. After that, as night fell, we steamed around Toronto Islands in the wake of various party boats that played screaming disco music. The entire fire crew, with the exception of the helmsman, were out on the foredeck dancing to Saturday Night Fever. The whole cruise got booked in as a training mission.

  As firefighters work long shifts they get quite a few days off. Many of them started various businesses on the side. The cookbook and fire fashions were only a couple of them. For a while the guys I knew had a house-painting business. Then they moved up to roofing. As the captain said, “If ya got a hammer and a ladder then you’re a roofer.” They did my cabin up on the island for a few cases of beer. One screaming summer convection storm blew off the roofing from the third-floor dormer of my house on Dufferin Grove Park and water began running down the interior walls. In desperation I called my fire buddies. Less than hour later a huge hook and ladder truck came down my driveway with lights strobing and a couple of guys ran up the hydraulic ladder in the downpour with a roll of roofing.

  The next time I called them about a roofing issue I was informed they didn’t do that anymore. “Now we’re driveway sealer guys.” It was hard to keep up with their careers. We’re told now the big thing in business is disruption — disruptive ideas, disruptive organizations, disruptive technologies, disruptive strategies. The last time I spoke with the captain he’d just been made a Toronto fire chief. “Wow,” I said to my former roofer.

  “Ya, I know,” he said. “Really scary, isn’t it!”

  ***

  The forests of the river’s upper reaches are burning — fire drives toward the clearing where we hide our cars. I want to save mine so I jump in my skiff and race through the wild rice and enter the river’s mouth. By a couple of miles upstream I can smell it. Soon I can no longer see and coast to a stop against the north bank. Smoke seeps like a rancid fog through the trees lining the other side. It’s become hard to breathe. I hear big trees fall. Animals are on the move. The birds are gone. A chopper circles behind a screen of trees. It’s a combat zone. My little world burns.

  Eleven

  Wandering

  “The hinterlands were filling with eccentrics, making their odd journeys in the belief that certain voyages out might become voyages in.”

  Robert MacFarlane

  “How was I to know that composers had to go up into the mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months?”

  Duke Ellington

  1998

  Paul, an old friend, calls me and says let’s go to China. He’s an architect and wants to explore Beijing’s hutongs, the traditional courtyard housing alleyways, before all are razed. One of our Canadian airlines is trying to establish its new Toronto to Beijing nonstop and is offering a cheap deal to point holders. I have just enough. After phoning around to my stock agents and generating some interest in photos of China I agree to go. We leave 10 days later. The route was too new to be popular. We had the entire upper deck to ourselves and the bored flight attendants treated us like grandees.

  As this was before the Chinese capital was riven by six-lane expressways we rent bicycles. After breakfast in our hotel every morning we’d mount our wheels and ride off for eight or 10 hours. For days we explored Beijing, street by street, block by block. The hutongs were once occupied by the elite. Each family had many rooms arranged around a central courtyard. Now entire extended families occupy each room and the mud brick structures are rapidly dissolving. Conditions are grim. Every block of these houses has a common toilet where users must wade through six inches of piss and shit to get to the row of holes. The surplus spills over the sills into the streets. It stinks. Moreover everybody has bad skin because of the pollution. They all look sad and sick.

  And they seem to treat each other very badly. They push, shove and shout at one another. It’s not a civil society. I later ask a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre who was teaching in Tokyo why this is so. He explains that most city dwellers had recently come from small towns in the countryside. Those places were basically extended families — everybody in town was related and all public interactions were based on kinship. When they are dumped into a big anonymous city like Beijing they had no social tools to deal with each other. Your neighbour may as well have been a Martian.

  On our exploratory rides we often come across particularly nice examples of traditional hutongs and agree to return and document them. More often than not, when we return, even a day or two later, the whole block will be a dusty pile of rubble with a bulldozer on top. The pace of destruction and disinterest in history is mind-boggling.

  On some days we separate with an agreement to meet at the south end of Tiananmen at dusk. We have a discovered a little café that serves something resembling a cappuccino.

  One day I meet a young local guy there named Dragon. He’d served in the merchant marine, sailing all over the world, even to Toronto. As a result he speaks some English. Paul has been pushing to visit the Great Wall but I’ve been resisting as the standard trip is to a heavily restored section with a garish a
musement park. I’m not interested.

  However, since Dragon’s between jobs, he agrees to accompany us to a section of wall in inner Mongolia where tourists don’t go. We’ll pay expenses.

  We meet early a few mornings later and board a bus. It proves to be the first of many that day. As we travel out the communities get smaller and the air gets cleaner. Finally, many hours later, we step off the last bus into a village. It’s market day and the young country women selling vegetables are radiant. They have round Mongolian faces, clear skin and welcoming smiles. It’s a complete contrast to Beijing. They’re also very curious. Who are these two white guys and why are they here? Dragon explains. There’s a lot of talk I can’t follow but eventually Dragon announces that since market morning is winding down a half-dozen of these engaging women have decided to come with us. Our goal is a couple of miles away. A sawtooth range of small mountains lies to the north. The wall drapes along it like a ribbon. It’s quite amazing.

  We set off on foot with the women joking and flirting and Paul and I doing the same. I’m always amazed by the basic goodwill from one’s fellow humans one experiences when travelling. These women are really fun.

  After a stiff uphill hike we reach the wall and climb it. Following an hour of walking the Great Wall I look back. The sight of the sharp peaks with the wall snaking over it is memorable. It is at that point that I remember my New York agent saying that if I could get a photograph of a soldier in a Red Army uniform using the then new technology of cell phones on the Wall he could sell it many times. I carry several dummy display cell phones in my camera bag. Two of the market women wear the right uniforms. I ask Dragon to negotiate.

  It’s complicated. There are several new concepts to explain — the cell phone for a start, especially one that doesn’t work. Then there’s the idea of the stock photo and, finally, the concept of the model release, especially one in a language they don’t know. The pictures must be legally released with payment to have any real value.