I hadn’t escaped at all.
In Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s, I’d take helmet and key number thirteen when no one else would. By then I thought I knew my own demons pretty well, and superstition wasn’t one of them.
There, my gear would include gloves with long cuffs, a burn hood, and a yellow notebook you could write on even in the rain; it had a few pages of the magic mathematics of pumper operations, how much pressure you lose for every length of hose, both through friction and from the upward angle of the hose along the ground.
Every year that I fought fires, there was less and less of me exposed to the air. First it was long coats and hip-length rubber boots. Later came the bunker pants, heavy, membrane-lined pants with red suspenders, and by the time I was in Portugal Cove my gear included short boots with steel toes, a fireproof balaclava and, over that, a helmet with a long trailing liner to keep the sparks out. The long gloves stopped a familiar injury for older firefighters: the polka-dot burns around your wrists where small cinders fell down your sleeves while you were pulling down ceilings with the pike pole, finding fire up above Gyproc or plaster ceilings.
As the years passed, I’d wind up carrying more first aid gear too—a case with a CPR mask in the pocket, and latex gloves. Then, later, bright blue and less-allergenic polyethylene gloves, and everyone switched to what trainers called universal precautions, which meant treating everyone as if they were infectious.
I bought a long, expensive flashlight, but a policeman stole it from me at an accident scene.
Every single piece of gear was useful and occasionally essential, but everything added a little bit more bulk, a little more weight. All the gear kept me at a greater distance, too, a little further separated from the people I was trying to help.
But I was overjoyed to be there. I was right back in the middle of the pathos and panic and confusion and fear—and exhilarated beyond belief. If I had been more honest, I might have told the roomful of eager new firefighters at the very first meeting just what it was going to be like, and just what it might do to them, and what it had already done to me. But I didn’t.
I held my breath instead. Held my breath and dove right back in.
We were doing a relay race in training, the sort of thing you do to test your fitness and a whole variety of skills: putting on breathing gear, laddering the roof, bringing the chainsaw up and starting it, dragging a hose around the training house and, finally, using a rescue hold to drag a casualty for a hundred feet or so. I had done everything else, even the knots, and I was making pretty good time, except I came around the building and they’d replaced my partner, Joe Hanames, with Ray, one of the heaviest firefighters in the department.
Ray was nudging up towards 270 pounds.
I could barely get my hands under his arms and my fingers laced together around his chest. I’m 160 pounds, and I couldn’t shift him an inch on the rough asphalt, even when I angled my body back and pulled as hard as I could. After four or five minutes, Ray looked up at me and smiled a beatific smile.
“I guess your team loses,” he said.
TEN
No fire call is the same, not even when it’s the second fire in a month in the exact same town councillor’s cracked and dangerous chimney, and you have to tell him all over again that his wood stove is unsafe and that he can’t use it anymore. Days later, driving by, I’d see the smoke chuffing out through his chimney and I’d know he’d ignored my warning all over again.
But even though fires are always different, one thing stayed exactly the same: I was already building a map, this time in a much smaller community, so that within a year or so any road I drove along would have something on it to remind me of a fire call.
Beachy Cove Road was marked up when a gas station—Power’s Ultramar—a big two-storey right on the side of the road, caught fire. When we brought the rescue down the hill, we had to thread the big truck in through crowds of spectators. It was a building packed full of additions and changes: a big two-bay garage on one end, large enough for transport trucks, that went straight up inside to the lattice of the trusses; two back storerooms in the right-hand side behind the small store counter and coolers; and then, up a narrow staircase on the far right, a second-floor apartment.
There’s a new house there now, a slope-roofed bungalow, but every time I drive by I see the Ultramar station and two firefighters coming back out through the front door, bent low, their backs steaming from the heat inside. The smoke bellying out around them as if they had been fired from a slow-motion cannon. It’s like seeing something that no one else can see, a hallucination of something that happened and that I can’t ever seem to shake.
It was a Sunday evening. The owner had left just before the fire started. When we got there, firefighters from the first truck already had lines to the hydrants, and they were trying to push their way in the front door, the smoke black and heavy and pillowing out all the way down to their knees, so that the second they were inside the door they simply disappeared. They kept pushing in and getting turned back and then pushing in again. Every time they cracked the nozzle open down the narrow hall towards the back, the water would flash into steam and boil back over them, too hot to stay in even when they were practically lying down on the floor.
I had a team of firefighters working on ventilation, trying to get around the back of the building through the thistles and burdock and discarded car parts, carrying ladders to try to break the storeroom windows and let some of the heat and smoke out. The back windows were barred, but we managed to break the glass before heading farther back and setting the ladders up to get onto the roof itself.
We were getting ready to vent the roof when I saw that the firefighters were leaving footprints as they walked, the tread of their boots in the tar clearly obvious from where I was on the top of the ladder. Footprints mean melting tar, and fire close underneath.
You come down off a roof like that really fast. We didn’t stop to lower the axe and the big saw by rope first, just passed them from hand to hand, hugging our chests in close to the ladder to try to keep our balance. Down below, there were already flames boiling out of the windows, dark orange and sooty as if they weren’t getting enough air, and there were flames starting at the eaves too, the little yellow candle-wick flames that you can sweep the hose over only to have them pop right up again, burning gas forced out through cracks by the fire below.
It was beginning to look like a building we’d lose altogether; the only thing on our side was that the upstairs apartment was empty. We’d taken a turn through it early in the fire, but there was nothing in the place except for light smoke and a big old rectangular microwave. Fire was coming up through the bedroom floor in the back corner, but it was half-hearted, with most of the heat from the burning room below going straight up through the hollows in the walls.
It took hours to knock that fire down, hours more to make sure it was finally out. We had managed to haul out the toolboxes and the compressed gas cylinders, trying to salvage anything we could from the darkened building, which would end up being a complete writeoff.
Afterwards, picking through the pieces, we learned a lot. We could have gone in through the big garage doors, but there was no sign that there was a connecting doorway, and we didn’t want firefighters in with the acetylene tanks and the pits under the lifts. There could have been waste oil in drums, high-pressure oxygen, and we didn’t want to push anyone into a more dangerous spot. As with most things, in retrospect, there might have been a better way.
The next morning, the fire investigators were there, and the chief and I went back in with them, our fire coats still dirty and smelling like kippers. Inside the big standing coolers, all of the pop bottles were intact, at least as far as the level of the liquids inside. Above the surface of the pop, every single plastic bottleneck had melted, and every single bottle top had turned, like a flower on a stalk seeking out the sun. Every snack bag had burst and then melted its thin plastic onto the potato chips inside, s
o they resembled some mysteriously shrivelled astronaut food. Everything in the front of the store was coated with a thick, tarry yellow covering of condensed fire gases, sticky to the touch, the sunlight coming in the windows a different shade than my eyes expected, like evening light angling down through big-city pollution.
Even now I can reach out and touch the bottles in a store that isn’t there anymore, and feel how tacky the condensed smoke makes them feel. That sensation is stronger than anything I remember away from the fireground, away from firefighting, as if every emergency call were drawn with much darker pencils, so that the other parts of my memory don’t seem to count.
The arson investigators walked straight down the hall to the back storeroom, crossing in a few strides a piece of real estate we’d tried over and over again to make our way through the night before. In the back, where the rooms were completely charred black, a stock of light bulbs on metal shelves had burned clear out of their packages, glass bells deformed and bulging out in different directions like some kind of light bulb freak show. The investigators were looking for what had caused the fire, and they eventually found where it had started, in the narrow back hall near the floor, though they couldn’t determine why.
It was just one more spot on a map that would get more crowded every single day.
More roads followed, my personal map coloured in bit by bit, call by call. Bennett’s Road, where a small red car rolled upside down into a deep ditch full of shattered ice and muddy water, and we were in the ditch feeling around for the driver for too long, our own bodies starting to freeze, when a passerby told us she was up the driveway in a neighbour’s house, sitting naked in a bathtub of hot water to warm up, waiting for the ambulance.
Indian Meal Line, because people will snowmobile without helmets, and sometimes they get thrown so hard that their boots come off as their head gets driven into a pile of rocks. King’s Road, where I knew that an idling school bus hemmed in by snowdrifts had filled a light blue house with diesel exhaust, killing one person immediately and leaving another in serious condition.
Beachy Cove Road again, where an old orange van had crashed after racing back and forth along a coastal road at night with no headlights. There was no driver, only a trail of blood drops and a bloody handprint on the front door of a house. The woman inside stridently told the police that her son wasn’t home, and that no, they couldn’t come in.
I looked down and there were the driver’s tools, lots of tools, shiny in the lights and spread all over the road. Somebody should have been picking them up, because they were someone’s livelihood, but they lay on the pavement instead, bright and flashing like a broken skeleton of dismembered silver bones, because the police were frustrated and angry and making a point. And no one’s supposed to mess with evidence.
At the beginning of a call you always have too little information, and afterwards it’s like you always have too much.
It wasn’t only the map: there was also the fact that I kept feeling as though I was always ripping someone off, that I was doing so much that I didn’t have time to do anything right. Later, I would feel as if stealing time from my family: in the beginning in St. Philip’s, I felt like I was stealing time from either the fire department, from Barby, or from my job. It was like no one was ever satisfied.
And my job itself didn’t make anything easier: as a local CBC television news reporter—something I wound up doing for five years, I would go to work never knowing when I would be coming home, or what I would be doing. Once I spent our anniversary watching water bombers swoop in over two different forest fires, and didn’t end up getting home until midnight. Another assignment, handed to me just minutes after the executive producer told me I could expect to be laid off because of budget cuts, saw my cameraman and I sent an hour and a half out of the city to Placentia to the scene of an axe murder. And even at work I was experiencing a kind of bizarre disconnect with reality: once at the scene, the RCMP invited us under the crime scene tape, and my cameraman shot videotape of the axe handle and the bloody sheet covering the victim while the police on the scene made small talk and waited for a crime scene team to come out from St. John’s.
I’m not sure, in the end, if anyone else actually noticed—hearing about a fuel truck roll-over in an early-season snowstormon Tucker’s Hill, I’d get out of work early and speed to the scene, wondering every inch of the way if leaving would end up affecting my job.
At an early-morning accident scene, I’d ask someone else to take over as scene commander and wait for the tow truck so I could get cleaned up and ready for work. I could never escape the look of disappointment I’d get from Barby when the pager went off in the middle of a social event—so that everywhere, I always felt I was in the midst of letting someone else down. It seemed so unfair to be trying so hard to help people, and to be failing someone every single step of the way. Strangely, it felt as if I was putting myself first and taking advantage—and that it was slowly eating away at the fabric of the rest of my life. And maybe that was true.
After falling out of firefighting, I know exactly how I fell back in, even though I knew from experience that I would see every single scrap of road I drove lose its innocence. I’m still not surprised I joined up again, even though I’m sure now that it was exactly the wrong choice for me to make.
You just don’t get to feel that way in normal, everyday life—you don’t get to completely fill up with emotion so that it piles out of your chest and runs down your arms like electricity, all of your senses becoming signal flares. You don’t get to see parts of the world that are completely wrong, totally out of place, but somehow so much more believable than if they were in their proper places.
I would end up limp and exhausted, as if all of my senses had been played like guitar strings, as if something incredibly important had swept right through me, ball lightning had run through me, dripped off my fingertips and drained away.
Why did I start again? More to the point—why did I ever think I could stop?
We had a call for the smell of smoke in a house, and we got there to find a teenaged girl and her brother out on the driveway in shorts in the November cold, and down in the basement the sickly smell of burned furnace oil, a smoke detector pealing away at the top of the stairs. It turned out that the furnace manifold had cracked, and that smoke— and carbon monoxide—was leaking into the basement.
I was trained to watch for a bunch of things with carbon monoxide poisoning. Bright red cheeks are a trademark, the sign that carbon monoxide is replacing oxygen in the victim’s blood. “Breaking the oxyhemoglobin link” is the way it’s described in textbooks, but it seems more insidious than that: carbon monoxide attaches itself instead of oxygen to red blood cells and then, like a bully, just won’t let go. So someone can appear healthy, except for the headaches. And the confusion. The sleepiness or weakness in the extremities. Sometimes the symptoms go on for days or even weeks, like a low-grade flu that no one in the family can seem to shake.
This teenaged girl had the right colour, the right kind of red high on her cheekbones, and I told her she’d done the right thing to get her brother out of the house. The colour might have been from the excitement, though, so I was watching for other symptoms, trying to see if we needed to send her for medical treatment.
She was hanging on my arm. “The turtles. You have to save the turtles,” she said, her eyes big and staring.
Then I started thinking maybe we would need an ambulance after all.
But down in the basement, when we had opened all the windows, we came across a child’s swimming pool on the floor, half full of water, and in it were several turtles swimming around in lazy circles, goggling up at us. All of them turned out to be fine.
There were just six houses on that cul-de-sac, and a month later the one right on the end burned, and we pulled hoses in over hip-high snowbanks, leaving a pattern that suggested snakes had swum across the surface of the snow.
Two for six in thirty-five days. So much
for the law of averages.
ELEVEN
I can be woken up in the middle of a thousand different nights and always feel the same way—crowbarred out of sleep, ripped upright, like I’ve left my stomach somewhere slightly behind. Sometimes I’d be completely disoriented, lost and without landmarks in what should have been a familiar room.
I’ve stood by the bed, swearing blindly at my pager—once, staring right at it and yelling “What the fuck is that?”—unable to figure out what was making all the noise.
Other times you wake up immediately, feeling as if your mind is as clean and sharp as cut glass. That’s when you suddenly believe that the best of all impractical discoveries are made in that slice of midnight wonder, because every single thing is distinct, finite in definition, beautiful in a way it never will be again. You have that fleeting perfect instant, that moment of understanding just how everything became the way it is. You see things in ways you’ve never seen them before. Something as simple as a wooden box sitting on a bureau can take on an individual magic, as if you’re the first person who has ever seen it—at least the first person who has ever seen it in terms of line and shape and purpose.
Even with the shock of being jarred awake, I always liked the night fire calls best. There is a kind of surreal nature about them that makes them both easier to accept and easier to try to divorce from real life. There’s so much that’s unworldly that it at least lets you put a sharp, dark line between the calls and everything else— the world you’ll wake up in come morning, if you’re lucky enough to sleep.
It’s difficult to explain. Perhaps it’s because, cast against the dark and in the absence of most familiar clues, it’s easier to accept the unbelievable—that a man, thrown from a snowmobile without a helmet, could be sitting on the bumper of your fire truck and talking to you, even though there is a hole in his head the size of a tennis ball and you can see through that window the wrinkled tissue of his brain as easily as if you were taking apart a plastic anatomical figure.
Burning Down the House Page 9