So. No hugs beside the fire trucks. My brothers and I lead our separate lives. We work on fires together. We are glad to see one another. We know that. There is no need to comment. When we are done, we go back to our separate lives. It is not so different with anyone else on the department, blood or no. I told the editor this, and he killed the piece.
Over 1.7 million years up in smoke, and we are still beholden to fire. It may be delivered via electrical outlets, or hidden under the hoods of our cars, but it is still fire. Our control of fire has been so refined that it is possible to forget that it even is fire. But that control is hardly absolute. The idea that we have learned to “control” fire is belied by the fact that we still burn our houses down. Truth be told, things are a lot better. We’ve even noticed it out here—we get more people, but fewer fires. Housing codes, smoke detectors—they’ve all done their part. Still, fire is a primeval force, and when you bring a primeval force into the house—as we still do, in our furnaces, our cigarettes, our joss sticks, our gas ranges, our candles, our amateur wiring jobs—it doesn’t always act civilized.
Fire gives little quarter, but it does play by a few rules, and that’s where you must take your advantage. As soon as possible, we try to cut a hole in the roof of a burning house. Ventilation, the fire books call it. You do this to make fire dance your way, to make it rise from the hole like a cobra from a basket. This is called “drawing” the fire. If you’re going to dance with fire, this is your one chance to lead. Usually, the roof is opened as directly over the flames as possible, creating a chimney effect. Hot air, smoke, and toxic gases fume out the hole, cooling and clearing the interior so that firefighters can advance and find the seat of the fire. The release of smoke improves visibility and reduces the threat of backdraft and flashover by removing combustible vapors. And in a cooler environment, firefighters are less likely to be burned by superheated steam when they open the hose line. If the hole is cut directly over the fire, the chimney effect will help stabilize it, stand it up straight, and keep it burning in one spot. If the hole is off-centered, the updraft can spread the fire by pulling it through the structure. In any case, the upside of ventilation comes with a downside kicker: If you don’t get the fire out quickly after ventilation, it will feed on the increased air flow and shift to high gear. It’s a scary thing to poke a hole in the roof, knowing that you are coaxing the fire into your hands by giving it exactly what it wants. It is like dangling raw meat before a lion to coax him from the den—you would be wise to consider your next move before he finishes chewing. Deal is, by the time we get on scene, the fire has often burned through the roof, effectively venting itself. It is a fact of life out here, where help is not always close at hand. Early on, one of the department veterans drew himself up proudly, looked me in the eye, and recited the unofficial department motto: “We have never lost a basement.”
We make some saves. At a barn fire two years ago, we arrived quickly enough to contain the fire to one corner of the haymow. If we get a good jump on a chimney fire, we can usually shut it down before it spreads to the walls. But usually we are fighting to preserve as much of the structure as we can and protect everything surrounding it. Preservation enhances any subsequent investigation; it often also yields invaluable artifacts. After all, a house fire is a destruction of the past. The people here are losing their history. I have walked out of burning buildings carrying a charred photo album and watched a teary grandmother clutch it to her breast. I have handed over deer rifles, a child’s snow boots, a soggy “Baby’s First Year” calendar. These things are touchstones to the past. They have come through fire; their survival renders them totemic.
In The Acquisition and Control of Fire, Sigmund Freud claimed that man gained control over fire only after he gained control over his bladder. According to Freud, the first man who saw a small fire and resisted the urge to pee on it committed one of the great acts of civilization. The desire to quell fire, he posited, had to do with demonstrations of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. Furthermore, said Freud, it was no coincidence that Prometheus smuggled fire to man in a hollow fennel stalk—a symbolic penis, capable of extinguishing the very fire it carried. Sigmund would be a treat on a fire scene. The handling of hoses alone would be enough to send him into paroxysms of analytical confabulation. Every time I pull the extension ladder from the pumper and prepare to raise and extend it, I think, Here’s lookin’ at yer, Sigmund.
Across the majority of our culture, it is no longer necessary to teach children to gather and tend fire. But fire is still strongly associated with numerous cultural taboos and restrictions. Some of the children in this area live in homes heated by wood-burning stoves, and many learn to make campfires at a young age, but in general, their first formal introduction to fire comes in the form of what the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard referred to as “social interdiction.” This fall, as part of Fire Safety Awareness Week, we took one of our fire trucks over to the school and performed a little social interdiction. Sixty fidgeting grade-schoolers are waiting for us in the band room. They range in age from preschool to third grade. I’ve been elected to do the talking, so I begin by describing the members of our department as “people just like your mom and dad,” and then, looking into all those little faces from homes of every sort, wonder if the reference is universally useful. I move on to 911. “Always stay calm, and never hang up until the person on the phone tells you to.” Even adults panic, and having seen people unable to give directions to their own house, we recommend that families keep a clearly written set of directions posted beside the phone. A good concept, but nowadays everyone has six phones, several of them cordless and liable to be tossed anywhere. Still, it’s a good idea to know how to tell the dispatcher how to find your location, and how to call you back if you’re cut off. “How many of you know your phone number?” I ask. A thicket of hands shoot up.
When I was in kindergarten, Mr. Plomber, the janitor, came to our classroom and installed a plastic phone on the wall so we could practice calling the fire department. While we gathered around to watch him drive the screws, he asked how many of us knew our phone number. Everyone raised their hand but me. “You have to know your phone number, in case you get lost,” said Mr. Plomber. I ran to the coat rack and pulled my jacket from the hanger. My mother had written my name and number on the tag. I reported back to Mr. Plomber with the information. “You won’t always have that coat,” he said.
It was a good coat. Thick and heavy, the outer constructed of fat-ribbed brown corduroy. The snug cuffs kept the snow out, and the oversized steel zipper zipped easily, even in the coldest weather. It must have been a tiny coat; I weighed only forty-five pounds, but it felt substantial as buffalo robes. That winter, Mrs. Warren drove us home from kindergarten in a frosty blue van, and the coat kept me snug. I hated to outgrow that coat.
Without divulging his identity, I tell the children the story of the little boy who didn’t know his phone number.
“Who do you think that little boy was?”
“You!” They laugh and laugh.
We wind up needing to know a lot in this life. Our phone number, where we live, left from right, how to make toast, how to tell the boys’ bathroom from the girls’ bathroom. It’s daunting to look at these children and recognize how much they already know, even the dullest among them. We humans start slow, but we pick up speed fast. Your chimpanzees and elephants and dolphins and other members of the animal kingdom intelligentsia probably don’t get the respect they deserve, but even the brightest lowland gorilla will be hard-pressed to match wits with Homo sapiens, even if the Homo sapiens in question is a mouth-breather crushing Schlitz cans against his forehead at a demolition derby. The faces in the band room this morning are open and bright. The eyes are a row of shiny buttons, unclouded by the opacities of irony. Attentive, joyful groups of children like this often provoke adults to say goofy things like, “The children are our future!” Of course this statement completely ignores the fa
ct that everyone who has not stopped absorbing oxygen is our future. Children are fascinating, and surprising, and at their best, heavenly sprites, but before you go in too deeply for the idea that the world would be a better place if we were all more childlike, try sticking three kids in one room with two toys. You’ll witness conflict-resolution techniques synthesizing the very worst of the Marquis de Sade and the World Wrestling Federation. The world is like it is because, on the whole, we tend to act like children.
So we give children information about fire and hope they make the best of it. I move from 911 to the old standby, “Stop, drop, and roll.” Many of them know this one already, it’s concise and rhythmic and sticks in your head. A child has a chance with this one, a chance that the saying will lodge in their cortex and become nearly instinctual. “What should you do if you start on fire?” I ask, realizing as I’m saying it that my poor phrasing insinuates they may spontaneously combust. “Stop, drop, and roll!” they cheer, unconcerned by the idea of fire suddenly leaping from their pockets.
“How many of you have smoke detectors in your houses?”
Hands up all over, and a babble of details: “We have one in the kitchen…. We have two!…We have six!…My grandma has a parrot…” I make a mental note: try to keep the open-ended questions to a minimum. We’re coming up on daylight savings time. “When you change your clocks, change the batteries in your smoke detectors,” I tell them. We’re hoping a lot of this filters home to parents.
The rest of my talk is a miscellany of preparation. Close your bedroom door at night, it will buy you time and breathable air should a fire fill the house with undetected smoke. If you think there is a fire, stay low and find another exit. Don’t hide under your bed or in a closet or in the bathtub. If you do leave the room, never open a door without feeling it first with the back of your hand. If it is warm, stay put. Practice fire drills at home just as you do at school. Have your family draw an escape map, make sure you have two escape routes from your room, and make sure the whole family has an agreed-upon meeting place once you escape the house. Never go back in the house. Not even if you have a puppy or favorite toy inside. Most of all, stay calm. We give the address of a Web site that has extensive fire-safety information geared toward children. Then we bring in a fully outfitted firefighter. When you weigh forty pounds, a fully outfitted firefighter looks like a giant swamp monster. So we bring in Tom, all six feet of him, all 230 pounds of him, and he looms even larger in his yellow helmet and sooty bunkers. He’s got a tank on his back and a hose from the tank to his face, which is hidden by a mask, and the mask hisses and blows every time he takes a breath. I spin him around in front of the children, pointing out the various pieces of equipment, explaining the whole time that there’s one of their neighbors in there, and that if they are in a fire and they see someone like this coming toward them, they must not hide, but instead should let themselves be carried to safety. At the end, Tom takes off his helmet and mask, and grins at the kids, and I crack a joke and stomp on his steel-toed boots to comic effect, and as the room fills with tiny giggles, we hope we have defanged the monster.
Next, the kids troop out, class by class, to a portable smoke house borrowed from the fire department up the road. Lieutenant Pam takes them into the first room. Watching on closed-circuit TV from a small room hidden in the house, Captain Matt releases peanut oil smoke into the room and triggers the fire alarms. Pam tells the children to watch how the smoke slowly descends from the ceiling to the floor, tells them this is why they must stay low, and then, reminding everyone to stay calm, Pam herself gets on all fours and leads the children on a crawl to safety. They emerge through a second-story window at the far end of the trailer, where Tom helps them to a waiting ladder. I am at the top of the ladder, and back them down, one by one, coaching them all the way. At the bottom I tell them to join their classmates at the meeting place.
Pick a meeting place. Change your clock, change your batteries. Crawl low, and go, go, go. Stop, drop, and roll. We are trying to inculcate an ordered response to disorder. Our very presence here admits the possibility of terror—we hope that the catchphrases and the fake smoke will be an inoculation against blind fear should they find themselves facing the real thing. It’s a fun day for them and for us, but at the bottom of it all is a grave—to say nothing of primitive—element of any civilization daring to put reins on fire.
We got to talking at the fire meeting the other night about the fire-safety speech and how it has evolved over the years. Today we have the smoke house, bags full of stickers, activity books, and an organized presentation. Several of us remember sitting in the bleachers when we were in grade school and hearing the fire chief explain that “inflammable” was not the opposite of “flammable.” He held up an aerosol can of deodorant. “See this?” he asked. “It says ‘inflammable’ on the label. Now watch.” At which point he sprayed the can into the air, pulled out a lighter, and flicked it. The deodorant plume ignited, turning the can into a miniature flamethrower. I suspect the kids hadn’t been off the bus five minutes when behind sheds all over the county you heard the roar of flaming Right Guard. I know I tried it. During this same demonstration, we noticed that the chief’s hand was wrapped in thick gauze up to his forearm. He burned it while throwing gas on a training fire.
Someone else told the story of another chief who showed up with a crew and a pumper to stand guard at the homecoming bonfire back in the ’70s. When the bonfire wouldn’t catch, he flung a can of gas on it. The flame raced backward up the gas and leapt to his nylon jacket, whereupon the students were treated to a galvanized demonstration of the old “stop, drop, and roll” chestnut.
These forays into the community are performed to raise safety issues, but they are also intended to inspire a little comfort and confidence in the fire and rescue corps. It doesn’t always turn out that way. I have yet to set myself alight during a fire-safety demonstration, but last year, while driving the rescue van in the homecoming parade, my partner, Dan, had stopped to let the rest of the parade catch up. We threw some candy to the kids, and then the parade started up again. Forgetting that the van was in gear, Dan popped the clutch and killed the engine. There had been a lot of stop-and-go during the parade, and because we hadn’t kept the idle up, the strobe lights had drained the battery. The van wouldn’t start. And so it was that for the last tenth of a mile of the parade route, the citizenry was treated to the sight of their very own rapid-response medical team in action: Dan fighting the dead wheel, me with my back to the rear door, sweating bullets and pushing the van to the school parking lot.
Homo ergaster decided he’d use fire for his own, and that decision shaped the world to follow. It shapes my life, it shapes my town, it forges my relationship with my brothers. Before the magazine editor pressed me on the issue, I never really thought of what role firefighting played in the context of my relationship with my brothers. I have often thought of it since, and if anything, it creates a situation of privilege. The privilege of standing shoulder to shoulder with the playmates of your childhood, sure, but that applies to more than just my brothers in this situation. Scooter Southern is on the department, and that scar on my brother’s forehead is from the day I knocked him off Scooter’s porch with the screen door. Firefighting isn’t the only interest I share with my brothers: we grew up hunting deer together, for instance, and do to this day—but it is the closest to any shared social activity we might engage in together, say, like being on the same softball team. Our pursuits and avocations have little in common. They drive log trucks, I sit in a chair trying to herd words. Put us in a row and turn our palms up—mine are soft and clean. There’s your story.
We do not, in the parlance of the day, always celebrate our differences. We’re stubborn and strong-willed, and life has taken us down divergent paths of understanding. There are times when we disagree so vehemently that one of us will simply grit his teeth and leave the room. There is never any shouting or arm-waving, that is not our way. An outside obser
ver might miss the whole thing. But disagreements with my brothers often shake me up for days, because they are a reminder of how disagreeing profoundly with someone you love in equal profundity is an intractable dilemma because you don’t have the option of dismissing them out of contempt. I read volumes on the Civil War when I was a child, and was always morbidly fascinated with the idea of brother fighting brother. I could never understand how such a thing could be. Today I do. I would kill—I am not speaking figuratively—for my brothers, but I also know that if the course of civilization boiled down to a few salient points, we would be irretrievably opposed. Such a likelihood is highly fanciful, but the thought is still unsettling. There is a certain paradoxical rage weltering in us that explodes when it is nudged too closely by love. These are threads of love and hate traceable to Cain and Abel.
Fire cuts through all that. Down in the basement of that house, we are on the same side, my brother and I. Doing something we both love, fighting something we both fear, covering for each other. Fire is heat and light, able to cut through the murky complications reserved for souls born of the same womb.
Back to the basement. My low-air alarm is sounding. I still have some time, but I have a ways to backtrack before I can safely remove the SCBA. My brother, smaller and in better shape, has air remaining. He has knocked down all but a few small flames. He waves me back. I crawl back out, then immediately second-guess myself. I hear my instructor’s voice. Never become separated. I was wrong to leave, and he was wrong to stay. Out in the driveway, in the glare of the halogen scene lights, I stare at the smoking skeleton of the house, giving no clue that someone is deep in its bowels. The cold is astounding. We are all encased in a shell of ice. Our sleeves won’t bend, our gloves might as well be made of steel. Every once in a while, someone slips and falls, and he paws around on his back, helpless as a turtle, until someone helps him to his feet. I keep staring at the collapsed garage, at the spot where my brother should be reappearing. Why did I leave without him? My guts churn until a few minutes later, he crawls out safely. Anticlimax. As it usually is. What we do rarely ends in heroic conquest or tragedy. It’s dangerous, and not to be taken lightly, but what we’re basically doing out there, when we haul our hoses out to minivans and garages, up silos, over rooftops, and down into basements, is trying to disrupt the geometry of fire. Kick the slats out of the tetrahedron.
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