Burning Down the House (10 page)

I remember the dragging gear we had in Wolfville, gear that looked for all the world like the frame for the springs under a camp bed, only that, at every intersection of the springs, there was a one-foot-long steel leader and a wicked-looking treble hook as big as my thumb. The fire chief explained that drowning victims always came up by their softest parts, the hooks set deep in some opportune place such as the webbing between the thumb and forefinger or hooked through the nose or cheek, the body drawn up slowly from the deep of one of the murky, silted ponds that lay in front of scores of cottages in our fire district. And I always imagined seeing the victim slowly rise from underneath, as if I were somehow underwater, the body splayed out above me, the sun making the water's surface into a silver horizon above it.

Bit by bit, in a manner that was thin, even tenuous, things started to change—almost imperceptibly, the way a floater in your eye darts away every single time you try to look directly at it. No longer the newest of the firefighters, I'd end up at the fire station at all hours, sitting up in the radio room listening to trucks from other fire departments call each other, recognizing each department by its call number on the multi-channel radio. I could turn on the speaker that hung out over the equipment floor and walk around the trucks, listening to other departments whirl around the radio like small independent constellations, fireground officers barking orders at their trucks, calling for more water and asking how far out the other trucks were.

The rattling edge was starting then, nights fingered with occasional jarring nightmares that started in familiar places and then came apart, and I thought they were just a natural part of being a firefighter, a sort of off-gassing of experience and colour, nothing more than the gentle fizz you learn to expect every time you pour a glass of ginger ale.

A dream, for example, about crawling through heavy smoke inside a house. That's frightening enough when you're doing it for real, because even though you have air from your tank, the smoke closes in so tightly around you that it's easy to crawl straight into furniture or walls. Heavy smoke defies the brightest of flashlights, shortening the beam so that the area in front of you lights up completely but discloses nothing. I roadmap the room in my head like unrolling a long piece of thread, making the three-dimensional space deliberately linear, drawing it up in a combination of straight lines and sudden turns. That's really the easiest way to think about it, because I have to maintain a clear memory of every turn and even every false path—like when I've crawled into and back out of a walk-in closet. I have to hold all the parts of the whole if I ever want to be able to follow my route back out. Most of the time firefighters have a hose line with them, so they can simply feel the metal knuckles of the hose connectors and know which way to crawl to follow the hose—the male end of the hose fitting inside the female, so no matter how disoriented you are you can always find the right direction by touch. Sometimes, out in front of the other firefighters and looking fast for victims, you don't have a hose—but you always have to be able to backtrack fast, without mistakes. Simple mistakes get you killed.

In the dream, I don't have a hose. I'm on fast attack, one of the first team in, looking for someone who's supposed to be trapped, someone who may or may not be there; and although I have a partner, another firefighter, we get separated. We're following what sounds like a voice through the smoke, but we can never seem to get close enough to find the person. After losing my partner—a cardinal sin right there—I start losing my gear.

The Halligan tool first: it's a big chrome bar with a spike on the end for forcing doors open. Then for some reason my gloves. It's hard to explain how important gloves are to a firefighter—how exposed you feel to heat and sheared metal and broken glass if you lose them. Then the low-pressure alarm on my breathing gear goes off, a vibrating bell you can feel right through your fire coat, like a frightened bird beating its wings in your armpit.

In the dream, I'm always out of air and disconnecting the low-pressure hose to stuff it under my arm when I wake up.

There's no one who hasn't experienced it who understands how serious it is when the bells stop ringing, who can comprehend what it's like to take that last available breath and feel the facepiece of the mask smack in hard against your face like a dry-cleaning bag, your breath caught and stopped cold by something out of your control. It's impossible to describe the abrupt and panicked slap of being stopped halfway through a breath, so that your diaphragm is still trying to pull air inwards even though there's nothing left for your lungs to draw. Your body is trying to breathe, and in the process is using so much of its musculature that the sudden stop actually hurts. It's almost like falling and knocking the breath out of yourself, except you can feel the effort flexing your ribs.

One of the things training officers sometimes do—one of the things I've done—is to creep up behind a rookie firefighter in the smokehouse, when his mask is blacked out and he can see nothing, and turn his tank valves off. You want to see what the firefighter will do, how he will react, whether he'll check the override valve on the front of the regulator—it's a different shape and feel than any of the other valves—and whether he'll take the time to reach back and find the main valve behind his back before giving up. It takes tremendous self-control not to simply stand up and tear your mask right off your face and suck in a great heaving breath of whatever's out there in the air all around you.

That first dream—that first needling dream—started to prick a small hole in my confidence, in my belief that I had everything under control. Later on, that lost control would start to prick holes in my days as well as my nights.

An early June morning and the pager had gone off, because there was a car in Healey's Pond and no one had any idea how long it had been in there.

A new-looking Tempo had gone up and over the guardrail and down into deep-enough water that we could only see the dome of the roof from where we stood, looking down through water from the bank. Standing by the guardrail, I wondered just how anyone even saw it down there, or at least saw enough through the peaty brown water to stop and look more carefully.

We couldn't tell if there was anyone in the car, and we didn't want to wait for the divers. You call for divers and they'll suit up, the cold-water rescue team from St. John's, but it takes time for them to track down the whole team and get the gear on the road. So Mike Reid put on one of the floater suits from the rescue and walked into the pond, and every time he kicked himself down under the water, he bobbed back up again like an orange cork.

Once we knew there was no one in the car, we were busting up laughing, all the time trying not to let anyone see in the cars that slowed down every time they came around the corner and spotted our lights.

Finally, Mike got himself completely inside the car, and the flotation suit held him stuck tight up against the roof like an air bubble, so that he had to pull himself around by holding on to the car's interior. He managed to get the registration out of the glove compartment, and the police called the woman who owned the car, and she said that her son had had it the night before but he was home asleep in bed now, thank you very much.

“So, is your car in the driveway, then?” we heard the police officer ask her on the phone. We couldn't hear the answer.

NINE

When I graduated from university, it was suddenly time to move. Time to find work, even if that meant moving hundreds of miles to Toronto. At least that was the plan, and I thought it was a good one.

After we left Wolfville, I didn't plan on ever fighting fires again. I'd only been in the department for a little more than a year and a half, on call every single night, but leaving the department was actually more difficult than leaving my family and heading off to college had been. I'd married my high school sweetheart, we'd finished college together, and like many people in the Atlantic provinces we were heading for Toronto. Barby was going to go to art school and I was going to find a full-time job—any full-time job. By then I was the only arts graduate in my family, with an honours degree in philosophy and not very much in the way of solid prospects.

I'd changed, too. For months, as Barby watched me get more and more involved with the fire department, I had been telling her less and less about the most serious calls. It just didn't seem important. Well, that's not true. It
did
seem important, but I couldn't bring myself to go through all the detail of explaining why it was so darned important to me, and why that should have anything to do with us.

But that was only half of it. I was already aware that nobody else in the department ever seemed to have the need to talk about anything, to work through anything. I needed to explain how hard it all was without feeling foolish—that I loved riding the truck through the town and along the back roads, but that when we reached a car accident I thought I was the only one who felt like a fraud. But there just didn't seem to be any way to tell that to anyone. I couldn't explain that I had all the training, knew exactly what to do, but still had a lingering fear that I was somehow just going through the motions, that someone else would do a far better job.

At twenty-two, I wasn't aware how many people spend a lot of their life feeling exactly that way, whether they're journalists or firefighters or cops. I didn't let on to anyone that I could be jarred enough by the sight of blood on my latex gloves that I could stand by the side of the pumper, waiting to head back to the station, and just stare at the scattered scarlet drops on my hands. I didn't explain that torn-up cars have a kind of ragged, savage newness that barely lasts overnight before the shiny, exposed metal begins to cloud over with fine rust.

I preferred the idea of a clean break from the fire department, getting away from all that before anyone figured out I was a fake. But it turned out that the break was full of jangly edges and unfinished business, full of a sense of loss that nagged at me at the oddest times.

Another firefighter, Peter Jadis, left the department at the same time I did, heading for a career in the RCMP, and our colleagues got us drunk and left us wandering on the fire chief's lawn. I saw the chief look out between his curtains, shake his head and pull them closed again. Laughing, we urinated on the mailbox post, while the firefighters who had brought us there climbed in their cars and drove away. The chief hadn't come to the party, too used to recruiting and training young firefighters only to have them move away after college.

Turning in my gear, initialling the list of equipment I was returning, and handing over my pager and the key to the fire station was brutally hard, especially for someone who hadn't yet experienced much of the change that life usually brings. I was barely out of school, my family was still living in the same Halifax house I had lived in almost all my life, and I wasn't familiar with the draining idea that there is a point at which scores of things suddenly exist only in your memory. It wasn't until my parents retired, sold the house and moved to Victoria, B.C., that I realized a home could just disappear, moving from the concrete to the intangible in a mere moment. Suddenly, everything that had been our family home became just scattered electrons zipping around my head as memories, and I couldn't even be sure I had the order right.

But I certainly felt a sense of loss the instant I left the fire department in Wolfville. It came with a sinking awareness that the situation couldn't be undone, that we already had airline tickets to Toronto and plans that wouldn't be changed. Handing in my key to the station, I felt that a thousand things were slipping away.

I realized that, while I would certainly never forget putting out a huge pile of burning car tires in the middle of a rural road on a freezing cold Halloween night, there wouldn't be anyone who would know exactly what I meant when I said the night was so dark that the smoke was invisible, showing itself only in the negative when thick curtains of it snuffed out the stars in a rising column of inked black.

That no one would understand the strange, light, feathery feeling I had in my chest as I walked back from the fire department and down a dirt road to the university's rugby field, the fall sky streaked with long fingers of orange cloud.

That no one would know there had been a highway crash in Canning where a dump truck loaded with asphalt had rolled over a stalled car at an intersection, the edge of the dump truck's box clipping off the doorposts and both the heads of the old couple in the car. Some firefighters looked for the heads, others shovelled hot asphalt out of the car and away from the slowly cooking bodies. The couple had been married for decades and were just out for a drive from their Kentville retirement home.

That I'd have no one left to talk to who would understand how a whole fire department could be overcome by laughter talking about a chicken farm fire—a fire that the chief thought was arson at first because there were so many points of origin. The barn was burning, then the front porch caught, then a small fire started under a truck. But it was far simpler than arson—and I still smile thinking about it, and still think that smile is cruel. Burning chickens run and hide. It's a sight that's both absolutely horrible and, in its own way, uncontrollably funny. The smell was like burning pillows, the sight like small, angry meteors rushing along the ground in straight and urgent lines.

That no one I would meet could possibly know about the time Captain Stewart got run over by a 300-pound burning sow at a pig barn fire when he broke open the barn doors too quickly; or how, directing firefighters at another barn fire, he sank to his knees in what turned out to be a grassed-over manure pile.

Don't get me wrong: I was happy in some ways to close the door. I was still having nightmares, mostly ones where I repeatedly messed up simple tasks. I've always been bad with knots, and I'd have nightmares where tying the right knot was both essential and impossible, where the only thing in my vision was the rope I was working on. Sometimes it was nightmares about car accidents and barn fires, nightmares that left me disoriented and out of sorts when I woke up, covered with sweat, a newlywed in a downtown Toronto apartment hundreds of miles from any barn.