Burning Down the House (11 page)

That little old lady is still one of my most terrifying dreams, and I've been having it for twenty years now, six or eight times a year. I have it so often that there's even a strange familiarity to it, as if the dream can move much more quickly through its opening steps now. I stand next to the car in the heat, listening to the disordered birdsong from the chattering starlings hiding up in the high branches of an elm tree that isn't even there anymore. In the dream, once I get to the side of the car, her face is like it has always been: still, slightly annoyed, smooth-looking. And for most of the rest of the dream I just wait, smelling fuel oil and gasoline and the fresh, sharp scent of new hay—and there's no one there but me, because all the other firefighters have left.

Just me, standing by that car with the hose.

Then she opens her eyes, and those eyes look angry and black, the pupils over-large and staring.

That's all. And I scream myself awake every time.

The nightmares made leaving seem like the right decision, even more so when I heard that my crew from Wolfville had fought a fire at a pesticides warehouse in Canning, and that they were now getting regular blood tests to see how many different chemicals were still in their system. That testing went on for months while provincial health officials tried to determine if there would be lasting effects, the kind of time bomb no one would want to be carrying around inside him.

I had left when I was right on the verge of wanting to look for a job in Wolfville and never leave the department, taking the pieces as they came, choosing something close to a surfing bum's existence, hopping from short-term job to short-term job in order to be able to stay in the department and keep the wonder of the fire calls. I continued to feel that I'd gotten out just in time, even though our Toronto apartment backed onto an ambulance station and late at night the urgent blurt of the sirens would wake me and I'd feel I should be trying harder to find my gear.

The move didn't last. The colours couldn't compete: Toronto, grey and dingy, the work every bit as grey. I spent eighteen months working as a researcher for Southam News at the Queen's Park legislature, but in my memory it was like you could pack that whole time into less than a handful of Wolfville fire calls.

So, as quickly as we could, we left Toronto so I could take a job in Newfoundland. Barby hadn't liked art school and was tired of painting in the sunroom of a one-bedroom apartment. She missed her family, and I had a chance to work as a reporter at a new weekly newspaper in St. John's.

Flying to an interview for the job, we stopped in Halifax for only an hour or so, where my mother had driven out to see us at the airport with a sad expression and a bouquet of hydrangeas, the flowers weeping pale blue petals onto the slick floor. She was close to tears herself, convinced that the move was a step backwards. “Are you sure you really want to do this?” she said.

There's a question I've spent half a lifetime playing in my head.

We ended up in St. John's anyway. I started working at the
Sunday
Express
, was handed many of the police and fire stories because I knew what they were talking about on the police scanner. I knew the emergency services shorthand, knew that 10-18 meant police and 10-6 was a radio check. That a 10-45 was a report of a dead body, and I'd been on those, too.

Just a few months in at the paper, I was sent out to a Saturday afternoon explosion in an eighteen-wheeler's gasoline tank trailer. It was a big truck with the company's name stencilled down both sides of the silver-grey trailer, and by the time I got there it was surrounded by fire equipment and police cars. There was already a crowd, mostly comprising people who stopped when they saw the emergency vehicles; on the edge of an industrial park, the area had been empty when the explosion occurred, and few people knew what had actually happened.

There had been two men working on the tanker trailer, either cleaning the tank or doing some kind of repairs to the inside. The truck was supposed to have been properly vented and clear of gasoline. Apparently, it hadn't been. One of the workmen was seriously injured, the other dead. One was inside the tank and the other had been on top, over the open hatch, handing in tools.

Standing behind the police tape, I could picture the way it must have happened—enough vapour for an explosion, then a spark as simple as a sharp finger of static electricity, and then the giant wave of plum-coloured flame rolling over the man inside the tank, the pressure building inside the long silver tube, the crushing weight of the explosion collapsing his chest and squashing his stomach, his lungs.

I could even imagine the brief, final, finishing thud of it—the way the trailer would ring like some sort of sonorous explosive bell—and the exact types of injury the man inside the tank would have. Crushed internal organs, especially the lungs, and the deep-tissue tearing that thoracic surgeons call avulsion. Deep flash burns on the exposed skin of his face and hands, the skin charring in an instant, blisters bubbling up later if there was still any circulation at all. If the victim was breathing in when the tank blew, flash burns to his lungs and a virtually instantaneous death. Breathe in, and out, in and out—a 50 percent chance of being caught doing the wrong thing when the explosion hit, swimming towards him like something jellied and well defined.

Firefighters often talk about confronting the “red devil” when they fight fires, embodying fire with some sort of malevolent presence. I always found the whole idea hopelessly overwrought and melodramatic, except I could never shake the notion that there was really something out there, waiting for you. Not an intelligent presence as much as an amorphous, shadowy thing, the kind of black cloud that exists on the edge of your vision in the evening in a darkening house. The sort of thing you glimpse but that always vanishes when you stare straight at it.

I didn't think the man in the tank could survive. Neither could the onlookers, milling around there outside the fire line. The police issued a two-paragraph press release, but no one would talk about which man had died. I wrote my news story without a doubt in my mind—and it turned out that I was completely wrong. My editor was furious with me: the man on top of the tanker had been killed, thrown clear by the explosion, while the man inside the tank had somehow lived. Explosions are fickle, and timing is everything. Breathe out and you get to live. Breathe in and you die.

In just a few years I'd learn first-hand just how fickle an explosion could be, how it can wrap around you while you're powerless to do anything but watch. How I could know just how deadly a fuel explosion can be but realize at the same time that there was no chance to run. This knowledge would change the way I looked at everything, from the fire service to my own life. It would be a piece of the puzzle that I would find I could not ignore, exactly because it made perfect sense, and because I would miss every single clue that it was coming.

Years of preparation, and I would not be ready.

When Barby and I moved to Portugal Cove–St. Philip's, a small town just outside St. John's, it was to a small, slate-grey house with plenty of mice and so little insulation that we couldn't afford to keep the heat turned up in the winter. We were seventeen minutes from the nearest fire department, and our insurance company knew all about that and made us pay for it, too. So when the town council decided to start a volunteer department, I found myself at the first meeting, and at every meeting afterwards.

One of the few firefighters in the department with experience, I was picked to be deputy chief right away, and soon we were a department of three pumpers, a rescue truck and a whole bunch of new ground to try to work through. I showed some thirty firefighters how to make chimney chains and packs for chimney fires, and I found myself slingshotted right back to where I had been. Talking about portable pumps and the ponds in the town where we could set up and draft water, about hard suction hoses and fire load and how many backpack water tanks we'd need for brush fires in the heavily wooded town, I was suddenly preplanning all over again.

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.