Burning Down the House (18 page)

When you move right inside a burning building, the smoke huffs down over your head and shoulders and even your boots; everything vanishes as you cross the threshold. We had the Stang down at arm's length, one of us on either side, shuffling slowly forward, but as soon as we were in the smoke we dropped to our knees to crawl instead. Even if you could still see the glow of your flashlight, it was better to start setting your compass by touch, and to be low enough down that there was no way to trip and fall.

Sounds at a fire can become as deceptive as they are in fog: noises seem muffled and indistinct, and while you can move in their direction you often end up head-butting furniture or the sharp corners of walls.

I've always found breathing gear strangely comforting, although I know that's not the case for many people. Being in smoke to me is like humming, not a learned skill as much as blind luck: either you can do it or you can't. Once in smoke, everything has to become repetitive patterns, so you make the same choices and follow them over and over again, as clearly as following lines on paper with a pencil.
Always turn right and follow the right-hand wall after you come
in the door.
It's what you do every time, living completely within the pattern, and really within your own head.

Count the turns while following a path with no overt clues about where you are or where you're going. It's like a big blind hedge maze—and when the smoke lifts or you get to go back in after the fire's out, it's downright startling how different the rooms are from what you've put together in your head. Shapes you couldn't figure out with your hands become tables and chairs and beds, walls you couldn't solve become closets and even kitchen cupboards.

Hold the back of your hand against the wall so if you hit live, bare electrical wires your muscles won't contract and clench your hand over them.

I've often wondered if one reason I'm so comfortable in smoke is my poor vision. Without my glasses I swim around by touch anyway, having to take short steps that allow me to feel out just where my feet are going. It's a skill that works marvellously well at fires.

When I used to take my turn playing the victim in training exercises, masked up in heavy smoke and lying somewhere in the training building—under the bed, in the bathtub, curled up in a closet—I'd find myself lost in a smoky reverie, cocooned, listening to the firefighters come into the building to look for me. The searchers were supposed to call out for victims, and they were supposed to stop every few minutes and listen. Good firefighters communicate well together, working in pairs, and there's a strange thrill to hearing them come for you, regularly stopping and listening for you to make any sound at all, occasionally cheating by listening for the click of your regulator and the quick inward rasp of breath. Sometimes, when you're training new firefighters, you move around them unfairly—you know the floor plan, where everything is, and they don't really know how to listen yet. You can move all around the house almost on top of them, without them even knowing you're there.

Waterville was one of my first times in heavy smoke at a real fire—and it was, at first, every bit as relaxing as training. On my own with Weagle on the other side of the nozzle, I was floating in the smoky darkness. I knew it was easy to become disoriented, even with the fat hoses to follow, leading back from the Stang to the barn doors behind us.

Then the water was on, and it subtracted another sensory dimension: little to see because of the smoke, and nothing to hear because of the water.We had angled the Stang straight up towards momentary flashes of flame high up along what we could only assume was the ridgepole of the barn. Setting the nozzle up, we had run into something that felt like a low, uneven wall, but we already had almost all the hose we could use. From time to time we could hear other firefighters yelling beneath us on a lower floor—but after the Stang was going, there was nothing to do except hover and wait, and feel your head slip away into its own creative reality.

Your head always wants to make sense of disordered sounds, and it sometimes comes up with strange combinations. The process works the same way when you're fishing near a big waterfall: faced with too much information, with the constant and complicated roar of falling water, your head picks out pieces of sounds and tries to put them into workable order. A baby crying—cats fighting—heavy trucks shifting down gear: I've heard all of that on rivers, and I had the same aural hallucinations in fires, especially when there was lots of water running. It's just worse when you're also completely blind.

We were in a big muddy-red dairy barn, with over a hundred cattle on two floors. Not the usual white and black Nova Scotia dairy cattle, but big, sleek, sandy brown milkers, as much alike as if they were all sisters. Firefighters from other departments had broken their way in through the lower doors in the barn, and were moving from stall to stall, finding dead cows flopped on the floor, as far out of the stalls as they could get before they were fetched up by their head ropes. Sometimes the panicked cattle lay stretched out backwards, the ropes as tight as if the cows were still alive and pulling frantically.

Upstairs, we had doused what few flames we could see and had radioed out to have the pump shut down so we could move farther in. But first we had to get around that low wall in front of us. I yelled to Bill to move my way. The wall felt about knee high, and I could reach over it and feel nothing beyond. We started dragging the Stang, me pulling, Bill pushing, along the sloping wall, but I couldn't get past it. I decided to see if I could get close enough to at least find out what it was made of. I reached into my pocket for my two-dollar flashlight, pressed my face up tight against the obstacle, and held the bulb right at the top of my face mask as I flicked it on.

For a moment I stopped breathing entirely, the way you do when you fall suddenly and knock the wind out of yourself. You get short, alarmed gasps, little more than mouthfuls of air, but you can't seem to draw enough in to actually reach your lungs.

Pressed up against the clear mask of my breathing gear was a single large and sightless eye, the great wet and blindly staring orb of a dead cow lying on its side, the glow from my small flashlight shining into the brown depths like there was a small and liquid universe right there in front of me.

Terrifying—stupidly terrifying.

It's the kind of thing you can joke about later in the fire hall and get a lot of laughs, and even more teasing, but you can't ever kid about it without a shudder shifting through you like the wind changing, and without knowing it's the kind of linchpin that dreams will certainly turn on later. The contact was just too close. The rough backward pull of my gloved hand as it moved the short fur the wrong way, the mark the eyeball momentarily left on my mask, the huge swollen tongue that my mask hit next: a playground for nightmares.

When the water had been going, I could handle—even dismiss— the sounds of babies and crows, of trucks and dogs, even the idea that someone was screaming just on the edge of my aural register. But the sudden appearance of the cow—well, there was no simple way of dealing with that.

Once I could breathe again, we lugged the Stang around the cow, both of us working hard while, somewhere outside, wires got crossed and the hoses got charged again. The Stang was still tipped forward, and the thing slammed back into both of us and almost took off like a rocket.

Later, walking away from the barn, I was steaming like a racehorse on a cold day. If I stopped moving for even a moment, the sleeves of my fire jacket and the legs of my bunker pants, soaking wet from hoses inside the barn, would start to freeze into unyielding tubes, so that I would have to swing one arm like a club to break a joint into the elbow of the other. I walked like the Tin Man in
The
Wizard of Oz
from the barn to the truck where the Salvation Army was handing out hot coffee.

It was the first cup of coffee I'd ever had in my life, hot and milky and sweet, but mostly hot.

I had bruises on my arms from the Stang for a week, and Bill had them on his chest, and somewhere out in the smoky darkness hundreds of gallons of water had crashed into a firefighter from Water-ville, plucking the helmet right off his head and knocking him over and almost down a ladder. Later, at the coffee truck, I ran into that firefighter, complaining about the assholes who'd hit him with the water, but I didn't say anything about it. I would have asked Bill to keep his mouth shut too, if I'd had the chance. But I didn't speak to him again that night, and I fell asleep, exhausted, on the backseat bench in the rescue on the way back. Even soaked, my boots full of water, I slept . . . and I still don't have a clue where we were.

By the next week, Bill was in the hospital with a heart attack.

That summer, the department went to help build a deck on the back of his bungalow. It was as if there was nothing left he wanted to talk about except being split open like a fish and sewn back together again. When we had enough rum and Cokes in us, he opened his shirt to show us his ragged row of stitches, and told us that if World War Three ever came he'd be ready—because he had an engine block in the garage “and I'll just go out and try to lift that sucker, and that will be that.”

I don't remember a lot about Bill's deck party. I remember he had an anvil in his basement, and a long tool bench, and I remember that we talked about fires in a strange and wistful way, as if we were recognizing that Bill wouldn't be back, or that if he was, it would be for the worst of fire department responsibilities, as a lame-duck radio operator who stayed at the station while everyone else rolled. The guy whose turnout gear never gets out of the locker, but whom the chief can't seem to dig up enough nerve to ask to hand in his bunker coat and boots and helmet.

I didn't get it at the time, but I would in Portugal Cove, and Bill would be the first one on that list when I eventually put it all together. The walking wounded had a way of disappearing: one day they were there and the next the person you'd gone through so much with would simply be gone. Mike went to Vancouver for an EMS job. Gord Squires had a TIA, the mini-stroke transient ischemic attack, and his wife phoned me because he came in from shovelling snow swearing like a stranger. Later he had the big stroke, in the car out near Grand Falls, and couldn't talk at all, and he was a long time coming back. Scott Churchill's wife had a baby. Ivor Hann moved away. A succession of fire chiefs and senior officers quit.

Foolish as it was, I ended up feeling like I was the only one holding the map together. Every time another firefighter left, it was as though any experiences we had shared were suddenly mine alone to care for. A librarian of hard, dangerous facts—as if the things we were doing were crucially important but I was the only one left keeping track.

Of all the firefighters I worked with, Bill Weagle was the first to go. We were drinking swish in his basement at one point, the whole room full of war stories. Some of them I'd been part of, others I was supposed to listen to and absorb, because, as a new firefighter, wide-eyed listening was also my job. They talked about the house they'd hosed out when social services called us in, an old woman abandoned on her own, rotten groceries everywhere and the floor in the front room covered with spilled strike-anywhere matches. Rats swinging on the curtains and the water turned off, the bathtub and toilet piled full with cones of human excrement. Weekly boxes of groceries dropped off that she'd dragged into the front hall, taking what she wanted and then just leaving the rest to rot. The pump operator turned on the hose as soon as the first firefighter was inside the front door, and a great tide of water swept down and over Mother just as he was opening the basement door to come in.

We talked about the years the department had spent fighting barn fires started by a fat arsonist who wound up getting beaten almost to death with broomsticks on his first day in Dorchester penitentiary because he was cursed with a smart mouth.

The bookstore with the cats. The fuel delivery truck that had its back wheels fall off.

After that, I remember pouring deck stain into a pan so that we could roll it onto the boards—and that's it. I woke up the next morning in my small second-floor apartment, deck-stain handprints on the toilet seat in the bathroom.

I'd like to say I remember equally little about my encounter with the cow. That would be a lie.

We had two training dummies, Mr. Heavy and Mr. Tall. Mr. Heavy was a pair of overalls filled with sandbags, while Mr. Tall—longer than the average sofa—was a shirt sewn into a pair of trousers, also filled with long tubes of sand. Neither of them had a head.

On one training exercise we heard the two firefighters inside wrestling one of the dummies out of the back bedroom of the training bungalow. Basil Hibbs came out carrying the shoulders and arms, Scott Churchill a few moments later carrying everything from the belt down. We told them they would have to go back and do it again, that it didn't count as a rescue if you've torn the victim in half.

SIXTEEN

In St. Philip's, on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, the moon would lip up over the hill opposite my living room and cycle high, yelling, before falling back into the hill again. When the moon was full, it would cast a bright, cold light across my living room floor. And several nights a month, moon or not, I would find myself sitting on that floor, often shivering, sometimes with tears streaming down my face.

Fire trucks have a load limit, the amount they can carry without their brakes suddenly failing or else fading on the long downhill grade—and every now and then, their backs loaded with heavy fabric-wrapped hose, you take the fire trucks out to the weigh scales, just to make sure you haven't put too much weight on the back axle. The temptation is always to add more equipment: a portable pump on the back, maybe, a chainsaw, more hose—often more hose, just because you might need it.