Burning Down the House (3 page)

I'm not sure they would have signed the forms if they'd known what the next few years would bring. They might have made a different decision, and I would have missed at least one year on the trucks. And how eager I was to get on those trucks!

Three blocks from the house where I grew up—one block up and two blocks over—was the Halifax Fire Department station at Robie Street and University Avenue. It was a quiet station—in the city but in a residential neighbourhood with two universities, not the kind of busy station where the trucks roll ten or more times a day. It was the sort of station that gets called out to false alarms pulled in the residences, and the occasional kitchen fire. It was staffed mostly with older firefighters, careerists, well past the flush of wanting to be at every single serious call. The station is still standing, an old structure built in 1903, sandy grey stone on the outside layered with years of climbing sucker-footed ivy. It's so old that the doors are barely wide enough for the new equipment, the bay barely long enough for the ladder truck.

Trucks have gotten bigger and heavier and, paradoxically, easier to drive. Drivers on big aerial ladder trucks now often drive from low down, out in front of the wheels, and a huge truck can corner much the same way a compact car does. But that's not the way it's always been. When I was growing up, the University Avenue station had a tiller ladder truck—a long aerial ladder with an open cab for the driver and the captain and a small seat high up on the back, where another firefighter sat with a steering wheel that turned the rear end of the truck. For many of its calls, the big truck had to come out of the bay and immediately turn right, down a narrow one-way street lined with cars parked at meters all along one side. Watching the truck turn, especially from the pine-lined island in the middle of University Avenue, was an awe-inspiring sight. The firefighters always looked far more blasé about the fire calls than I felt as a bystander.

Even if it didn't look as though I'd ever fight fires, I could still run to the dining room at the front of my old Halifax house at the first sound of the sirens coming up South Street, while my mother yelled “Fire trucks!” from the kitchen. At the time, firefighting seemed like an unattainable career. I started wearing glasses in grade six, and a bunch of boyhood dreams were closed off right then. I wasn't going to be a jet pilot, and I wouldn't be an astronaut either. I was growing to look like my mother: too short for the police and, like my grandfather, too wiry in the upper body to fit the fire department's entrance criteria.

Even the chief in my first department would occasionally repeat the old joke about the perfect firefighter: “Strong back, weak mind.” The classic firefighter was supposed to go where he was told and throw all his strength into whatever task had to be done. But while this may have been true once, there's now so much more to keep track of: chemical fires and emergency placarding on trucks, high-angle rescue and medical calls. Every year it's more complex, with warnings about car plastics and chemicals in furniture, and concerns about whether exposure to regular smoke can cause heart attacks and urinary and bowel cancers later in life.

Fortunately for me, volunteer departments have different entrance standards, and now I had my chance. After the permission slip was signed and I was back in Wolfville, I was given boots and bunker gear, even if the boots had to be special-ordered because, at size 8 1/2, my feet were smaller than any of the pairs they had on hand in the storeroom.

Starting out in Wolfville, I had my mitts, a two-dollar throwaway flashlight—the first one I bought was white, but there would be many more—an aluminum hose tool for tightening connections, and eight feet of lightweight yellow nylon rope, coiled tightly and tied around itself. And helmet number nine—that was the number I signed out on everything. The helmet was light yellow, with a Plexiglas visor on the front to protect my eyes and reflective numbers on the back so that the safety officer would know who I was even walking away from him in the dark.

I was in locker number nine, an open-front wooden locker in a row of real firefighters, all the other gear on either side of me, all of it belonging to the kind of guys who ran into burning houses while their owners were running out: Big Al MacDonald, with a craggy, pockmarked face and steel-rimmed glasses, a guy who stood with his feet wide apart as if good balance was a necessity. Drew Peck, the training officer, who could turn his steady grey eyes on you while you were working, squint slightly as if looking in under your skin, and take apart every move you made. Bob Cook, always smiling, short and stocky and able to drive every single truck in the station, and he would stay smiling while the siren wailed and he ripped the big pumper through the night. He could fix small engines with his fingertips like a magician making quarters appear, and he knew what was wrong with the chop saw from the sound it made when he pulled the cord. Scottie MacDougall, shorter than me but broad— an oil rig worker, three weeks on, three off, and a weightlifter too, and in his bunker gear he looked as solid as a wall.

They all looked bigger than real life to me, every one of them, all huge and serious and professional, incapable of either fear or doubt. Guys who knew what to do, always. The chief, Gerald Wood, small and wizened and hard as nails. Captain Tim MacLeod, a no-nonsense prison guard who once used a piece of broken broomstick to show another firefighter how quickly a nightstick could take a violent prisoner down. MacLeod spent every quiet minute at the fire station joking and kidding around, but on the fireground his face would fall like a curtain had swept over it, all business and calculation and concern.

I felt like a kid among men, the coffee machine always running, the kitchen up in the back of the fire hall thick with cigarette smoke. I washed hose and hoisted it into the hose tower, washed and waxed trucks, swept the equipment floor—did anything I was asked to do, desperately afraid they might change their minds, decide I was a bad choice and ask me to leave. Probationary firefighters had a few short months to make their mark, and then there was a secret ballot at the monthly meeting to see if you'd be allowed to stay. If you weren't, you'd never know who voted against you or why—the equipment officer would just meet you with his clipboard, carefully checking off every single piece of gear as you handed it back in. The last thing on the list was always the building key. I was keen to avoid that fate, and also afraid that it was out of my hands, that every small mistake I made was being indexed, compiled and totted up against every single thing I did right. As the vote got closer, I began looking at each firefighter, trying to decide if he would vote against me, and why.

I didn't find out until after the meeting that they'd voted to let me in, along with two other rookies just as intent on doing every single thing they could to stay.

In the very first weeks of training for what was a brand new department, a training officer from a visiting department was quizzing us on how to behave in heavy smoke—how to stay low and out of the heat and smoke, but not so low that you might run into other dangerous gases.

“Anyone know why you don't put your face next to the floor?” the trainer asked, turning around at the front of the room and looking at us.

The room, a space in the Anglican parish hall that acted as everything from a polling station during elections to a spot for hosting wedding receptions, stayed awkwardly silent.

“Doesn't anyone have any idea at all?”

I was one of the few people with any firefighting experience, and I'd answered too many questions from the trainer already. I was afraid that if I kept answering them, I'd start looking like a know-it-all. So I kept my mouth shut.

Down in the back of the room, a voice I didn't recognize yet spoke up quietly. “Splinters?” the voice asked.

We laughed until there were tears coming down our faces.

TWO

Nova Scotia's Gaspereau River lies between two long ridges, one called the South Mountain, the other, just scant miles across the valley, reasonably enough called the North Mountain. Neither are truly mountains, just long ridges with the wide, flat, fertile river valley between them.

South Mountain was essentially the backyard for Wolfville, with houses that started to range apart at more rural distances than in town, farmers' fields dotted with big black and white battleships of cattle, long, orderly apple orchards, and big squared-off patches of field corn that would be stripped of its cobs and left thin and standing through the winter. Then, the wind and the snow would hiss off the standing stalks with a dry, sibilant whisper.

Wolfville was a college town, home to Acadia University, and even on the South Mountain, up behind the highway, there were some houses rented out to students. But by the time you crossed underneath the highway and headed down into the valley behind, most of the homes were single-family dwellings with wide driveways and small windows, built square with steep peaked roofs.

North Mountain was much rougher, with single-wide mobile homes buried deep in grey sugar bush, big dogs on chains, and pickup trucks whose headlights could be seen beetling along the narrow dirt roads at all hours of the night on mysterious and private errands. Fire calls to the North Mountain used to be among the most serious. Sometimes they were medical calls, where you would have to sit in the rescue truck and wait for the police to arrive before you would go in. Other times it was a big, hot fire, where the aluminum skin of a mobile home had already melted into round, otherworldly, bright silver pools on the ground by the time we got there.

There were fires in houses where there was little property to save but where every scrap you could salvage was something the family would keep, stained with smoke or not. Sometimes we'd get called out to a fire where you couldn't even save the small things— families with no money and no insurance, staring with dead eyes from the other side of the caution tape as if they had always known they'd end up with nothing.

Once, we were called to a fully involved house, flames jetting yellow out of the upstairs windows when we got there, but with no one and nothing inside, only two single tire tracks in the thin, wet snow, turning onto the muddy road and away. It turned out the house was a bank foreclosure, abandoned, but we already knew something was strange as we searched the downstairs carefully but vainly in the pitch black while the flames roared upstairs. We didn't run into even a single stick of furniture. By the time another firefighter and I started for the stairs, the smoke was heavy, the fire burning so hot that the railings had burned off the tops of the spindles on the stairs, and the chief pulled us out because the roof looked like it would cave in. Big, long blasts on the air horns of the pumpers, the pump operators standing on the running boards and pulling the horn chains for long, moaning blasts that echoed off the hills long after the horns fell silent—a universal signal for firefighters, the sound of those horns, a sound that means the building's on the verge of collapse. So we beetled backwards out of the house as quickly as we could, so fast that the difference between the heat inside and the cold outdoors steamed the mask on our breathing gear. Even though I had successfully and safely navigated a burning house in the pitch black and heavy smoke, with my first steps out in the blinding light of the truck spotlights I fell down the porch steps and sprawled in the snow like an ungainly starfish tossed flat on the beach.

We waited for more water then, listening for the big tankers trundling up the steep grades, and watched the flankers—embers that rose on the thermal upwelling from the fire and fell, still flaming, in a scattered ring around the house—as they snuffed themselves out in the snow in an ever-expanding circle, the fire growing hotter and more out of control.

More like a bonfire than anything else, the flames were so bright that the maples surrounding the small yard cast dancing, flickering black shadows back onto their fellows deeper in the woods. The circle of that blaze seemed like the only light those woods had ever seen. After the roof let go and settled down into the second floor, and with nothing else on the property to protect, we just poured the water on until finally, around dawn, there was nothing left but charred wall beams and the occasional chunk of shingled wall that had broken free and fallen outwards into the snow.

For me, mere months in, with the liners of my boots still smelling as if they'd just come off the shelf, it all felt brand new. The other firefighters, more experienced, circled around me, sure in their duties without a word from the officers—getting more hose ready, hooking up the big tankers as they rumbled in—while I watched and waited to be told what to do. They'd sent me in for the experience and then left me on the edge of things to think about it all. Sometimes I was sent back to the trucks for tools, but often I was just kept within arm's reach of the fire chief.

The North Mountain was beautiful country in the fall, the leaves unbelievably bright, multicoloured, and close to the sides of the truck as we sped along the narrow roads. But once winter came, the tall maples, reaching upwards, were altogether too reminiscent of bare bones to me. The worst calls on the North Mountain tended to be in the winter, when there were chimney fires and either shorts in electric heaters or toppled kerosene burners; in the spring and summer it was mostly brush fires and accidents with night-time drivers ripping along too fast and too drunk.

Down between the two ridges, the Gaspereau wound along the edges of healthier apple orchards. It is a flat, wide river that riffles over a black stone bottom until it reaches the red clay mud of the Bay of Fundy. Deceptive, too—the river is fully dammed high up near White Rock, so it sometimes slackens away to virtually nothing while the electric company stockpiles water for the times of year when it most needs the power. There is a good flow of water in the spring, though, when a bony species of alewife, fish named gaspereaux after the river they come home to, make their way upstream to spawn.