Burning Down the House (24 page)

It was a beautiful late summer day, the kind of day when you would make any excuse to get out into the woods. The bunchberries— called crackerberries in Newfoundland—were a brilliant red, far sharper than scarlet, and the raspberry canes were laden with fruit; it was impossible not to reach out as you went past, snagging a handful of the soft, warm berries packed tight with summer.

The higher we got, the more of the valley we could see. We were kicking up dust along a road that you could barely pick out from down below, threading our way along the edge of a steeper drop-off. The road followed the contour line of the hill and so did we, occasionally looking out into the valley over the edge. By then I had all the clips on my jacket undone and the Velcro strip pulled open, my portable radio clipped on my bunker jacket right at the neck. The other two firefighters were slightly ahead of me. Every now and then the pump operator would call us from below and tell us how close the forestry truck was, and how much smoke there was above us.

“Darker now,” the small speaker would crackle, and I'd say “Roger that,” and we'd shrug the shoulder straps of the water packs back in tight against our shoulders and try to move a little faster up the dirt road. We were soaked with sweat and breathing hard, and the deer flies were circling our heads like hungry little fighter planes. I was happy to be on the call-out, happy to be making my way uphill in the heat, distracted by the surroundings.

Everything seemed to catch at my eyes in the brilliant sunlight: a battered and rotten log with moss tufting out through the cracks in its sides, and the curious tall blue berries on hollow stalks that would never move in the wind but were supposed to be deadly poisonous. Slender moose paths wound their way out from between trees, looking purposeful as they neared the road but probably as ethereal and wandering as moose paths usually are, the big animals meandering with no real destination beyond a spot to sleep on high ground, and dinner in the meadow and bog down below. Along the side of the road were tangles of leapfrogging wild strawberry plants, and I was making my way uphill looking back into the woods and thinking there must be fifty thousand different kinds of moss in there under the wind-battered forest canopy—the green storybook mosses with tops like stars, the matted, brittle reindeer moss with thin stalks capped with bright red tips.

At the same time, every now and then I'd remember we were working our way uphill through the kind of heavy fire load they always warn you about when you train for wildland fires. It was old woods with lots of toppled trees and tangled, dry undergrowth, last winter's windfall still dressed with rusty red spruce needles, and I knew the forest fire index was extreme because we'd been getting ready for it all week. It was the kind of ground that fires just rip across, the flames coursing through the low slash faster than a man can run. And between the three of us we had just sixty litres of water and not much careful planning about what it was we were going to do when we got to the fire.

Then, all at once, we were on top of the hill. We broke out of the trees into an open patch of grass after almost half an hour of climbing, and there it was in front of us—the back of the silver Dodge Caravan that we hadn't even known to expect, nose down where it had been pushed into a patch of clear-cut, its sides striped with scratches from the trip through the tightly packed trees on both sides of the road. The inside of the van was roiling with flames that were the deep orange of burning plastic, packed tight with sooty black smoke that coats your gear and stays there for months.

We sprayed water uselessly from our small backpacks until the forestry truck rolled up behind us, and even with its portable pump and three hundred gallons of water, we only just put it out.

We were awash in sweat by then, and the straps of the heavy backpacks had torn raw trenches into our shoulders, and then, just to make it better still, the first water from the forestry truck knocked a wasps' nest from a dead tree, so we had smoke and heat and angry wasps too.

When the fire was out, the forestry guys offered us a ride back down the hill, but I shrugged my backpack tank over their tailgate and walked instead, my wet fire gloves pushed fingers-first into the outside pockets of my open jacket. I took great long strides down the twisting road, and every now and then I'd rub one of my hands across my sweaty face, my fingers under my nose so I could smell the wet suede scent left by the gloves and the tang of hot black spruce pitch on my fingers.

There's a small, thin tongue of metal next to the nozzle on the backpacks, and when you're pumping water you can bend it slightly so that it moves in front of the flow and fans the water out. If you take off your gloves while you're working—in summer, you always end up taking off your gloves—the index finger that pushes on that plate picks up a curious brassy smell, like rainwater. So I could smell suede and brass and fir trees, a mix with as rich a bouquet as wine.

That August day was a wonder, the sky fragile and blue mixed through with white, like the hollow glow of a robin's egg, and I could see pieces of the town through the trees, sloping roofs and shingles, and the occasional flash of the sun flickering off passing windshields. The world seemed a perfect place.

I said to myself then, my heavy boots clumping on the road and raising dry swirls of pale dust, that I'd be willing to fight fires until they knocked me down and took my gear away by force, that I'd climb ladders and pull down ceilings and sit on frozen coils of hose at January fires when it feels like you're absolutely alone, because it was too perfect ever to think of stopping.

That's the other half of the equation, the part that tries to balance out the fear and the nightmares and the shame. By the time we fought that fire on Greyman's Beard, I was already spinning out of control, and you'd think there would be absolutely no reason not to simply pack it in. But there was that simple beauty that occasionally waited around the corner—and the need to keep experiencing it— which makes every time your pager goes off a small, and sometimes a huge, wonder.

The sky dark blue and brightening as the wrecker comes to haul a car up out of the ditch, the roof lights orange and bright—the patch of asphalt in front of the fire station when you're cleaning muddy hose with the pressure washer so you can load it back on the pumper: it's all jarring and unique and particularly intense.

Each piece magic and different, as sharp as cut glass in your memory, set in place all the deeper because of the excitement and fear and apprehension that accompany it. Small triumphs, small miracles, and sometimes just small pieces of chance that save people too. And me—not knowing that I was less than a year away from hanging it all up anyway, from turning in my gear and just walking away. Despite the way everything was fragmenting, I wouldn't have believed I was about to leave then if someone had come right up to me and said it to my face.

The day before Christmas Eve we were in a new subdivision in Portugal Cove. It was pouring rain and something had gone wrong where the electricity came into one of the houses.

I was late getting there, all the way on the other side of town, and a firefighter came up from the basement and said the rainwater was pouring straight down through the breaker panel and puddling on the floor. When I got to the top of the stairs, I could smell something high and electrical, like burning paint, only sharper.

I told the homeowners I was going to have their power pulled, and they'd have to be out of the house until the panel dried and an electrical inspector could come in. While the power crew was up working on the pole, the woman pleaded with me to reconsider, because their extended family was supposed to be coming over for dinner the next day. She argued, saying it isn't really that bad, is it, and couldn't we just wait and see?

But I wouldn't let them stay, not with the thought that someone could be electrocuted or that a short-circuit might somehow set the house on fire. It wasn't much of a Christmas present, because I was sending them out of their own house and it was going to cost them money for repairs, both having an electrician in and then getting the power company to come in and hook up the service again.

I stayed long enough to see that they were getting packed up, loading presents and clothes into the back of their car in the pouring rain. It was getting darker and we used the big spotlight flashlights to help them get around the rapidly cooling house as the rain turned back into snow.

I could afford to be stubborn, because I got to go home to my own bed.

TWENTY-FOUR

There are few firefighters who haven't been called out in the middle of celebrating Christmas. For me, the one that sticks out was a structure fire where the roof of a house had burned because a chimney pipe for a wood stove got too hot. It was a stark contrast: leaving my own house, the living room still stuffed with the wreckage of unwrapped and excessive presents, and ending up in an undecorated three-room shack whose only resident was a tattooed man with no shirt who had recently been released from prison.

Inside the house, there was no sign whatsoever that Christmas even existed.

I'd left turkey and gravy at home, cooling on my plate in the sunlit dining room. The man sat in the rescue, shivering slightly, while we ripped down the entire ceiling in his living room to make sure the fire hadn't spread. He said thanks when we left, standing next to the pile of fibreboard ceiling tiles we had swept into one corner of the living room. No reason to say “Merry Christmas.”

Sometimes it happens at the grocery store or on the way to pick up Chinese food, or even when you're on the beach throwing rocks into the ocean with your kids. Sometimes your pager goes off in the middle of an argument, or when absolutely everyone is crying. Sometimes it's more of an escape than an emergency.

Next thing you know, you're saying you have to go, regardless of the situation, and it's like having an unfair and altruistic advantage over everyone else—you
have
to go, even though, deep down, that's just exactly what you want to be doing anyway.

I remember a cold, snowy morning, Barby still nursing and tormented with the pain of mastitis, Philip a three-year-old and Peter an infant, both howling at the top of their lungs. The bedroom was bright with mid-winter light, hard and electric and blue-white, the morning sun breaking through the cloud on and off and reflecting off the snow, up against the white of the ceiling.

It was the rolling nightmare every family has at some point or another, when you want to hold your head in your hands, cover your ears and wish it would all stop for a moment or two, just so you'd have time to gather even a handful of your thoughts. And my pager went off: a car off the road and overturned in a ditch on Old Broad Cove Road, just up the hill from us. Motor vehicle accident with injuries. Barby, through tears, saying “Do you have to go?” and me already into the countdown in my head, already thinking about my bunker gear and the sorts of injuries there always are in rollovers.

I also remember, just then, the distinct feeling of being torn raggedly in half—of knowing that I should really be in both places, that there was no way to justify leaving, and at the same time no way to justify staying. It was the kind of moment that's almost solid in your memory, nothing moving, as if someone has just poured fixative all over you, so that you're glued in place with clear, hard plastic.

It seems to me that I can remember exactly where everything was in the room—the Navajo blanket across the foot of the bed, the blond dresser, the big staring eye of the bedroom mirror, even the angle of the curtains and the rumpled cream duvet on the bed. And although time seemed to be ticking impossibly slowly, I was already moving towards the fire department radio, a decision I had made without ever clearly going through the process of making it.

Backing down the driveway, the tires of the truck left tracks through the snow to the gravel, as if someone had come to visit and left.

It would have been far easier if the accident had been more serious, or if the 911 operator had come back onto the radio and called us off. A more serious accident and I would have had some independent justification for my actions. If they'd called us off, I could have turned around and spun right back up the driveway.

But neither happened.

The car in the accident was a small red Fiesta, a Fiesta in a winter when we'd already seen three of them roll. It was upside down with its wheels straight up to the sky, the front wheels slightly turned, and snow starting to collect on its underside. The roof packed tight into the narrow ditch, a snow flurry blowing in across the bay and pouring down all around us. On the side of the road as I pulled up, Angela Collins, our only female firefighter, was dragging on the pants to her bunker gear, the snowflakes settling in her long red hair and onto her shoulders, and she was jumping on one foot, trying to force her other foot down through the quilted inside of the pants, so that she almost defined the urgency of the moment.

At that point the accident was the fixed image I was getting used to seeing, frames that flashed by as individual, locked images. But in hindsight, there were a number of pieces that I missed, and that I should have seen and found a way to put together. Like the fact that the snow was covering the bottom of the car evenly instead of melting on a still-hot exhaust system, a sure sign that the vehicle had been in the ditch awhile. Like the fact that the only footprints around the car were obviously made by the boots of the other firefighters, none by an occupant.

As it turned out, the car had rolled before the morning had even brightened from dark blue, an accident created by the combination of snow, dark and someone coming off a night shift. The driver had simply climbed out and walked to a nearby house to phone her mother, closing the car door neatly behind her.

So we checked the car out thoroughly, and then started the mandatory secondary survey, working out in a circle from the car to make sure no one had walked away only to topple over from their injuries.