Burning Down the House (6 page)

Enough hose to let me stand there just out of reach of the flames for those first few moments when I was waiting for water, while the pump operator yanked open the toggle for the discharge and filled the hose, one hundred pounds per square inch of water coming out the nozzle. I'd brace myself, feet wide apart, hose curled into my stomach, waiting for the urgent hiss of air that meant water was on the way.

I was learning all the time—and not all of the lessons were about the mechanics of fighting fires, either. Plenty of the lessons were simply about the rules of being a firefighter, and that's different.

In a fire at a hardware store, one of the Wolfville fire captains, Jim Sponagle, had a panel of vinyl wallpaper peel off its glued backing and drape itself, burning, over the top of his helmet and the facepiece of his breathing gear. When he pawed at the burning paper, it would only come away in smears, so that he was looking out through a nimbus of fire. His gloves were covered in burning vinyl too.

A hardware store can become a frightening maze in a hurry. It's strange how quickly the ordered rows of sale items can start reaching for your sleeves and for your air tank hoses. As a shopper, you'd never worry about bumping into the shelves while walking the narrow aisles, but it was amazing how the straight line you would walk along without touching anything could become a narrow slot that was almost impossible to navigate.

A hardware store fire was the first occasion I ever heard spray paint cans exploding, a bright, sharp crack of overheated metal, and then the deeper whumps as gallons of house paint blew their lids all along a shelving unit. It was a kaleidoscope of sound, that fire—the explosions, the crackling wood, the body slam of the plate glass front window suddenly reaching its thermal limit and blowing out all over the parking lot in great, long, reaching shards.

Later on, when we were outside putting water in through the broken front window, we heard the rifle and shotgun bullets exploding, small uneven fusillades of ammunition. By then it was the kind of fire that firefighters call a “surround and drown,” the kind where you set up the big hoses and pour water on from the outside until the smoke devolves through black and brown and yellow to the thin, winning white of steam, water on hot charcoal.

No one talked about the sheer wonder of it, about the explosions that shot the paint can lids roaring upwards, about the thud you could feel inside when they blew, or even about the way the great gouts of paint shot straight up and burst into instant bright flame in the superheated air above. No one mentioned the way the column of black smoke stood out alien against the bright blue of the sky, or how, from a distance, that same smoke drew your eye the way an asterisk does at the end of a word, footnoting the sky.

At another store fire, my partner and I were crawling on our hands and knees, dragging a hose towards the back of the building, towards the glow of a fire that had started in a storeroom. Then the flames burst out and ran back across the ceiling above us before we could get to the seat of the fire, before we could even crack the nozzle and hear that first eager rush of air. It moved fast, boiling out and above us in an upside-down wave. As the ceiling lit on fire, we started crawling backwards, and I got the other firefighter's boot square in my face mask. We detoured along the outside edge of the office, glass shattering and bottles bursting, the room suddenly full of smoke and noise.

That was frightening enough. I can imagine how much more frightening it must have been for Captain Sponagle, working the same kind of fire scene and ending up wearing wallpaper, seeing only fire through his mask. It must have been terrifying, all that vinyl-fronted paper stuck to his face like burning glue.

But we didn't talk about it. All our conversation was practical and thorough, and I learned repeatedly that, when it came to talking, no one really did it at all. Captain Sponagle found a way to talk about the experience to new firefighters, as if a face full of burning wallpaper could actually be pretty damned funny, the kind of story others could trot out every few months or so, blaming him for ruining the facepiece of the breathing gear.

Back then, everything was a first for me—and that was the first time I wondered whether everyone, from probationary firefighter up to fire captain, could be afraid. But no one ever said a word. We didn't talk about being scared—and I certainly wasn't going to say anything, not when I was surrounded by many guys who could, it seemed, do anything. My job was to listen and learn, and I was like a sponge, soaking up everything the other firefighters said—and noticing the things they didn't mention as well. No one talked about fear and, more than that, we didn't talk about mistakes either.

And it would stay that way.

After a fire call, I'd make sure the trucks were cleaned up and the straps on the air packs were fully extended and the Pepsi machine was full, and I'd move around the other firefighters, all of them loose-limbed and relaxed and leaning against the counter while they drank their coffee.

There is a picture of me that was taken that first summer firefighting. In it, I look strangely too narrow for my own body, as if I had finished growing but hadn't yet found a way to put any substance into myself. In the picture, I'm leaning against the brick side of Wolfville's train station, a station like a hundred others Canadian National built across the country, small-roomed and Victorian, with steep, gabled slate roofs, the slates set on the diagonal so that they look like diamonds or, when wet, the side of a lizard.

Jutting out from under my sweater, the object closest to the camera is my pager, a big rectangular Motorola that went everywhere with me. Every time the pager dug into me, every time I realized it was there, I would hope it was on the verge of going off. I'd already started doing the little planning flick in my head that would go on for years—deciding how I'd get to the fire station if the pager went off, how long it would take me, whether I'd be able to get there in time to catch the first truck before it rumbled away.

I look posed, leaning against that wall, and I realize now that I look remarkably unprepared for anything.
Smug
, as if I was sure I already knew everything there was to know, a look that was at the same time betrayed by the soft, unformed edges of my face. A face still forming up, halfway to the face it would eventually be, but already holding hints of what might be strain.

Back at the truck, the fire chief was blunt.

“Noxzema job,” he said gruffly, meaning he'd swipe a finger into a blue bottle of Noxzema and fill both his nostrils before he got close to the body, in an effort to keep from being hit too hard by the stench of the early stages of putrefaction. It doesn't take long in summer, not when it's someone who's been out in the weather for three days or so.

Noxzema sounds like a practical-enough solution, but it is never really as easy as that; there's no simple way to keep it all away, especially not that smell. The smell of death is something we all seem hard-wired to shy away from. If you smell it and have no idea what the stink is, you'll still be overcome with the urge to stay away. It can overwhelm curiosity, and it's a smell that clings, that sticks in your nose the way burnt cedar does, as if certain-shaped molecules find certain-shaped receptors and can't seem to disengage.

Then there's “the body” itself. I learned to use general, less human terms, and even those words get updated, changing over time as people fight over what's suitable. You can almost place a firefighter's training in time by what words he uses. Once, the people injured at accidents were called “victims.” I still fall back on that one. Then they became “casualties,” because “victims” always sounded like whoever you were talking about was already dead. But what we really needed was a good, neutral description. It's easier when the person is just “a body,” a simple thing like a couch or a table or a box spring, instead of “the baby” or “Elizabeth” or anything that makes you think of warm skin.

It was a small clearing, hardly more than twenty feet square, a small notch in the forest sloped precipitously enough that, by sitting at the top edge, the spruce and pine below didn't reach high enough to block my view of the valley. It was the kind of place you trip over sometimes by chance, far enough away from the path that you can imagine no one else has ever been there. The kind of place you might hold in your memory as a respite, as its own relaxation; the kind of place that, once found, you would go back to over and over again, either in person or in memory. The place you and a girlfriend would visit some afternoon and always remember. A postage stamp of the world that becomes your property by its mere discovery.

She had a blanket and a knapsack—the remains of a picnic, an empty pop bottle and wrappers. A few stuffed animals, and her jacket, folded neatly in a square. Pill bottles. She had taken off her shoes— brown flat shoes, the leather in a woven waffle pattern across the toes.

After we left, someone would have gathered up all the personal effects and litter, and in a week or so the grass would slowly have found its way back upright, looking as untrammelled as ever.

FIVE

One night in summer we were called out just after dark, and the trucks pulled up sharply next to a steel-girdered bridge across the Gaspereau. The cross-hatch of the girders against the sky was matte black set over the dark blue of the fading light, the way tree branches turn to two dimensions at dark, but the steel was far more ordered.

The pattern of the metal became even more pronounced as the night blackened and the flicker of the red and white strobe lights played across it, flattening out the depth so that the individual beams held in the air like a flashing, heavy spiderweb. The Gaspereau River is, by then, close to the Bay of Fundy, much wider than even a few miles farther up, and the silty brown water flows in between deep, fleshy berms of soft, gooey red clay and mud.

Step into that mud and you will sink in great sucking steps, up to the knee and beyond, and with every pulling step back out again you can feel your joints coming unhinged. The smell of the flats is rich and complicated, with a hint of sulphur left by the work of bivalves and mud worms and a hundred kinds of unseen creeping anaerobic life. It looks like a wasteland, but every square inch is packed with some kind of company, from shrimp-like copepods to flatworms so thin you can see their organs pulsing through their skin, to bacteria whose heat cooks the muck and makes it warm enough to steam all winter long, whenever the tide falls away.

The bridge was high and painted the shallow flat green that the Nova Scotia government must have gotten cheap somewhere. It was only one lane, so that you often had to wait your turn. You didn't so much drive across it as you aimed your car at the narrow gap and let your wheels do the rest of the work, trapped like a railcar on the tracks. It was the kind of bridge that woke up sleeping front-seat passengers simply by the abruptly altered sound of the tires on the bridge deck, the soft hiss of pavement changing to the angry buzz of the grated surface.

On both sides the bridge approaches were hemmed in by fat galvanized steel guardrails, bolted onto rows of six-by-six posts so that, if you missed the approach to the bridge, you would still be shepherded onto it, instead of piling into the ironwork or flinging yourself up and over and into the river.

Unless you hit the guardrail exactly right.

Every time I went to an accident I would wonder why it was that so many people could hit things just exactly right—just exactly right to do the most possible damage. I spent years going to see the aftermath of the most amazing sets of chances, all running precisely true, the results then fixed as rigidly as if cast in amber.

The car this time was a burgundy Cavalier, and the place where the guardrail edged down into the gravel was also the exact point where the car had angled away from the road, so that instead of stripping the paint off one side of the car and shrugging the vehicle back towards the pavement, the rail had instead launched the car almost directly into the air. When it was happening, it must have been something to see, I thought, looking down beside the river to where the car had landed square on its wheels in the mud, the front end already dipping into the water.

I was still standing on the tailgate of the pumper, and my eyes could follow the beam of the spotlight that perched on the back corner of the truck. It's the unexpected things that strike you the most—the missing things your mind still expects and somehow can't work out when they're not there. It took me a while, but I figured it out: what was missing were tire tracks. My brain expected a car to have made tracks in soft, wet mud. But that's because my head didn't expect cars to fly. This one had, and I can imagine it still, falling forward through the air for a few breath-holding seconds, like a big square cardboard shoebox, before landing hard twenty feet or so out and below the bridge.

Inside the car had been two girls, neither of them much older than myself. One was unhurt, and the first firefighter who scrambled down through the mud brought her up on his back, a slow-motion piggyback through the mucky soup. When we had angled the lights down onto the roof, she had been sitting there, waving, having twisted her way out through the open side window.

Her friend, the driver, hadn't been able to get out; the landing had broken the car's back and none of the doors would open. Besides, the driver hadn't been wearing her seat belt. She hadn't hit the windshield, but her stomach had fetched up on the steering wheel and the whole car had basically bent into her, the steering column pressing her back into her seat and pinning her in place. She was complaining about pain in her lower back, but she was lucky: sometimes the outside ring of the steering wheel just breaks away and the solid metal post of the column goes right into the driver's chest like a spear. Steering columns—they're one of the toughest things to cut in a car. Made of hardened steel, you usually pull them back out of the way with a come-along winch and chains, or with the big power tools the media always call “the jaws of life” once you've taken the roof off the car.We cut steering columns only if we had to, and it was very, very slow work.