Burning Down the House Read online

  Russell Wangersky is a writer whose first collection of short stories, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was nominated for numerous awards including, most notably, the longlist for the 2006 Giller Prize and the shortlist for the 2006 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. The editor of The Telegram in St. John’s, Newfoundland, his columns and editorials have appeared in newspapers across Canada.

  Burning Down the House

  ALSO BY RUSSELL WANGERSKY

  The Hour of Bad Decisions

  BURNING

  DOWN

  THE

  HOUSE

  Fighting Fires and Losing Myself

  RUSSELL

  WANGERSKY

  Thomas Allen Publishers

  Toronto

  Copyright © 2008 by Russell Wangersky

  First paperback edition copyright © 2009 by Russell Wangersky

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wangersky, Russell, 1962–

  Burning down the house : fighting fires and losing myself / Russell Wangersky.

  ISBN 0-88762-329-8.

  ISBN 978-0-88762-329-5 (bound). ISBN 978-0-88762-410-0 (pbk.)

  1.Wangersky, Russell, 1962–. 2. Volunteer fire fighters—Canada—Biography.

  3. First responders—Canada—Biography. 4. First responders—Psychology.

  5. First responders—Job stress. I. Title.

  TH9118.W35A3 2008 363.37092 C2007-907557-6

  Editor: Janice Zawerbny

  Cover and text design: Gordon Robertson

  Cover images: Veer

  I have drawn extensively on two pieces of previously published material for this book: an essay of mine titled “Heroes” that was published in Ian Brown’s What I Meant to Say, and “Mechanics of Injury,” which was published in PRISM international. Neither is included in its entirety here, but readers of either will recognize some of the situations involved. Astute readers may recognize details from two other pieces, “House of Dreams” and “Ways of Seeing,” which were also printed in PRISM international.

  Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

  a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

  145 Front Street East, Suite 209,

  Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada

  www.thomas-allen.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of

  The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which

  last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the

  Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book

  Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5

  Printed and bound in Canada

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Preface

  I have seen people in their most unguarded moments—where their family members have died, at accident scenes where the breadth of the destruction has already started to sink in but no one has any idea how long that destruction will last, and at fires where families have seen their homes and memories destroyed. I don’t mean to trade on that, at least not by describing private individuals in anything close to identifiable detail. In fact, in some cases I have intentionally made it difficult to identify people, although I have stayed away from establishing composite or fictionalized characters: what happened is true, you just may not be able to find out who it actually happened to. And that’s probably for the best.

  A second thing: this book is based on the most malleable of things—memory. My own memory, in fact. I didn’t take notes during my years of firefighting because, first of all, I had not planned to write this and, secondly, there wouldn’t have been time. Any mistakes or mistaken impressions are my own and should be seen in that light. There are hundreds of other versions of these same events, and they are equally true. By the time I was finished fighting fires, I had suffered a tremendous amount of psychological stress; it’s quite possible that my memories are very different from the memories of other firefighters at the same scenes.

  These are, warts and all, my experiences.

  One small warning: firefighting is a graphic business, so some of the writing you will encounter in this book is explicit. It has not been written merely to shock; I could have written about much more shocking things. I have simply tried to describe events in the way they happened.

  It may well be disturbing, and to a degree offensive. People who regularly face disturbing images have a blunt way of dealing with them, and often an offhand sense of humour that may seem unfeeling or hard-hearted. It is neither. More than anything else, it is a kind of coping mechanism.

  I served in two very different volunteer fire departments: one in the Annapolis Valley town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia; and one in Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s, on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. The first was a long-established fire department with an enviable and remarkable history; the other was brand new, started from the ground up. Both were departments that fought fires as well as responding to highway accidents and medical emergencies. One was a department where I dealt solely with strangers; in the second, the victims were occasionally acquaintances or friends. Both departments presented situations that were disturbing, albeit in different ways. Both were also extremely skilled, trained and professional, and if my house were burning or I were in a car accident, I would put my family and myself in their capable hands without a moment’s hesitation.

  There were many differences between the two departments, but at least two crucial things were the same: the incredible willingness of individuals to donate both their time and their hard physical work to help others, and the way that people who called either department had no choice but to allow us into the most frightening, embarrassing and emotional times of their lives.

  If you recognize yourself in here, please trust that the recognition will only be clear to yourself and to others on the scene who already know about it anyway. Nothing in this book will let a neighbour or a stranger into your living room. I know what your hands look like in front of your face: I’m the only one who knows it was actually you. To those involved, I offer my apologies from the start for this intrusion.

  No one asked me into their home or their personal disaster to do research for a book. I didn’t ask for what I’ve gotten
either, and that’s more of what this book is meant to be about.

  I would especially like to apologize to my ex-wife, Barbara Pratt. She, more than anyone, did not ask for this, or anything like this. Please keep in mind that this is just one side of a story. I have done what I can to preserve her privacy, but anyone who reads this should understand that her impression of the same events is likely much different—and may well, in many ways, be more accurate.

  I hope, in the end, that no one will feel I have taken advantage.

  Prologue

  Firefighting was something I had dreamed of doing, something I had thought was an impossible goal. I was always small for my age and nearsighted to boot, not at all the physical type fire departments generally demand. I would watch the fire trucks passing the Halifax house where I grew up, and if the trucks stopped close enough and their sirens cut off I’d head out to hunt for the fire. I read books about firefighters, living vicariously through the words, sure that I would never be able to do that work myself.

  As a result of chance and timing, I got to fight fires, and eventually both my size and my eyesight became their own kind of advantage. Small and light, I fit into many places where larger firefighters couldn’t work—inside crushed cars, in confined spaces, in any spot where bulk hindered. My poor eyesight also had a peculiar benefit: while some people become claustrophobic in breathing gear and smoke, I was used to working without depending on my eyes. I was already accustomed to navigating by sound, to listening, to understanding that my eyes could lie.

  Fighting fires and going to accident scenes is a sensory wonder, the most amazing and visceral experience anyone could ask for, but what had been a dream became a kind of personal nightmare, as bit by bit the underpinnings of wonder and heroics fell away. I was left with horrors I still live with now, horrors that can, occasionally, sneak up on me when I don’t expect them, smashing my confidence and leaving me unable to control my temper or my fears.

  At first I believed it would all be simple: people would call us, we would arrive on a scene with our training and our equipment, and we would help, because that was what we were supposed to do. The truth is infinitely more complicated than that, and helping sometimes ends up being far more subjective than it ever seems on paper.

  I didn’t actually help as much as I thought I would be able to. More than anything else, many actions were, in retrospect, best attempts and half measures. Bit by bit I realized that the heroic gloss of firefighting hid—at least for me—more and more self-doubt with every passing fire and accident scene.

  It wasn’t that way at first. Only a few months into firefighting, I found myself in that very brief honeymoon where I actually believed I knew everything I needed to know. I believed that, between my equipment and the training, I had more than enough to keep myself safe. It’s a feeling that would occasionally come back over the years I was fighting fires, but it was one that was always quickly dashed. Whenever you’re up, there’s going to be something to knock you down; you can do your best with physical safety, but you can’t always deal with the rest. They don’t make equipment to protect your mental health, although the fire service has gotten far better over the years at providing counselling and care for its members.

  Each step into the fire service took me two steps farther away from everyone else’s world, farther into a place that few people besides emergency workers will truly comprehend. I took every step wide-eyed with wonder, as careful as I could be not to break any unwritten code; firefighters have their own superstitions and fears, and it’s easy, early on, to step into mistakes you know nothing about.

  I don’t know exactly when the nightmares started, I just know I didn’t expect them and that they haven’t stopped—and I wonder if they ever will. I know they are made from the building blocks of hundreds of fire calls and accidents, from the mundane to the horrifying, but I don’t know which specific calls are the cause, or how the pieces will end up fitting together. I know that I can expect, regularly, to be jarred out of sleep, terrified, and that I may never fully escape the damage done. Within the first few months on the trucks I was seeing people ripped apart into their constituent bits, a sort of deconstruction that makes you look at your own hands and feet differently. Before I turned twenty-four, I would see how a 100-kilometre-per-hour head-on crash could break both a person’s wrists so that their hands hung limp as if they were cloth, forced to fold against the bias. I would see people with their heads torn off. High-speed rollovers. Fuel tanker wrecks. I’d witness the way camper trailers blow apart into quarter-inch plywood splinters when they roll over at high speed on the highway.

  I learned quickly that when I was with other firefighters, there were things I was allowed to talk about and ways that I was allowed to talk about them. There were other things I just wasn’t supposed to mention.

  When I finally stopped firefighting I was close to forty, the deputy chief of a thirty-member department. When I started I was twenty-one, and about to get married. Most people at twenty-one are getting ready for their life, told to hope for happily-ever-after and a fairy-tale ending. At twenty-one, you should be looking at clean wallpaper and fresh starts; I was seeing broken limbs and people taking their last few breaths after a cardiac arrest.

  The job caught up with me eventually, and, inside my head at least, it hit me far more harshly than I think I deserved.

  ONE

  In 1983, when I was twenty-one, I took a day off from a summer job in the periodicals department of the Acadia University library and unintentionally changed the rest of my life. I found out that the volunteer fire department in Wolfville was taking new members, and that they might actually accept me. The department would have their monthly meeting the next night, and if I didn’t get an application in to them, signed by a parent, it would be another month before I would even be considered again. That was back when a month meant something more than thirty days, back when I was young enough that it seemed like something close to forever.

  So I jumped on a train at Wolfville’s small red-brick station for the short ride to Halifax, through the summer birch woods and the grey smooth stands of sugar maple, a train ride I had taken dozens of times before. The railway tracks there have a wonderfully voyeuristic quality: you can see the messy parts of people’s lives—the rusting snowmobile pushed over the bank, the big gold LeMans with the hood propped open for months on end, as if someone went to get one more tool and simply forgot to come back. The fronts of houses, the sides that face the road, always have a peculiar, rigid formality. But more than that—the fronts of houses lie. They’re the faces you’re meant to see, while the backs of houses, visible to the train rumbling through once or twice a day, tell the real story. A man in a red and black plaid jacket, sitting on the tailgate of his pickup, smoking and holding a shotgun loose across his knees. Another man, methodically hitting a prone and subservient dog with a length of knotted yellow rope, the man’s arm swinging straight up in the air before slashing down again. A police car left empty on a red-soil woods road, its front door open and emergency lights flashing, with no one in sight.

  The people I passed were going on with their lives as if no one was watching. Adults fighting, their mouths open and yelling even though you couldn’t hear the words, their bodies in that angular and obvious semaphore, hands on hips, faces leaning close. Kids brazenly shooting the glass insulators off the railway signal poles even as the train trundled past. It’s like listening at the heater vents to a family fight downstairs: listening makes you a witness, but you foolishly believe you’re out of reach because you can’t be seen, as if being invisible keeps you safe.

  It was, in the end, a trip that would profoundly change the way I looked at both myself and the world in general. I’ve come through what lay ahead of me then without serious physical injuries, perhaps, but with a clear, concrete knowledge that little in the world is the way it seems, and that the line between morality and most of the deadly sins is pretty darned thin.

  My
mother, small and intense and always wearing her feelings naked on her face, had spent years trying to convince me that life wasn’t fair, drumming that sentence into my and my brothers’ heads regularly. What she hadn’t told me was that life can also be savage and hard and capriciously unfair, and that the change can come as simply as the wind turning a few degrees on its compass. That humanity can be both a balm and a veneer, and that you can wind up being unsure which is which.

  It was only a year or so later that I began to realize that fire departments do exactly the same thing as that train ride: they provide a window into the backyard of people’s most personal moments, unguarded, bare and raw, moments that many don’t even realize they’re sharing, moments they would be embarrassed to know someone else was seeing. It’s a window into both the heartfelt and the heart-wrenching, and perhaps it’s a view that a person like me— carrying too much imagination and lacking the ability to simply shake things off—wasn’t suited to see.

  Riding the train, like firefighting, was interesting both inside and out. Outside, the Dayliner crossed a lot of terrain that seemed virtually untouched by humans: long sloping embankments down to the Bay of Fundy, the occasional crashing river gorge, the back of apple orchards, heavy in fall with bright red fruit. Inside, the scenery was just as changeable. Once, a florid man pulled a glass bottle of 7UP and a handful of Dixie cups out of his briefcase. “Lemon gin’s already in there,” he said quietly, offering me a cup at eleven o’clock in the morning, an older man taking an unsettling interest in someone barely out of their teens, travelling alone.

  Another time, I sat with a smoothly shaven army recruit heading back for a second round of basic training. He had gotten tossed out in his tenth week the first time, he told me, because he hadn’t used the footbath outside the showers and had developed three hundred plantar’s warts, a hundred on one foot and two hundred or so on the other. He’d had the warts frozen off, and he offered to show me the soles of his feet. I looked at his skinny white ankles and imagined I could already see the scarred red tissue.