Burning Down the House Read online

  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.

  On both sides of the Gaspereau are big, old-fashioned farmhouses, spread far enough apart to be buffered by orchards on both sides, the houses three-storeyed and square and covered with wood shingles. Houses with big porches and verandas and gingerbread cutouts on the gable ends. Houses built on foundations of fieldstone mortared together into rough jigsawed patterns that hold the remarkable weight of the three square storeys above them. Houses with four or five chimneys and a small fireplace or wood-stove chimney thimble in every room. Big and drafty, they burned a lot of wood or coal to get through the winter, so that in years past the big horses in the barns worked the orchards from spring to fall and then headed to a woodlot on the North Mountain to bring out fuel for the next winter. Their drivers—apple farmers or dairymen in summer and fall, loggers in winter—eventually switched from horses to tractors with long, fat-wheeled trailers that fit between the rows of squat apple trees but turned awkwardly with anything less than a practised hand.

  Those men all seemed pretty much the same to me: mostly big and slow-moving, with rough hands and very little to say. Capable and quiet like the firefighters, they had earned the weight of their presence. They were very different from a city kid like me. Like some of the firefighters, these were men used to fixing their own equipment, able to strip down small engines as a matter of course, blunt and opinionated and matter-of-fact. Felt red-and-black jackets and dirty jeans, sometimes overalls.

  They were men who bought fire insurance on their huge red ochre or weathered grey barns but who didn’t insure the fifty head of dairy cattle inside. The premiums for the cattle were too high and, besides, the farmers had the kind of self-confidence that allowed them to believe they’d always be able to get the cattle out in a fire. The firefighters would be there to take care of the building, the farmers thought, while they wrangled the big animals out. And we did, often finding ourselves fighting blazes up in the overstuffed lofts, moving tons of hay to find the hot little nucleus where some slightly damp hay had started to winkle itself into spontaneous combustion.

  Spontaneous combustion was the most frightening kind of fire, and even if you understood just how it worked, it was still like some mysterious agricultural alchemy—wet hay working on itself, decomposing into hot little fragments and making more and more heat in the process, until it finally started to smoulder, usually at the spot where the heating damp hay met dry, more flammable hay. It’s a fire that starts inside and eventually finds its way to the surface.

  You’d see or smell thin threads of smoke, but when air finally got to it, the fire would move quickly up the thin, hollow straws of the hay. Once it actually reached flame, it would start travelling in directions of its own creation—along the paths of least resistance, or the paths of driest fuel. There might barely be a hint of a problem, but deep inside the hay it could be working itself into a nascent furnace. The only warning, sometimes, was a thin, sugary smell reminiscent of caramel.

  It’s a lot like a peat fire in a dry bog. Hay fires can burn for days completely out of sight, travelling in any direction, up, down, sideways, branching out in forks like lightning, so that just when you think you’ve found the seat of the fire, you’ve really only uncovered yet another fast-working satellite.

  That was probably the most common kind of fire in barns. Sometimes there’d be electrical fires in the sparsely wired structures, strings of bare light bulbs on a single wandering and ancient circuit—even old knob and tube wiring that would burn clear in an instant and still carry enough amperage to loosen your teeth if you grazed it with your arm. Other times, more difficult electrical fires in the almost surgically clean dairy parlours. The electronics of the milking machines and ranks of bright fluorescent lights rarely caused fires that spread. The dairies themselves were mostly concrete and antiseptic and bright.

  The barns, with their hayracks and stalls, were not. Once, in Waterville, it was a cigarette that two teens had shared and then tossed, still lit, down into the manure chute. That was an expensive cigarette—120 purebred dairy cattle, beautiful animals with big eyes and sleek, shiny ginger coats, all dead in their stalls from the smoke before anyone could get inside to lift the long bar out of its metal brackets and open the doors.

  Barn fires meant lots of trucks fast: we’d empty our station and start calling for help almost immediately. First the close tankers from Port Williams or New Minas and Kentville, sometimes even as far away as Berwick and Waterville. If you were the fireground commander, you had to be thinking about water supply right away, because a pumper can empty the 500- or 800-gallon straddle tank behind its pump in less than a minute if you’ve got two or three hose lines out. Pumpers could churn out 840 gallons a minute—1,050 gallons if they were the newer front-line trucks with the big Hale pumps—so you’d need a parade of the 3,200-gallon tankers shuttling back and forth from wherever you could set up pumps or draw water.

  We would have to move all the hay, and the more water we’d use, the heavier the hay would be. Firefighters sometimes train by wearing breathing gear and shovelling sand or gravel; it helps you learn how much time you’re going to get out of an air cylinder, because everyone’s in different physical shape and it’s important to know that you might be running low before the tank alarm sounds. But shovelling sand has nothing on forking wet hay—you never know how much a forkful of hay is going to weigh, whether it’s going to be wet or dry, whether it’s going to be balanced or unevenly spread across the tines. Your muscles are always compensating for the load—a
nd your back always takes the worst of it. You’d already be wearing forty pounds of firefighting gear, and haylofts are always in the top of the barn because it’s easier to lift hay than to move dairy cattle up a ladder. Oh, and heat rises, too, so it’s always perishingly hot in the loft as you shift ton after ton of hay. Fire gear has a vapour barrier between its inner and outer layers, so you’re wearing something close to a heavyweight garbage bag on top of everything else. The hard work has the sweat streaming out of you in minutes, even if it’s twenty below outside.

  And that was just the cleanup work. Before then, a fire crew would have climbed up and cut a hole high in the wall or roof to let the smoke and fire gases out, and firefighters inside the building would have struggled to get the animals out and bring the fire under control. It’s hard to do in a big, open space like a barn because, with the building full of smoke, you don’t really have a good idea of what’s burning, or where. Firefighters fan out through the building in pairs, dragging the heavy two-and-a-half-inch hoses that can deliver big water with the opening of a nozzle valve, and hope to find the fire without falling through a floor and having it find them by surprise instead.

  It helps with big buildings such as barns or warehouses if you get the chance to preplan, if you keep track of the places in your fire district where your tankers can pick up water, drafting it out of deep ponds or pools on the river. Long before there’s a fire or an accident, you plan how to deal with it, figure out where the fire might be and the best way to fight it. This often involves mapping out buildings and their hazards on a floor plan. Is there a refrigeration system? Ammonia? Propane forklifts? Sudden drops or chutes that someone could wander into in heavy smoke?

  It’s even more important in town. With a school or plant or hockey rink, it’s best to tour the building and make decisions about how to fight a fire, right down to where you put the trucks in the very beginning and which hydrants are on the largest water mains, so you’ll be able to get the most possible water in the least possible time. The more variables you can deal with ahead of time, the faster you’ll be able to get to the fire when it happens. If it happens.

  Preplanning, though, is a deceptively addictive concept. With me, it also became a semi-functional way to live my life, looking ahead, trying to preplan for any crisis. It started right from the moment I joined. I wanted to catch the trucks for every fire, because it felt as if I would only ever get to go to so many calls. I began to make sure I was always close enough to run to the station. Often, finishing university, I would do school work right in the station, waiting for the pagers to key up.

  Later, the urge to preplan would turn the corner to near-pathological. Sitting at a family dinner, watching people talk and eat, I would try to divine who might suddenly choke. How I’d get to them, whom I’d tell to call the ambulance, where I’d put my hands. Whether it would work at all. Thinking that if I were ready, I’d at least have a chance to do my best.

  I was preparing myself for heart attacks on airplanes. Watching a kid cross the street, I would be deciding what I’d do first if he got hit by a car. Standing on the edge of the Salmonier River in Newfoundland, the only parent overseeing a gaggle of kids throwing rocks at the angled river ice, I’d be thinking about where to run if one of the children fell into the current, and how deep into that current I could reasonably go without getting myself into danger too.

  That way of thinking leaves you outside the normal world all the time, outside a normal life, the only person looking at every step and anticipating how it might unfold towards disaster. Isolating is hardly a good enough word for it, because you’re winding yourself up with all sorts of stress that has no outlet whatsoever. I’d be constantly poised on the balls of my feet, waiting to jump.

  On the fireground it works wonderfully well, because it jerks you right into routine, and firefighting loves routine. Every time you train, you train on routine. Fire departments depend on it so much that they like to train recruits from the ground up, so that everyone is doing exactly the same thing and everyone can be counted on to react in exactly the same way. If you suddenly have to find someone, you know precisely where he’s likely to be.

  That was pounded into me — the necessity of clear dependence on numbers and sequences and the way things are meant to happen in order, as simple as hooking the pumper to a hydrant. You learn it by rote and you do it by rote, and you do it right, every single time. Same thing, every time, exactly in order—and there are hundreds of things in the fire service exactly like that. And every time I would get one of them down pat, I’d feel a little more like I belonged, a little less like I stuck out. There’s the order you put your breathing gear on, and the valves and gauges you check every single time. Even though the tanks are never, ever put into the gear unless they are fully filled, your first step is to turn the gear upside down and check the fill gauge on the cylinder. And when you take that first breath from the mask, you lift up the chest gauge and check it too, before you head for the fire.

  That’s only the breathing gear. There’s where the wind has to be when it’s time to break a window with an axe. Where to stand on a hillside when there’s a brush fire, and where not to, because the wind and the fire can turn and boil uphill faster than a man can run.

  You can hide yourself wonderfully well in that order. You can, if you want, practically live in that kind of process, turning things into a job-by-rote and a life-by-rote as well: married because you’re supposed to be, doing every single thing that’s expected of you at the time it’s expected. It’s a life spent quietly living up to what you think are everybody’s expectations. I went to university in part because I had always been told by my parents that I would, and I spent years believing I was the only one of the three kids who let down our parents by not going into either science or engineering. Except for getting an arts degree, I was following the path of least resistance because it was the path I was expected to follow.

  The problem with that sort of life, especially if you decide to fight fires or ride the emotional roller coaster of emergency medicine, is the riot that is your imagination and your overflowing senses, the constant bright blunt world that flows in through your eyes and ears and nose and fingers. No matter how hard you try— and I tried for years to be the kind of smooth-edged firefighter who could just let everything roll off him like water off wax—the tangle overruns the way things are supposed to work.

  Sometimes I would just run into a wall, even though I knew exactly what I had to do. The sheer volume of sensations—the sound, the colour—overwhelmed me, drove me briefly away from doing things by the numbers. You can know exactly how the chop saw looks, how it sounds and works, but when you’re actually standing next to someone cutting a steel silo auger with a big rotary grinder, it’s a frighteningly involved process. You can be trained to the hilt and still it’s so jarring that it rips you right out of yourself, scrambling the order you’ve spent so much time developing in your head. You find yourself clamouring for that straight line.

  You count on the order of training and fledgling experience to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  You can count on nothing else.

  Ray Parsons took the call on the telephone inside the fire station, a telephone that hardly ever rings because the number’s in the book as the fire chief’s office.

  “Do you get cats down from telephone poles?” the caller asked him.

  “No,” Ray said. “That’s the light and power company. How high up is he?”

  “He’s sitting on a transformer. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  Ray says he thought for a moment before answering, “I’ve got a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

  The caller hung up.

  Ray smiles whenever he tells that story. When Ray smiles, he smiles wide, like you should see every single one of his teeth.

  THREE

  We had a ten-storey aerial truck in Wolfville with a great big ladder that winched up in sections after being lifted to the
vertical by hydraulic rams. When the ladder was up, the whole truck sat on huge outriggers that we had lowered on either side, and the only reason we even had the truck was that there was a university residence in the town, called Tower, which was tall enough to need it.

  Dave Hennessey and I were the only firefighters who hadn’t certified on the ladder, who hadn’t climbed all the way to the top with the ladder fully extended. It was late summer of my first year, maybe three or four months in the department, and the certification was critical to be able to keep fighting fires, even to stay with the department. The idea was that you had to be tested on every piece of equipment.

  Dave was a little younger than me, but bigger across the shoulders, and heavier—stronger, too, with a more traditional build for a firefighter. Smiling and good-natured most of the time, he joined up at the same time I did, but he was only fresh out of high school, sandy hair parted in the middle, with the kind of eagerness that made him an easy target for the other guys. They’d send him off on made-up errands to find left-handed screwdrivers, and he’d come back like a puppy dog asked to fetch a ball, holding a screwdriver and asking if it was the right kind.

  When it was our turn for the training, I thought we’d head up to the university, lean the ladder in, and climb up and down in our harnesses—but it wasn’t that simple. They took the truck out of the station and turned the other way, eventually stopping in the huge parking lot behind the university’s football stadium. The driver hauled right out into the middle of the lot and was putting the outriggers down by the time Dave and I were off the truck.