Burning Down the House Read online

  “I thought we’d be going to Tower,” I said.

  “Too easy to do damage with the end of the ladder,” the chief replied. “You’ll go up here.”

  “Up where?” I asked, looking around.

  “Up there,” the chief said, putting on his helmet and pointing straight up.

  Ten storeys is a long way, even when you’re climbing at an angle.

  The chief pointed at me first. By then the ladder was already beetling straight up, making its peculiar metallic sound of the extensions hissing across each other as the ladder lengthened.

  The ladder’s really reassuring at the bottom. Since each part collapses in on the next, it’s four feet wide on the first extension and smaller for each of the telescoping sections.

  “Mask on,” the chief said, pulling at my shoulder harness to make sure it was on right and pulled tight. “Up you go.”

  The only thing harder than carrying around forty pounds or so of tanks and boots and fire gear is lugging that same gear almost straight up for ten storeys. The chief wouldn’t count the climb as a successful test until I got as close to the top as the deluge gun, a big hose nozzle clamped to the top three rungs of the ladder.With the air tanks we were using, if you were fit, you had something like forty minutes’ worth of air, so you had to keep climbing steadily to make it. I was trussed into a webbing harness that ran over my shoulders, around and between my legs, and coming out of the front of it was a great big snap-clip on a short length of thick rope. When I was tired or had to stop for any reason, I had to clip myself onto the first available rung of the ladder.

  When we got to the top, the chief wanted us to clip onto one of the upper rungs, take our hands off the ladder and lean back against our harness, pulling the short tether rope tight. If you had vertigo, it would be completely impossible. Up there, I was higher than the roof of the stands at the football stadium, higher than the big elms that used to fill most of Wolfville’s downtown before the Dutch elm disease took them—huge trees, as big around at their base as the circumference of a transport truck tire. It was so high that I could barely make out the chief down at the equipment panel, so high that the sky was huge, bigger and bluer than I thought it could be, and the town unfolded like a map beneath me.

  The most amazing part was that the ladder was so narrow at the top that I made the last length of the climb almost hand-over-hand, with not enough room on the narrow ladder to fit both of my feet comfortably side by side. The ladder swayed. It swayed a lot, back and forth in the wind, in a gently creaking pendular motion that was painfully obvious. There was nothing up there but me—no structure, no surroundings, virtually no mechanism to keep me from falling. It was like climbing narrow stairs that suddenly ended, and when they did end, it was like you discovered there wasn’t really anything underneath holding them up. It’s the kind of height that makes you suck in your breath and then makes your body refuse to let it out again.

  With me at the top of the ladder was a very small intercom loudspeaker, and I had to stay clipped in and waiting until the fire chief told me in precise and tinny words to come back down.

  I heard him tell me to come back down. I heard him say that I was finished, and I knew that I had completed my last requirement to become a certified firefighter.

  But I couldn’t move.

  Normally, I don’t have trouble with heights—not big trouble. But this was not a normal height. I can work on roofs with no problem, and I don’t even mind the bounce and bow of the big four-fly Bangor extension ladder, a ladder so long—forty feet in all—that it has stabilizer poles both to help four firefighters raise it and to take some of the spring out of the span. But this wasn’t even close to normal. This was easily twice as high as any place I had ever climbed, and this was out in the open air, and what I was having trouble with were my hands.

  I couldn’t make them undo the D-clip on the rung of the ladder. My hands didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to lose that security. I was clearly safe as long as I was clipped in, and my hands were willing for me to stay there forever rather than risk falling on the way back down all that endless ladder. I could imagine all kinds of things happening to me on the descent; what I couldn’t imagine was actually undoing that clip. I had practically convinced myself that I knew what hitting the pavement was going to feel like before I finally managed to pull the metal tongue back and ease the clip off the second rung from the top.

  I could imagine that my fingers were turning white inside my mitts because I was holding on so hard, and I remember thinking that it would be better if I’d taken my mitts off, because I could just imagine their smooth black fabric slipping away from the rungs.

  I ended up having to will each individual finger to break its grip, to actually force them loose, one at a time, until I could move one hand.

  Coming down the ladder, I looked straight out through the rungs and imagined that each rung was the second-last one before the bottom. I didn’t look down, afraid that the pavement would come up and meet me fast. All the way down the ladder, and long after I was safely on the ground, I had that watery feeling in my stomach that you get after a particularly scary roller coaster ride— that feeling that you’ve dodged death in fifteen thousand different ways, that just one old and rusting bolt, barely holding its oxidizing grip, could make the difference between taking the ride safely or pitching inevitably to your death.

  Dave went up the ladder after me, and my legs were still weak and rubbery when he reached the top. Then the chief swore and slapped the equipment panel, and I heard all the big metal locks come on that fixed the ladder in place. I heard them running up the ladder— bang, bang, bang—growing fainter as they got farther away. Then I looked over the chief’s helmet and saw hydraulic oil spraying from the top of the lifting ram on the other side of the truck, shooting out in a high-pressure arc as the seal in the ram failed and the chief locked everything up solid.

  Next I watched him flick open the microphone switch to talk to Dave, everything moving slowly. “Ahh, a little problem down here, Dave,” he said calmly. “You just hang on up there, stay put, we’re going to get someone to come and have a look at this.”

  At the top of the ladder, I could see Dave reach out for the toggle switch and flick it up. “No problem,” his voice crackled from the speaker. “Helluva view.”

  Forty-five minutes later and the hydraulics guy got there from New Minas and had a look. And he told the chief to tell Dave to come back down. Dave was leaning into the top of the ladder, his mask off and thrown over his shoulder, his air tank long empty, looking for all the world as if he had fallen asleep up there.

  He came down slowly, and I helped him strip off the breathing gear and the harness. He was sweating from the climb down and the heavy gear, and when he took off his bunker gear his T-shirt was soaked back and front with a huge sopping curve of sweat.

  “Nervous?” I asked him.

  “Nah,” he said, and shrugged. “Where was I going, anyway?”

  I looked at the big puddle of hydraulic fluid, black against the grey of the asphalt parking lot, and knew it couldn’t have looked anything but absolutely alarming from the top of the ladder. I knew that, if it had happened while I was up there, I wouldn’t have been able to move at all, terrified that any motion might bring the whole apparatus crashing down.

  “I didn’t lean back,” Dave said to the chief, who was still poking away at the panel and swearing. “I’ll have to do it again tomorrow.”

  The chief decided Dave had done enough already.

  Thinking about it, I imagined Dave was always going to be a better firefighter than me. He was better equipped for it, because he sometimes seemed to lack just enough damned imagination, because he just went ahead and did things instead of letting them run riot all around the inside of his head. But I knew we’d worked well together, and that he’d never point out my failings, and that he and I and the chief would add the story to our mutual collection, another tiny stitch of fellowship.
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  Years later, while I was fighting fires in Portugal Cove, Dave found my phone number somehow and called me, full of details from the Wolfville department, eager to fill me in on where everyone was and what they were doing. He’d quit long before, and he talked about firefighting as if it was something he had tried on like a shirt: he liked all the people all right, he just couldn’t see any point in continuing.

  Put it behind him. Moved on.

  Lucky Dave.

  Augers pull silage up to the top of the silo—mostly feed corn and corncobs, sometimes hard, dry corn stalks and tangles of green hay and fresh, sweet, green clover. The blade is a great long impeller inside a tube built tough enough to put up with the constant turning inside, all powered by a motor sufficiently strong to keep the silage moving. The whole apparatus brooks no impertinence, puts up with no delay. Augers are an unstoppable force, and sometimes they grab the loose shirt sleeve of someone clearing the roughage away from the fill bin, and they slowly, evenly pull that shirt sleeve, and then the wrist, and then the arm of the farmer up into the auger, winding it around and around and caring not at all for the screaming that results from splintered bone and torn muscle.

  If you’re caught by an auger and have any luck at all, you can reach the kill switch and shut it down. Otherwise, when it gets to your shoulder, it can rip your arm clean off, dejointing and deboning it as cleanly as meat coming off a cooked chicken wing. But even if you can get the auger stopped, you’re pinned there, your arm caught tight and wound in an unnatural shape, and it must be blindingly painful, at least until the shock sets in completely.

  When a firefighter looks at an auger, he sees as much as two hours of cutting work. And if he’s lucky, there isn’t screaming, because the farmer—or, worse, one of his kids—is in shock and is just leaning against the auger, mute.

  In the movies, getting someone out of machinery or a car wreck is always quick, and it’s almost always followed by the roof caving in or the car exploding. What’s left out of the movies is the sheer time involved—oh, and the screaming, the moaning, the crying and the begging as well.

  Even a doctor won’t give someone caught in an auger a shot for the pain, not before their arm is cut out of its casing and the doctor knows how much bleeding there is and what kind of shape the patient is in. Painkillers change blood pressure and mask symptoms, so you just don’t get them. Instead, you get to say whatever you want to the firefighters. You can call them sadistic bastards and assholes, and I’ve certainly heard that—but the firefighters just keep their heads down and keep working.

  Getting someone out of an auger means carving the casing away. It’s heavy steel, a slow cut. Every time the shriek of the saw stops, you notice something else about the person whose arm is trapped—the rise and fall of their chest, perhaps, pulled tight up against the pipe. Or the steady flow of blood that seeps out of the bottom side of the cut pipe, dripping into the dirt, hanging in a slowly coagulating stalactite.

  Even years later, I would think about that every single time I took one of the big grinding saws out of its case. The metal cutting disc on the saw has a distinctive smell, a smell that would burst out as soon as I opened the hard plastic case. There’d be a hint of gas and exhaust, but most of all it was the cutting disc I’d smell. It’s a smell that is, to me, very much like the scent of pencil leads or hot brakes or the skin of a little boy who needs a bath, a smell that clings to the gear and gets exponentially stronger when the saw’s actually cutting.

  Then the saw throws out clouds of blue exhaust and a carnival of long-shafted, thin orange sparks like a giant sparkler. The sparks seem to be constantly attached to one another, connected by their points.

  FOUR

  Some firefighters preferred the jump seats, the two seats that left you facing backwards behind the driver, your back already settled into the racked breathing apparatus so you could pull the straps into place tight and stand up with a jerk, the cylinders settled into place on your back. Winter or summer, in Wolfville I rode the tailgate of the lead pumper if I could get there in time. I liked the tailgate, liked the way it flung me upwards every time the rear wheels went over a big bump—like the back row of seats in the school bus—and I liked the way I was right there, ready to put my armthrough the loose loop at the bottom of the attack line. Pull that loop and two hundred feet of yellow fabric hose would spill off the pumper in a heap, more than enough to reach most fires, even with the pumper at a safe distance.

  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 ha
ve 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.