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.
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.
The firefighters from my crew were moving around the car in slow motion, trying to decide if it was likely to slide the rest of the way into the water, knowing we’d be unable to stop it if it did.
You’re supposed to stabilize a car before you begin working on it, so that it doesn’t start moving and injure someone else. Sandbags or wheel chocks work well on the road or on the shoulder, but there’s not much that works well in wet mud. There was nothing to attach the chains or the come-along to, only long, bright green sawgrass on the banks of the river, its roots set deep into the soft, wet mud sponge. No trees on the bank, just a farmer’s fence, the posts coloured a silvered grey that meant they’d either hardened off to an almost astounding toughness or else rotted away at ground level, held up by the taut barbed wire running around the flat river pasture. Still a new firefighter, I felt almost like a bystander—but more than that. It was as if a window was opening; I was realizing that even someone my age wasn’t immune, that wrong turns and loose gravel could happen to anyone at any time. That bad luck had a way of just waiting for people, and that even I might not be safe.
The more experienced firefighters had a way of doing things at a scene as if they were following some kind of whispered instructions only they could hear, their ears on a different frequency than any I could tune into. I’d spent hours memorizing the contents of every compartment on every truck: which heavy door hid the saws, where the chimney-fire gear was kept. But the other firefighters all seemed to know much more than that—not only where things were, but also which ones would be needed, and in what order. Gear came out of the trucks and made its way down to a tarpaulin near the car, heavy equipment being laid out side by side in lines, like huge surgical tools on a dark blue plastic tray.
Down in the mud, the firefighters were moving like astronauts, slowed by the viscous goo around their boots. They were bringing down the big power units and the cutters, were putting the heavy tools on the hood, getting ready to set out everything so that it would be close at hand when they started working. The tools caught in the bright lights, and the woman in the car started screaming.
We put a blanket over people when we start to work; it keeps sharp scraps of metal away from them and catches the sprays of breaking glass when the windows are smashed out. I’ve held blankets in front of scores of victims, but I have a hard time believing I’d be able to stand it if someone did it for me. It’s not so much the claustrophobia as the feeling of having everything that’s going on kept away from you. Dentists keep their instrument trays out of sight for good reason, and firefighters often do too.
The firefighters weren’t that far along yet; the blanket that would cover the victim was out of its plastic sleeve but still on the roof of the car. The cutters with their big bird-beak titanium jaws must have been threatening enough to the woman inside, lying the way they were, tilted
