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.
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.
Imagination can be a horrible thing, I thought, and I declined both offers.
Reality can be far worse.
After it left Wolfville, the train turned towards Avonport in a long, gentle curve, crossing the Gaspereau River on a huge steel-girdered bridge, green paint with angry boils of red rust. Avonport, I’d eventually be told, was marked by Wolfville’s firefighters as the place where two kids had died in an apartment fire over a store. No one ever told me who was killed or who was on the trucks that day, but I did learn that two firefighters had turned in their gear and quit the department the day after they’d gone in to recover the bodies. Out of Avonport and around the corner of coastline, the train trundled through Hantsport, past huge bruised piles of raw gypsum waiting to be made into wallboard.
After the causeway at Windsor, the train took the long, slow climb through the centre of Nova Scotia. The railroad took a route away from the highway, and climbed its shallow grade through big spruce and pine and stands of heavy birch. Occasionally the train passed woods roads for a minute or two, and the land sometimes opened up wide through great square patches of clear-cut, the slash left in mounds and the skidder tracks cut deep in the reddish soil. The trees left standing, even when crooked or scarred by the equipment, giving the strange impression that the cutting had happened overnight, everything abrupt and raw. Once or twice the train would pass a parked skidder or a log truck with the driver up on top, pulling the chains tight over his load, but the overall sensation was of having come upon the scene of an accident without having seen it happen.
The distance was all the more palpable because the windows on the train didn’t open—huge sheets of double-paned glass, cool against a forehead but sealed
