building’s on the verge of collapse. So we beetled backwards out of the house as quickly as we could, so fast that the difference between the heat inside and the cold outdoors steamed the mask on our breathing gear. Even though I had successfully and safely navigated a burning house in the pitch black and heavy smoke, with my first steps out in the blinding light of the truck spotlights I fell down the porch steps and sprawled in the snow like an ungainly starfish tossed flat on the beach.
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
