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—and 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
