caller hung up.
Ray smiles whenever he tells that story. When Ray smiles, he smiles wide, like you should see every single one of his teeth.
We had a ten-storey aerial truck in Wolfville with a great big ladder that winched up in sections after being lifted to the vertical by hydraulic rams. When the ladder was up, the whole truck sat on huge outriggers that we had lowered on either side, and the only reason we even had the truck was that there was a university residence in the town, called Tower, which was tall enough to need it.
Dave Hennessey and I were the only firefighters who hadn’t certified on the ladder, who hadn’t climbed all the way to the top with the ladder fully extended. It was late summer of my first year, maybe three or four months in the department, and the certification was critical to be able to keep fighting fires, even to stay with the department. The idea was that you had to be tested on every piece of equipment.
Dave was a little younger than me, but bigger across the shoulders, and heavier—stronger, too, with a more traditional build for a firefighter. Smiling and good-natured most of the time, he joined up at the same time I did, but he was only fresh out of high school, sandy hair parted in the middle, with the kind of eagerness that made him an easy target for the other guys. They’d send him off on made-up errands to find left-handed screwdrivers, and he’d come back like a puppy dog asked to fetch a ball, holding a screwdriver and asking if it was the right kind.
When it was our turn for the training, I thought we’d head up to the university, lean the ladder in, and climb up and down in our harnesses—but it wasn’t that simple. They took the truck out of the station and turned the other way, eventually stopping in the huge parking lot behind the university’s football stadium. The driver hauled right out into the middle of the lot and was putting the outriggers down by the time Dave and I were off the truck.
“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—
