saw hydraulic oil spraying from the top of the lifting ram on the other side of the truck, shooting out in a high-pressure arc as the seal in the ram failed and the chief locked everything up solid.
Next I watched him flick open the microphone switch to talk to Dave, everything moving slowly. “Ahh, a little problem down here, Dave,” he said calmly. “You just hang on up there, stay put, we’re going to get someone to come and have a look at this.”
At the top of the ladder, I could see Dave reach out for the toggle switch and flick it up. “No problem,” his voice crackled from the speaker. “Helluva view.”
Forty-five minutes later and the hydraulics guy got there from New Minas and had a look. And he told the chief to tell Dave to come back down. Dave was leaning into the top of the ladder, his mask off and thrown over his shoulder, his air tank long empty, looking for all the world as if he had fallen asleep up there.
He came down slowly, and I helped him strip off the breathing gear and the harness. He was sweating from the climb down and the heavy gear, and when he took off his bunker gear his T-shirt was soaked back and front with a huge sopping curve of sweat.
“Nervous?” I asked him.
“Nah,” he said, and shrugged. “Where was I going, anyway?”
I looked at the big puddle of hydraulic fluid, black against the grey of the asphalt parking lot, and knew it couldn’t have looked anything but absolutely alarming from the top of the ladder. I knew that, if it had happened while I was up there, I wouldn’t have been able to move at all, terrified that any motion might bring the whole apparatus crashing down.
“I didn’t lean back,” Dave said to the chief, who was still poking away at the panel and swearing. “I’ll have to do it again tomorrow.”
The chief decided Dave had done enough already.
Thinking about it, I imagined Dave was always going to be a better firefighter than me. He was better equipped for it, because he sometimes seemed to lack just enough damned imagination, because he just went ahead and did things instead of letting them run riot all around the inside of his head. But I knew we’d worked well together, and that he’d never point out my failings, and that he and I and the chief would add the story to our mutual collection, another tiny stitch of fellowship.
Years later, while I was fighting fires in Portugal Cove, Dave found my phone number somehow and called me, full of details from the Wolfville department, eager to fill me in on where everyone was and what they were doing. He’d quit long before, and he talked about firefighting as if it was something he had tried on like a shirt: he liked all the people all right, he just couldn’t see any point in continuing.
Put it behind him. Moved on.
Lucky Dave.
Augers pull silage up to the top of the silo—mostly feed corn and corncobs, sometimes hard, dry corn stalks and tangles of green hay and fresh, sweet, green clover. The blade is a great long impeller inside a tube built tough enough to put up with the constant turning inside, all powered by a motor sufficiently strong to keep the silage moving. The whole apparatus brooks no impertinence, puts up with no delay. Augers are an unstoppable force, and sometimes they grab the loose shirt sleeve of someone clearing the roughage away from the fill bin, and they slowly, evenly pull that shirt sleeve, and then the wrist, and then the arm of the farmer up into the auger, winding it around and around and caring not at all for the screaming that results from splintered bone and torn muscle.
If you’re caught by an auger and have any luck at all, you can reach the kill switch and shut it down. Otherwise, when it gets to your shoulder, it can rip your arm clean off, dejointing and deboning it as cleanly as meat coming off a cooked chicken wing. But even if you can get the auger stopped, you’re pinned there, your arm caught tight and wound in an unnatural shape, and it must be blindingly painful, at least until the shock sets in completely.
When a firefighter looks at an auger, he sees as much as two hours of cutting work. And if he’s lucky, there isn’t screaming, because the farmer—or, worse, one of his kids—is in shock and is just leaning against the auger, mute.
In the movies, getting someone out of machinery or a car wreck is always quick, and it’s almost always followed by the roof caving in or the car exploding. What’s left out of the movies is the sheer time involved—oh, and the screaming, the moaning, the crying and the begging as well.
Even a doctor won’t give someone caught in an auger a shot for the pain, not before their arm is cut out of its casing and the doctor knows how much bleeding there is and what kind of shape the patient is in. Painkillers change blood pressure and mask symptoms, so you just don’t get them. Instead, you get to say whatever you want to the firefighters. You can call them sadistic bastards and assholes, and I’ve certainly heard that—but the firefighters just keep their heads down and keep working.
Getting someone out of an auger means carving the casing away. It’s heavy steel, a slow cut. Every time the shriek of the saw stops, you notice something else about the person whose arm is trapped—the rise and fall of their chest, perhaps, pulled tight up against the pipe. Or the steady flow of blood that seeps out of the bottom side of the cut pipe, dripping into the dirt, hanging in a slowly coagulating stalactite.
Even years later, I would think about that every single time I took one of the big grinding saws out of its case. The metal cutting disc on the saw has a distinctive smell, a smell that would burst out as soon as I opened the hard plastic case. There’d be a hint of gas and exhaust, but most of all it was the cutting disc I’d smell. It’s a smell that is, to me, very much like the scent of pencil leads or hot brakes or the skin of a little boy who needs a bath, a smell that clings to the gear and gets exponentially stronger when the saw’s actually cutting.
Then the saw throws out clouds of blue exhaust and a carnival of long-shafted, thin orange sparks like a giant sparkler. The sparks seem to be constantly attached to one another, connected by their points.
Some firefighters preferred the jump seats, the two seats that left you facing backwards behind the driver, your back already settled into the racked breathing apparatus so you could pull the straps into place tight and stand up with a jerk, the cylinders settled into place on your back. Winter or summer, in Wolfville I rode the tailgate of the lead pumper if I could get there in time. I liked the tailgate, liked the way it flung me upwards every time the rear wheels went over a big bump—like the back row of seats in the school bus—and I liked the way I was right there, ready to put my armthrough the loose loop at the bottom of the attack line. Pull that loop and two hundred feet of yellow fabric hose would spill off the pumper in a heap, more than enough to reach most fires, even with the pumper at a safe distance.
Enough hose to let me stand there just out of reach of the flames for those first few moments when I was waiting for water, while the pump operator yanked open the toggle for the discharge and filled the hose, one hundred pounds per square inch of water coming out the nozzle. I’d brace myself, feet wide apart, hose curled into my stomach, waiting for the urgent hiss of air that meant water was on the way.
I was learning all the time—and not all of the lessons were about the mechanics of fighting fires, either. Plenty of the lessons were simply about the rules of being a firefighter, and that’s different.
In a fire at a hardware store, one of the Wolfville fire captains, Jim Sponagle, had a panel of vinyl wallpaper peel off its glued backing and drape itself, burning, over the top of his helmet and the facepiece
