Burning Down the House - Russell Wangersky

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mistakes or mistaken impressions are my own and should be seen in that light. There are hundreds of other versions of these same events, and they are equally true. By the time I was finished fighting fires, I had suffered a tremendous amount of psychological stress; it’s quite possible that my memories are very different from the memories of other firefighters at the same scenes.

      These are, warts and all, my experiences.

      One small warning: firefighting is a graphic business, so some of the writing you will encounter in this book is explicit. It has not been written merely to shock; I could have written about much more shocking things. I have simply tried to describe events in the way they happened.

      It may well be disturbing, and to a degree offensive. People who regularly face disturbing images have a blunt way of dealing with them, and often an offhand sense of humour that may seem unfeeling or hard-hearted. It is neither. More than anything else, it is a kind of coping mechanism.

      I served in two very different volunteer fire departments: one in the Annapolis Valley town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia; and one in Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s, on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. The first was a long-established fire department with an enviable and remarkable history; the other was brand new, started from the ground up. Both were departments that fought fires as well as responding to highway accidents and medical emergencies. One was a department where I dealt solely with strangers; in the second, the victims were occasionally acquaintances or friends. Both departments presented situations that were disturbing, albeit in different ways. Both were also extremely skilled, trained and professional, and if my house were burning or I were in a car accident, I would put my family and myself in their capable hands without a moment’s hesitation.

      There were many differences between the two departments, but at least two crucial things were the same: the incredible willingness of individuals to donate both their time and their hard physical work to help others, and the way that people who called either department had no choice but to allow us into the most frightening, embarrassing and emotional times of their lives.

      If you recognize yourself in here, please trust that the recognition will only be clear to yourself and to others on the scene who already know about it anyway. Nothing in this book will let a neighbour or a stranger into your living room. I know what your hands look like in front of your face: I’m the only one who knows it was actually you. To those involved, I offer my apologies from the start for this intrusion.

      No one asked me into their home or their personal disaster to do research for a book. I didn’t ask for what I’ve gotten either, and that’s more of what this book is meant to be about.

      I would especially like to apologize to my ex-wife, Barbara Pratt. She, more than anyone, did not ask for this, or anything like this. Please keep in mind that this is just one side of a story. I have done what I can to preserve her privacy, but anyone who reads this should understand that her impression of the same events is likely much different—and may well, in many ways, be more accurate.

      I hope, in the end, that no one will feel I have taken advantage.

      Firefighting was something I had dreamed of doing, something I had thought was an impossible goal. I was always small for my age and nearsighted to boot, not at all the physical type fire departments generally demand. I would watch the fire trucks passing the Halifax house where I grew up, and if the trucks stopped close enough and their sirens cut off I’d head out to hunt for the fire. I read books about firefighters, living vicariously through the words, sure that I would never be able to do that work myself.

      As a result of chance and timing, I got to fight fires, and eventually both my size and my eyesight became their own kind of advantage. Small and light, I fit into many places where larger firefighters couldn’t work—inside crushed cars, in confined spaces, in any spot where bulk hindered. My poor eyesight also had a peculiar benefit: while some people become claustrophobic in breathing gear and smoke, I was used to working without depending on my eyes. I was already accustomed to navigating by sound, to listening, to understanding that my eyes could lie.

      Fighting fires and going to accident scenes is a sensory wonder, the most amazing and visceral experience anyone could ask for, but what had been a dream became a kind of personal nightmare, as bit by bit the underpinnings of wonder and heroics fell away. I was left with horrors I still live with now, horrors that can, occasionally, sneak up on me when I don’t expect them, smashing my confidence and leaving me unable to control my temper or my fears.

      At first I believed it would all be simple: people would call us, we would arrive on a scene with our training and our equipment, and we would help, because that was what we were supposed to do. The truth is infinitely more complicated than that, and helping sometimes ends up being far more subjective than it ever seems on paper.

      I didn’t actually help as much as I thought I would be able to. More than anything else, many actions were, in retrospect, best attempts and half measures. Bit by bit I realized that the heroic gloss of firefighting hid—at least for me—more and more self-doubt with every passing fire and accident scene.

      It wasn’t that way at first. Only a few months into firefighting, I found myself in that very brief honeymoon where I actually believed I knew everything I needed to know. I believed that, between my equipment and the training, I had more than enough to keep myself safe. It’s a feeling that would occasionally come back over the years I was fighting fires, but it was one that was always quickly dashed. Whenever you’re up, there’s going to be something to knock you down; you can do your best with physical safety, but you can’t always deal with the rest. They don’t make equipment to protect your mental health, although the fire service has gotten far better over the years at providing counselling and care for its members.

      Each step into the fire service took me two steps farther away from everyone else’s world, farther into a place that few people besides emergency workers will truly comprehend. I took every step wide-eyed with wonder, as careful as I could be not to break any unwritten code; firefighters have their own superstitions and fears, and it’s easy, early on, to step into mistakes you know nothing about.

      I don’t know exactly when the nightmares started, I just know I didn’t expect them and that they haven’t stopped—and I wonder if they ever will. I know they are made from the building blocks of hundreds of fire 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

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