LITMIR.BIZ

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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 a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

      The 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.

THREE

      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

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