I remember being fourteen, ready to head off somewhere for several days, and saying goodbye to my dad up in his bedroom on a quiet, bright afternoon, the sun working in through the venetian blinds in thin, even stripes. I told him I was going, and instead of giving him the usual goodbye hug I reached out my right hand to shake his, and for a moment he stared at my hand as if he barely recognized the gesture. At the time I actually thought the idea of a handshake was kind of formal and dignified—I think I had read that somewhere—but I also remember watching a set of very different expressions play across my father’s face: dismay, loss, maybe even resignation.
In the end he shook my hand, and I still regret that defining moment and my decision to behave so formally. He shook my hand, I suppose, because he realized that hugging me then would have crossed a crucial line between us, and embarrassed me in the process. So he did his best to put his own sadness aside, and let me keep the grown-up distance I’d tried to assume. It is, I realize now, what parents do—they accept a thousand small broken hearts, and trust that, inside, the changing child is still the one they’ve always known.
When it came to the fire department, I think he felt he had to trust me to make the right choice while keeping his fear about the possible consequences buttoned down tight inside him. It was a reaction I was familiar with. I had played rugby for years, all through high school and university—a small guy in a big man’s game—and my father had come to exactly one game, when my university team played a much faster, much better squad. I was playing in the scrum half’s position, right behind the big men, and I was savaged every time I touched the ball. He didn’t say I should stop playing—he even liked to hear me talk about the games we’d played—but he never came to watch again.
I think he signed the fire department forms with that same kind of determined fatalism. A former U.S. Army Air Corps medical corpsman, he knew at least a slice of what I would be likely to see.
The funny thing was that you might have expected him to be the one who sprang into action in an emergency, but it was my mother who stopped the bleeding when I whittled a gash in my finger with a hunting knife. And it was Mom who smelled the deep infection in my ankle when a puncture wound went septic. We were in Maine then, with her mother, who had been a nurse, but it was Mom who spotted the infection and fought it tooth and nail.
Maybe Dad already had too much experience in the kind of world I was about to enter, and was doing what I would soon learn to do—drawing conclusions early, connecting the dots from incomplete equations. Maybe he had learned to shy away, which is probably the only real way to keep yourself safe. It makes me wonder if he should have said something then, except that I know, as all parents do, that you can’t protect kids from their own bad ideas, no matter how much you want to.
He kept any concerns he may have had to himself. Both my parents would rather that each of their boys—there are three of us, one older than me, one younger—made his own choices. Not only that: both children of overbearing parents, they made a conscious decision to keep us at arm’s length as we grew up, always within reach but only if we made the first move.
I’m not sure they would have signed the forms if they’d known what the next few years would bring. They might have made a different decision, and I would have missed at least one year on the trucks. And how eager I was to get on those trucks!
Three blocks from the house where I grew up—one block up and two blocks over—was the Halifax Fire Department station at Robie Street and University Avenue. It was a quiet station—in the city but in a residential neighbourhood with two universities, not the kind of busy station where the trucks roll ten or more times a day. It was the sort of station that gets called out to false alarms pulled in the residences, and the occasional kitchen fire. It was staffed mostly with older firefighters, careerists, well past the flush of wanting to be at every single serious call. The station is still standing, an old structure built in 1903, sandy grey stone on the outside layered with years of climbing sucker-footed ivy. It’s so old that the doors are barely wide enough for the new equipment, the bay barely long enough for the ladder truck.
Trucks have gotten bigger and heavier and, paradoxically, easier to drive. Drivers on big aerial ladder trucks now often drive from low down, out in front of the wheels, and a huge truck can corner much the same way a compact car does. But that’s not the way it’s always been. When I was growing up, the University Avenue station had a tiller ladder truck—a long aerial ladder with an open cab for the driver and the captain and a small seat high up on the back, where another firefighter sat with a steering wheel that turned the rear end of the truck. For many of its calls, the big truck had to come out of the bay and immediately turn right, down a narrow one-way street lined with cars parked at meters all along one side. Watching the truck turn, especially from the pine-lined island in the middle of University Avenue, was an awe-inspiring sight. The firefighters always looked far more blasé about the fire calls than I felt as a bystander.
Even if it didn’t look as though I’d ever fight fires, I could still run to the dining room at the front of my old Halifax house at the first sound of the sirens coming up South Street, while my mother yelled “Fire trucks!” from the kitchen. At the time, firefighting seemed like an unattainable career. I started wearing glasses in grade six, and a bunch of boyhood dreams were closed off right then. I wasn’t going to be a jet pilot, and I wouldn’t be an astronaut either. I was growing to look like my mother: too short for the police and, like my grandfather, too wiry in the upper body to fit the fire department’s entrance criteria.
Even the chief in my first department would occasionally repeat the old joke about the perfect firefighter: “Strong back, weak mind.” The classic firefighter was supposed to go where he was told and throw all his strength into whatever task had to be done. But while this may have been true once, there’s now so much more to keep track of: chemical fires and emergency placarding on trucks, high-angle rescue and medical calls. Every year it’s more complex, with warnings about car plastics and chemicals in furniture, and concerns about whether exposure to regular smoke can cause heart attacks and urinary and bowel cancers later in life.
Fortunately for me, volunteer departments have different entrance standards, and now I had my chance. After the permission slip was signed and I was back in Wolfville, I was given boots and bunker gear, even if the boots had to be special-ordered because, at size 8 1/2, my feet were smaller than any of the pairs they had on hand in the storeroom.
Starting out in Wolfville, I had my mitts, a two-dollar throwaway flashlight—the first one I bought was white, but there would be many more—an aluminum hose tool for tightening connections, and eight feet of lightweight yellow nylon rope, coiled tightly and tied around itself. And helmet number nine—that was the number I signed out on everything. The helmet was light yellow, with a Plexiglas visor on the front to protect my eyes and reflective numbers on the back so that the safety officer would know who I was even walking away from him in the dark.
I was in locker number nine, an open-front wooden locker in a row of real firefighters, all the other gear on either side of me, all of it belonging to the kind of guys who ran into burning houses while their owners were running out: Big Al MacDonald, with a craggy, pockmarked face and steel-rimmed glasses, a guy who stood with his feet wide apart as if good balance was a necessity. Drew Peck, the training officer, who could turn his steady grey eyes on you while you were working, squint slightly as if looking in under your skin, and take apart every move you made. Bob Cook, always smiling, short and stocky and able to drive every single truck in the station, and he would stay smiling while the siren wailed and he ripped the big pumper through the night. He could fix small engines with his fingertips like a magician making quarters appear, and he knew what was wrong with the chop saw from the sound it made when he pulled the cord. Scottie MacDougall, shorter than me but broad— an oil rig worker, three weeks on, three off, and a weightlifter too, and in his bunker gear he looked as solid as a wall.
They all looked bigger than real life to me, every one of them, all huge and serious and professional, incapable of either fear or doubt. Guys who knew what to do, always. The chief, Gerald Wood, small and wizened and hard as nails. Captain Tim MacLeod, a no-nonsense prison guard who once used a piece of broken broomstick to show another firefighter how