On both sides of the Gaspereau are big, old-fashioned farmhouses, spread far enough apart to be buffered by orchards on both sides, the houses three-storeyed and square and covered with wood shingles. Houses with big porches and verandas and gingerbread cutouts on the gable ends. Houses built on foundations of fieldstone mortared together into rough jigsawed patterns that hold the remarkable weight of the three square storeys above them. Houses with four or five chimneys and a small fireplace or wood-stove chimney thimble in every room. Big and drafty, they burned a lot of wood or coal to get through the winter, so that in years past the big horses in the barns worked the orchards from spring to fall and then headed to a woodlot on the North Mountain to bring out fuel for the next winter. Their drivers—apple farmers or dairymen in summer and fall, loggers in winter—eventually switched from horses to tractors with long, fat-wheeled trailers that fit between the rows of squat apple trees but turned awkwardly with anything less than a practised hand.
Those men all seemed pretty much the same to me: mostly big and slow-moving, with rough hands and very little to say. Capable and quiet like the firefighters, they had earned the weight of their presence. They were very different from a city kid like me. Like some of the firefighters, these were men used to fixing their own equipment, able to strip down small engines as a matter of course, blunt and opinionated and matter-of-fact. Felt red-and-black jackets and dirty jeans, sometimes overalls.
They were men who bought fire insurance on their huge red ochre or weathered grey barns but who didn’t insure the fifty head of dairy cattle inside. The premiums for the cattle were too high and, besides, the farmers had the kind of self-confidence that allowed them to believe they’d always be able to get the cattle out in a fire. The firefighters would be there to take care of the building, the farmers thought, while they wrangled the big animals out. And we did, often finding ourselves fighting blazes up in the overstuffed lofts, moving tons of hay to find the hot little nucleus where some slightly damp hay had started to winkle itself into spontaneous combustion.
Spontaneous combustion was the most frightening kind of fire, and even if you understood just how it worked, it was still like some mysterious agricultural alchemy—wet hay working on itself, decomposing into hot little fragments and making more and more heat in the process, until it finally started to smoulder, usually at the spot where the heating damp hay met dry, more flammable hay. It’s a fire that starts inside and eventually finds its way to the surface.
You’d see or smell thin threads of smoke, but when air finally got to it, the fire would move quickly up the thin, hollow straws of the hay. Once it actually reached flame, it would start travelling in directions of its own creation—along the paths of least resistance, or the paths of driest fuel. There might barely be a hint of a problem, but deep inside the hay it could be working itself into a nascent furnace. The only warning, sometimes, was a thin, sugary smell reminiscent of caramel.
It’s a lot like a peat fire in a dry bog. Hay fires can burn for days completely out of sight, travelling in any direction, up, down, sideways, branching out in forks like lightning, so that just when you think you’ve found the seat of the fire, you’ve really only uncovered yet another fast-working satellite.
That was probably the most common kind of fire in barns. Sometimes there’d be electrical fires in the sparsely wired structures, strings of bare light bulbs on a single wandering and ancient circuit—even old knob and tube wiring that would burn clear in an instant and still carry enough amperage to loosen your teeth if you grazed it with your arm. Other times, more difficult electrical fires in the almost surgically clean dairy parlours. The electronics of the milking machines and ranks of bright fluorescent lights rarely caused fires that spread. The dairies themselves were mostly concrete and antiseptic and bright.
The barns, with their hayracks and stalls, were not. Once, in Waterville, it was a cigarette that two teens had shared and then tossed, still lit, down into the manure chute. That was an expensive cigarette—120 purebred dairy cattle, beautiful animals with big eyes and sleek, shiny ginger coats, all dead in their stalls from the smoke before anyone could get inside to lift the long bar out of its metal brackets and open the doors.
Barn fires meant lots of trucks fast: we’d empty our station and start calling for help almost immediately. First the close tankers from Port Williams or New Minas and Kentville, sometimes even as far away as Berwick and Waterville. If you were the fireground commander, you had to be thinking about water supply right away, because a pumper can empty the 500- or 800-gallon straddle tank behind its pump in less than a minute if you’ve got two or three hose lines out. Pumpers could churn out 840 gallons a minute—1,050 gallons if they were the newer front-line trucks with the big Hale pumps—so you’d need a parade of the 3,200-gallon tankers shuttling back and forth from wherever you could set up pumps or draw water.
We would have to move all the hay, and the more water we’d use, the heavier the hay would be. Firefighters sometimes train by wearing breathing gear and shovelling sand or gravel; it helps you learn how much time you’re going to get out of an air cylinder, because everyone’s in different physical shape and it’s important to know that you might be running low before the tank alarm sounds. But shovelling sand has nothing on forking wet hay—you never know how much a forkful of hay is going to weigh, whether it’s going to be wet or dry, whether it’s going to be balanced or unevenly spread across the tines. Your muscles are always compensating for the load—and your back always takes the worst of it. You’d already be wearing forty pounds of firefighting gear, and haylofts are always in the top of the barn because it’s easier to lift hay than to move dairy cattle up a ladder. Oh, and heat rises, too, so it’s always perishingly hot in the loft as you shift ton after ton of hay. Fire gear has a vapour barrier between its inner and outer layers, so you’re wearing something close to a heavyweight garbage bag on top of everything else. The hard work has the sweat streaming out of you in minutes, even if it’s twenty below outside.
And that was just the cleanup work. Before then, a fire crew would have climbed up and cut a hole high in the wall or roof to let the smoke and fire gases out, and firefighters inside the building would have struggled to get the animals out and bring the fire under control. It’s hard to do in a big, open space like a barn because, with the building full of smoke, you don’t really have a good idea of what’s burning, or where. Firefighters fan out through the building in pairs, dragging the heavy two-and-a-half-inch hoses that can deliver big water with the opening of a nozzle valve, and hope to find the fire without falling through a floor and having it find them by surprise instead.
It helps with big buildings such as barns or warehouses if you get the chance to preplan, if you keep track of the places in your fire district where your tankers can pick up water, drafting it out of deep ponds or pools on the river. Long before there’s a fire or an accident, you plan how to deal with it, figure out where the fire might be and the best way to fight it. This often involves mapping out buildings and their hazards on a floor plan. Is there a refrigeration system? Ammonia? Propane forklifts? Sudden drops or chutes that someone could wander into in heavy smoke?
It’s even more important in town. With a school or plant or hockey rink, it’s best to tour the building and make decisions about how to fight a fire, right down to where you put the trucks in the very beginning and which hydrants are on the largest water mains, so you’ll be able to get the most possible water in the least possible time. The more variables you can deal with ahead of time, the faster you’ll be able to get to the fire when it happens. If it happens.
Preplanning, though, is a deceptively addictive concept. With me, it also became a semi-functional way to live my life, looking ahead, trying to preplan for any crisis. It started right from the moment I joined. I wanted to catch the trucks for every fire, because it felt as if I would only ever get to go to so many calls. I began to make sure I was always close enough to run to the station. Often, finishing university, I would do school work right in the station, waiting for the pagers to key up.
Later, the urge to preplan would turn the corner to near-pathological. Sitting at a family dinner, watching people talk and eat, I would try to divine who might suddenly choke. How I’d get to them, whom I’d tell to call the ambulance, where I’d put my hands. Whether it would work at all. Thinking