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 of his breathing gear. When he pawed at the burning paper, it would only come away in smears, so that he was looking out through a nimbus of fire. His gloves were covered in burning vinyl too.
A hardware store can become a frightening maze in a hurry. It’s strange how quickly the ordered rows of sale items can start reaching for your sleeves and for your air tank hoses. As a shopper, you’d never worry about bumping into the shelves while walking the narrow aisles, but it was amazing how the straight line you would walk along without touching anything could become a narrow slot that was almost impossible to navigate.
A hardware store fire was the first occasion I ever heard spray paint cans exploding, a bright, sharp crack of overheated metal, and then the deeper whumps as gallons of house paint blew their lids all along a shelving unit. It was a kaleidoscope of sound, that fire—the explosions, the crackling wood, the body slam of the plate glass front window suddenly reaching its thermal limit and blowing out all over the parking lot in great, long, reaching shards.
Later on, when we were outside putting water in through the broken front window, we heard the rifle and shotgun bullets exploding, small uneven fusillades of ammunition. By then it was the kind of fire that firefighters call a “surround and drown,” the kind where you set up the big hoses and pour water on from the outside until the smoke devolves through black and brown and yellow to the thin, winning white of steam, water on hot charcoal.
No one talked about the sheer wonder of it, about the explosions that shot the paint can lids roaring upwards, about the thud you could feel inside when they blew, or even about the way the great gouts of paint shot straight up and burst into instant bright flame in the superheated air above. No one mentioned the way the column of black smoke stood out alien against the bright blue of the sky, or how, from a distance, that same smoke drew your eye the way an asterisk does at the end of a word, footnoting the sky.
At another store fire, my partner and I were crawling on our hands and knees, dragging a hose towards the back of the building, towards the glow of a fire that had started in a storeroom. Then the flames burst out and ran back across the ceiling above us before we could get to the seat of the fire, before we could even crack the nozzle and hear that first eager rush of air. It moved fast, boiling out and above us in an upside-down wave. As the ceiling lit on fire, we started crawling backwards, and I got the other firefighter’s boot square in my face mask. We detoured along the outside edge of the office, glass shattering and bottles bursting, the room suddenly full of smoke and noise.
That was frightening enough. I can imagine how much more frightening it must have been for Captain Sponagle, working the same kind of fire scene and ending up wearing wallpaper, seeing only fire through his mask. It must have been terrifying, all that vinyl-fronted paper stuck to his face like burning glue.
But we didn’t talk about it. All our conversation was practical and thorough, and I learned repeatedly that, when it came to talking, no one really did it at all. Captain Sponagle found a way to talk about the experience to new firefighters, as if a face full of burning wallpaper could actually be pretty damned funny, the kind of story others could trot out every few months or so, blaming him for ruining the facepiece of the breathing gear.
Back then, everything was a first for me—and that was the first time I wondered whether everyone, from probationary firefighter up to fire captain, could be afraid. But no one ever said a word. We didn’t talk about being scared—and I certainly wasn’t going to say anything, not when I was surrounded by many guys who could, it seemed, do anything. My job was to listen and learn, and I was like a sponge, soaking up everything the other firefighters said—and noticing the things they didn’t mention as well. No one talked about fear and, more than that, we didn’t talk about mistakes either.
And it would stay that way.
After a fire call, I’d make sure the trucks were cleaned up and the straps on the air packs were fully extended and the Pepsi machine was full, and I’d move around the other firefighters, all of them loose-limbed and relaxed and leaning against the counter while they drank their coffee.
There is a picture of me that was taken that first summer firefighting. In it, I look strangely too narrow for my own body, as if I had finished growing but hadn’t yet found a way to put any substance into myself. In the picture, I’m leaning against the brick side of Wolfville’s train station, a station like a hundred others Canadian National built across the country, small-roomed and Victorian, with steep, gabled slate roofs, the slates set on the diagonal