Population 485 (11 page)

And so I worry about the guy ahead of me in this basement. I worry about him because he is my brother. Not my brother in the universal fraternity of firefighters sense, but my brother in the we-played-in-the-doghouse-dirt sense. Jed is five years younger than I, and far more competent, but as the big brother, I feel protective. He starts down the stairs, steps off into hip-deep water, totters a bit. All that heavy gear, if he falls over, I’ll have to drag him out in a hurry. I can hear a muffled exclamation from behind his SCBA mask as the water fills his boots. It’s a bitterly cold night, well below zero, with a vicious west wind. He hollers that I should stay where I am. I feed him hose and aim a heavy rechargeable lantern at the darkest corners of the basement while he slops around, craning his neck to spot signs of flame above, wetting them down when he does. When he ventures farther into the dark corners, I get nervous. I holler at him to be careful. I keep checking up and behind me for signs of flame, keep patting the hose with my free hand. That hose is our lifeline. In a spot like this, you never break contact with the hose. Like Tom Sawyer’s string strung through a cavern, it’s your way out, should things go bad. Dance with it long enough, and fire will show you the difference between bravery and bravado. We advance, but we are equally prepared to retreat. Firefighting is often framed in terms of courage, but courage does not always carry you forward.

It is supposed that fire appeared on this planet right about the time vegetation took root. Lightning struck a patch of dry something and birthed a primeval force of nature. The term implies a certain brutishness, but fire is anything but brutish. It is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.

How godlike, then, to strike a match. The quick rasp, the spit of the sulfur, and fire leaps to hand. We cannot summon the wind, we cannot—with any reliability—bring down rain, but we can raise fire at will. It is a mythic power: with fire in your hand, you will rule the world. Which is why, as Greek legend has it, Zeus went crazy-ape-bonkers when he learned the demigod Prometheus had stolen fire from Mount Olympus and given it to mankind. His greatest party trick revealed, angry Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and retained a vulture to drop in daily and rip out the demigod’s liver.

Nice story, but the human learning curve on fire spans epochs and is blistered with false starts. Recent reports indicate that man—or at least the
Homo ergaster
version of same—learned to control fire roughly 1.7 million years ago.
Ergaster
likely intended to do nothing grander than roast a handful of seeds or toast his tootsies, but Johan Goudsblom, writing in
Fire and Civilization
, insists the results were anthropologically profound:

The ability to handle fire…is exclusively human. Rudimentary forms of language and tool use are also found among non-human primates and other animals; but only humans have learned, as part of their culture, to control fire.

But of course, we don’t always control it. Goudsblom, five pages later: “The perpetual presence of fire in a human group is a complicating factor.”

Ergo, firefighters are required.

I have already mentioned the favorite local joke that all you need to join the local fire department is a valid driver’s license and a pulse, but the fire board does eventually require that you attend a firefighting course. The training exercises were a lark. We learned to unfurl a fifty-foot roll of hose by underhanding it like a bowling ball. We raced a stopwatch to see who could “gear up” most quickly. We practiced spraying figure-eights, the fat three-inch hose stiff and insistent, shuddering with the power of compressed water. Once, the largest student in class—well over six feet tall, 250-pound range—let his attention lapse at the nozzle. The hose tipped him over as easily as if he had been nudged by an elephant. We had a good laugh.

The instructor arranged an obstacle course. I waited my turn swaddled from helmet to steel-toed boots in heavy turnout gear, sealed in the intimate, portable environment of the SCBA mask, that transparent barrier between toxic smoke and pink lungs, able to hear little beyond the easy huff and chuff of the respirator. I felt utterly isolated and protected, the way I felt as a child curled up in the darkness beneath a cardboard box fort. We crawled around the course in pairs, the backmost partner clinging to the leader’s pack strap. Always partner up, the instructor said, never become separated. Gripping the strap, facedown, unable to see, I tried to raise my head. The oxygen hose resisted, levering the mask from my face, breaking the seal. A rush of air hissed out around my ears. I realigned my face, and the hissing stopped. I still couldn’t see. Scrabbling forward, I heard a clang. My oxygen bottle had struck the underside of a fire truck, wedging me against the floor. I was suddenly air-hungry. The measured huff and chuff of the respirator became more insistent. Claustrophobia pressed in. Sweat leapt to my skin. The motion sensor attached to my collar began to caw. An image flashed: Flames. Heat. Dark smoke, thick as poison pudding. Wedged against the concrete, unable to see, unable to move, I suddenly understood what panic for oxygen might drive a man to do. I sucked air out of the tank faster and faster, wasting it, trying to keep up with my heartbeat. My partner wriggled free. I lost my grip on his strap. The low-air alarm kicked in, an incongruous, flatulent ting-a-ling. A thought presented itself, unbidden: You can die doing this.

Nonetheless, fire is a tantalizing enemy. It has an undeniable pull. It lures you close, dares you inside. But as a firefighter, you must look beyond fire’s hypnotic face. You see fire, you see it billow and snap, you watch it do its angry amorphous dance, and you are mesmerized into believing it has no more shape than a soul. But to a firefighter, fire is fundamentally geometric. Five minutes into our first evening class, the instructor drew a triangle on the chalkboard. Then he labeled each point: heat, fuel, and oxygen. “The fire triangle,” he announced. The fire triangle isn’t fire; it is only the potential for fire. For fire made manifest, you need one more ingredient: an uninhibited chemical reaction. “The fire
tetrahedron
,” said the instructor, replacing the triangle. He looked around the room. “Remove any one element of the tetrahedron and you put out the fire.” It’s that simple.

Until you get there. The geometry of fire is one thing. The behavior of fire is another. It grows in volatile stages: The incipient phase, in which a fire is born. Rollover, in which combustible vapors accumulate at ceiling level, then explode into a rolling “fire front.” The free-burning phase. Flashover, in which an entire room becomes superheated to the point of simultaneous ignition. The smoldering phase. And then the Hollywood-friendly granddaddy of them all: backdraft. If a fire in a tightly sealed house cycles through the phases and depletes the available oxygen, it will settle into a brooding stasis. The house groans for air, and if you stick your ax through the door, you’ll be blown across the yard like a flaming marshmallow out a blast furnace. Should you awaken, you will likely do so in the nearest intensive-care burn unit.

Sometimes, when you’re feeling reckless, you forget that. It’s dangerous to get reckless, but it happens. There’s an undeniable thrill in fighting fire. There are as many reasons to volunteer for this job as there are firefighters, but at some level most of us have a perverse hunger for danger, a desire to be tested, to survive—a trial by fire, literally. I feel this recklessness sometimes, but it never lasts long. Every month,
FireRescue Magazine
runs a column titled “In the Line of Duty.” It never lacks material. Article VI, Section 5, of our department’s bylaws, a copy of which you are provided upon joining, outlines the procedure for draping the headquarters in mourning.

Of course, remove the danger and firefighting is just plain fun. You get full-grown toys, you get to drive fast, and you get to spray water. Guys who join up for these reasons roar off to their first fire, and it’s a rush, and they’re all hot damn and rock-and-roll. Then the fire’s out, and we spend three hours mopping up, and then another two hours back at the station scrubbing hoses and running checklists, and two or three calls later they just sort of fade away.

Many small-town volunteers feel an unclichéd sense of civic duty. I see it as an alternative to writing a check for some bureaucratic megacharity. We like the idea that when there is trouble, we’re the ones sent in. But the whole “bold and brave” thing gets overblown. I receive a catalog every few months filled with everything from shoulder holsters to disposable handcuffs. It also features a range of popular novelty T-shirts for firefighters: WE WALK WHERE THE DEVIL DANCES and WE GO TO HELL SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO and I FIGHT WHAT YOU FEAR. Ash buckets, say I. Self-aggrandizing claptrap. We study, we prepare, but the fact remains: We are amateurs playing a game in which the professionals regularly get their tails whipped. I fear what I fight.

In the basement, Jed is making progress, working deeper into the structure. I track him with the lantern. The beam is solid in the smoke. I direct it across the space between us, and when I lay it over his shoulder it is as if I am knighting him with a light saber. I keep twisting my neck, watching back and above for signs of flame. The helmet and SCBA mask limit peripheral vision—if you don’t keep your head on a swivel, flames can sneak right over your shoulder before you see them. This is a nervous-making place, but cocoonish, too. When we jumped from the trucks tonight, we stepped into the teeth of a steadfast wind, hurling itself at us from the west, across a wide field of snow. It was a relentless blow, an icy scour. The temperature was already subzero; the wind chill was unthinkable. The wind whipped the flames, bending them out the windows, troweling the chubby rolls of smoke into a flat smear across the sky. The big flames are knocked down now, or we wouldn’t be in the basement, but the battle is not won. Firefighters still hustle after equipment, punching through the snow crust like someone perpetually missing a stair step. Tankers come and go, their strobes sweeping the drifts, and the powerful halogen scene lights on the pumper illuminate the house like a monument, casting giant shadows across the siding and into the darkness. Down here in the basement, there is no light, no wind, no flashing strobes. For the moment, we are working alone. Just me and my little brother, playing with fire.

Once they had fire in hand, hominids faced the primary challenge of maintenance. Domestic fire required care and feeding. In this respect, the flames were a civilizing force, a catalyst nudging early man toward concepts of communication and cooperation, of unification in support of a common good. We learned to work together to keep fire alive. Subsequently, we learned to work together to put fire out. Today, with fire easily at hand, we no longer require someone to stay up all night stoking the coals. The positive capabilities of fire have been contained and subsumed in such a way that they represent rather than precipitate social cooperation, but the negative capabilities of fire still require attention at the most fundamental level, and as such, still shape the dynamics of community. Fire—dancing in the very same form as that which illumined the face of
Homo ergaster
—remains a force that compels social cooperation. And as long as it requires the formation of volunteer fire brigades, it will be so.

Our desire to court fire is balanced by our desire to keep it at bay.

While Jed and I work in the basement, our brother John is up top somewhere. He’s a “red hat”—a lieutenant. I am older, but he outranks me. It is sometimes his duty to put me in harm’s way. I shouldn’t have teased him for not being able to draw when we were in grade school.

In some ways, fighting fire beside your brothers is the ultimate extension of play, although, for all the things I remember doing with my brothers—building cardboard ships, playing Tarzan in the haymow, crashing our Matchbox cars—I never recall playing fireman. Or even playing with matches, for that matter. There is one other set of three brothers on our department, and we joke that I joined up just to help my family pull even. What is mentioned less often is that once they were four. The fourth brother collapsed while fighting a fire outside town a few years back. He was twenty-six years old and died within the week. Our joking is tempered by a tacit acknowledgment of this history. Once, at a barn fire, deep inside the structure, I remember peering through the smoke and recognizing the two firefighters ahead of me as my brothers. We were arranged along the hose in order of birth, from youngest to oldest. Later, I joked with the chief, told him this was the equivalent of putting the president, vice president, and Speaker of the House on the same airplane.

I was once hired to write an essay about firefighting, and when the editor found out my brothers were on the department with me, he kept pressing me to expand their presence in the piece. “How do you feel, after you fight a fire together?” he’d ask on the phone. “What do you say to each other? How does it draw you closer together as brothers?” I rewrote the piece two different times, but he kept pushing for more. “I still don’t quite feel like I’m getting enough about your brothers,” he said. “I see this piece as being as much about your relationship with your brothers as with firefighting.” I began to see what he wanted. He wanted my brothers and me standing in front of the fire hall, drenched and smoky, locking eyes like blood warriors. Or perhaps clasping each other in wordless bear hugs. The plain truth is, when we get done rolling hose and filling the tankers, we generally seek each other out just long enough for a see-ya, and we go our separate ways. We love one another deeply. I would avenge my brothers in blood if necessary. But we are stoic, and we like it that way, which seems to drive more demonstrative people batty. We are accused of repressing our emotions. In fact, I like my emotions contained. The humiliation I feel in revealing myself far outweighs the putative benefit of “letting it all out.” I go for Kierkegaard, and his talk of “passionate inwardness.”