The search begins in a burning house - through the front door on hands and knees. The smoke is almost down to the floor, and we stay low where the visibility is better. It would be impossible to stand up anyhow. The heat has been stacking up in here as the fire has burned unchecked - the smoke stratifying into layers of superheated gases and products of incomplete combustion - creating a thick, toxic soup that is best left undisturbed for now. The temperature at the floor is probably three hundred degrees and we can feel it in the places that our gear is tightest – across our elbows, knees, and backs as we crawl slowly forward. At five feet up, it is hot enough to melt the visors on our helmets and possibly even burn through the face pieces of our breathing apparatus. The heat is like a giant, malevolent hand pushing us to the floor, and the longer this search takes, the more we feel its weight.
There is a terrible beauty to be found inside a house on fire. It’s as if the whole world has been turned upside down. Roll the house over in your mind and picture it as an empty vessel being filled with a thick, viscous flame - the way a drop of cream billows and spreads at the bottom of a cup of coffee. The smoke is a dense, black, turbulent ooze that streams towards the ceiling where it begins to roll and spread like the bell of a trumpet. When the widening plume reaches the corners of the room, the turbulence increases, and the smoke begins to curl under on itself, banking down the walls back towards the floor. The longer this smoke is poured into the room, the more it fills from the top down. Sometimes in the early stages of a fire, the smoke level will create a hard “neutral line” below which visibility will be nearly perfect, as if the ceiling of the room had been slowly lowered over your head. This angry, black roiling mass looks like the surface of a boiling sea when seen from below, and as the temperature increases, fire occasionally dances across its face as the unburned gases ignite into racing fingers of flame. Left unchecked, this blanket of hot gases radiates enough heat that it eventually brings every item in the room up to its combustion point and everything flashes at once in an explosion of heat and flame that is usually not survivable even for firefighters in full gear.
This is why we do the job. Of course, there are other reasons - saving lives, helping people, the perpetually-discussed pension - but there is something more primal, and perhaps less noble, that keeps calling us back here. Combined moments of beauty and terror have a way of making impressions that can leave you aching for more. There are things that we know, instinctively, we are not supposed to see. I have experienced a few of these sights in my life, from high mountain vistas to deep blue oceans, but few can approach the beauty and terror found in the living room of this little 60’s ranch house as it burns.
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I’m in my second year on the job and I’ve finally made a couple of friends. We’ve taken up mountain climbing as an escape from the rigors of firefighting in Florida’s summer heat. After months of training, travel, acclimatization, and waiting on the weather, we’re finally climbing into the dawn just below the icy summit of Mt. Rainier on a frigid July moring. The size our world has condensed to the narrow cones of light cast by our headlamps whose frozen batteries are starting to die, but we remain insulated – by the equipment we’re wearing and the sense of detachment that comes from walking through an alien landscape. Kick a step and breathe. Kick a step and breathe. Plant your axe and breathe. Every sound is hollow and metallic, like the tinkling coals at the base of a fire - the crinkly noises you hear on the edges of your hearing when you’ve sucked down a lungful of nitrous oxide. My breath is raspy and cold, mentholated. With each step comes the satisfying crunch of the snow’s icy crust giving way to the points of my crampons, followed by the whoosh of metal on ice as I plunge the handle of my axe up higher on the slope, lean in, and ready myself to take another step up. I lock the knee on my downhill leg, straighten my stance, and allow my bones to take the weight from my aching muscles for a second. Rest and breathe. I can hear the distant clang of other climber’s axes from up and down the slope, and far below me, a slowly undulating snake of twinkling lights is carefully winding its way up the mountain – the faint headlamp beams of other climbers working their way up from the same camp we left hours ago. The other teams in the hut told us they were leaving at midnight, so we left at nine. We know ourselves. We are from Florida, and we are slow. No amount of trips to the top of Tampa’s Bank of America tower could possibly prepare us for 14,000 feet of elevation, but we have still made plenty of them - taking the elevators down from the 44th floor on our tenth or twelfth trip up the stairs under forty-pound packs. Standing in the elevator breathing heavy and sweating profusely. I’m wearing a pair of short, silky running shorts and a large backpack. I can smell the perfume and conditioner of the perfectly coiffed paralegals who are staring quizzically at the two sweaty backpackers in their midst. I look down to see an actual puddle of sweat forming on the floor beneath my feet. Today we move steadily upwards in the darkness, climbing through the cloud ceiling before the sun has made its way over the horizon and now, below us, a taut, woolen blanket of clouds separates us from the sun’s first rays as they begin to illuminate the sleeping world beneath us. We are on the opposite side of an overcast morning, clouds beneath our feet. At first imperceptibly, and then with surprising speed, the brilliant knife edge of the sun cuts its way up through the clouds as we step through dawn’s peephole and the entire universe explodes before us - our field of vision going from a few feet to a few hundred miles in seconds. The mountain casts a perfect triangle of shadow across the sky, and I imagine that somewhere in its image I am silhouetted, clinging perilously to the slope - my own shadow large enough to envelope entire villages on the Earth’s surface below.
There is a loneliness in these settings that both attracts and repels. Part of me craves the view from these wild places, but my first reaction to them is always a kind of pressure in the chest and a slight shortness of breath. Maybe it isn’t relaxing at all. Maybe it’s not supposed to be. Enjoying the wonders and immensity of nature from an extremely precarious position - maybe that’s all that we’re doing. You could just stay home and read National Geographic with a pistol pressed to your temple.
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The solitary feeling of freedom and loneliness to be found at the frozen peak of a tall mountain is not all that different from the feeling down here, right now, pressed to the linoleum of what appears to be a 1970’s suburban kitchen. Even when there is nothing but chaos all around, there is often a quiet calm to be found in these spaces. Settle in and control your breathing, lower your heart rate, and relax as much as possible. Feel the heat and the pressure as it wraps around you like a warm opiate blanket. Stretch things out. Try to stay calm.
It’s loud in here. I have my radio mic clipped at my shoulder and it’s turned up to an ear-splitting volume. I don’t want to miss anything said by the other interior crews or those on the outside who might be seeing things deteriorate - things that we’re not able to see. The overdriven sound of breathing can be heard through the talk box on my partner’s facepiece. I don’t use a talk box myself because they distort your speech and they can only get so loud (I’d rather just yell if I have to), but mostly, I just don’t want others to hear me breathing. I need to project a sense of calm, and panic can be contagious. Keep your voice down, keep your breathing in check, speak slowly and clearly on the radio.
We are not the first ones into this fire, but it is still free-burning at the front of the house, and the hose streams from the attack crews are starting to push the heat and smoke into the rear of the structure. With no back door and few rear windows, there is no easy way to dissipate the heat that has accumulated in the back of the house. Some ventilation would be nice, but as long as that fire is still burning in the front, we don’t want to give it any more oxygen than it already has. We search blindly, keeping our left hands on the wall to keep from getting turned around. We don’t have the benefit of a hose line to follow if things go wrong, so we need to do our best to stay oriented to our surroundings. I reach back and place my partner’s hand on the heel of my boot. I want to feel him there. I crawl forward, and we yell back and forth to maintain contact with each other.
I shouldn’t need to tell you that we’re crawling through a metaphor – one where firefighting becomes a parable for life’s larger struggles and questions. How do you form an overall picture of a chaotic situation and your place within it while still deep in the darkness, blindly groping your way along? The room is always smaller than you thought when someone finally turns the lights on. The time dilation brought on by adrenalin leads to spatial dilation in the darkness. The distance between the couch and the dining table can be an eternity in the moment. Walking through the house after the fire is out is a lot like returning to your childhood home as an adult. All the dramas and intensity are reframed in a new light, everything is smaller, and all the stakes are suddenly much lower.
This, I suppose, is how I feel most of the time. Like the blind man and the elephant, I have no sense of where I am, or where my story begins. But who does? Perhaps it’s better to think of this story as a balloon large enough for me to step inside. Each measured breath stretches the skin a little tighter, and the connections on the surface move further apart while keeping their positions and relationships to each other, as long-forgotten details are uncovered to fill in the gaps – a story that expands with the breath of the universe that it’s in.