When the house is in ruins

I’ve never done this: entered a burning building to try and save someone’s life or cut away a car that’s wrapped around a person in the aftermath of an accident.

You need a certain kind of steel in your spine and ice in your veins to do this kind of thing, with equal measures of courage, training and physical strength.

I’d like to think I could do it given time and the patience of others to guide me through, but when the call comes and volunteer firefighters scramble, my guess is there’s very little time and lives hang always in the balance.

I just finished reading Russell Wangersky’s memoir, Burning Down the House. It’s such a powerful account of what volunteer firefighters face - inside the fire, at car crashes and myriad other emergency situations – that I put a story about it on Page 1.

In my estimation, firefighters, police officers and medical professionals are special. Yes, they’re trained to do the job and thank heavens for that, but they have a strong sense of purpose to do what’s right: to protect and, if possible, make things better.

Volunteer firefighters locally have saved countless lives, millions of dollars worth of real estate and handled situations regular citizens could even countenance. I’ve often wondered how they cope with what they see and hear because, as Wangersky points out, fires, accident victims and emergency circumstances are vivid, dynamic and rarely silent events.

Each has its thunder, screams and sense of the incredible – stuff beyond the imagination – that could linger and replay over and over once the matter is resolved. This is exactly what happened to Wangersky and I admire his courage in relating the effect that eight years of firefighting had on him and how it changed his life forever.

He couldn’t just leave the victim at the scene or find a place in his mind that would insulate him from the fire. The spool unraveled endlessly; slowly at first, but with greater and more alarming speed as his career progressed and took on a life of its own.

Ultimately, it cost him his marriage and his mental health, and I wonder how many others in similar service have been overwhelmed by what they give and get in return.

It must be a constant obligation to duty and others, but what happens when the well runs dry, the procession marches over rather than past you and you’re trampled emotionally and psychologically by the heart-rending demand?

This is the conundrum at the heart of Wangersky’s book, and the questions he asks are as universally applicable as they are specific to anyone in emergency services.

I read his account hungrily, thinking how brave he must be just to let it all go, write it down as it happened and allow himself to be so vulnerable.

Burning Down the House is a tremendous insight into the world of firefighting, but it’s so much more a glimpse into the heart and mind of a sensitive man who wanted to do the right thing and had it gobble him up and spit him out.

There’s no Hollywood happy ending, either. Just real life, where you pick up and keep going because you have little choice otherwise, and hope you can manage for one more day. It’s a relevant message, and one that Wangersky has obviously suffered much to share with us.