7

The Next Chapter

A FEW MONTHS AFTER I moved to Toronto in 1981 to attend college, my high school sweetheart, Lise, dumped me. We’d talked constantly on the phone and she’d visited me once, but she wasn’t interested in a long distance relationship and had no intention of moving to Toronto away from Geraldton and her family. I was heartbroken. Crushed like any eighteen-year-old who had mourned a four-year relationship would be. I was never one to play the field and casually date. I’m what you would call a serial monogamist, dating someone until I get dumped then immediately searching for another girlfriend.

While searching for another girlfriend, I learned electronics is not the curriculum you want to study if you want females in your class with whom to socialize. All my classes were filled with guys. There were a couple of young women in a couple of my classes, but they were all spoken for.

Heartbroken and homesick, I called home every day. The phone bills used up all the money I had saved for a trip, so during the summer break I stayed in Toronto. My two sisters Chereyl and Brenda were my daily counsellors trying to keep my spirits up and encourage me to stay positive. Chereyl and her husband John, a Geraldton volunteer firefighter, allowed me to call daily and reverse the charges. I can’t imagine how much it cost them in telephone long distance charges to keep this heartbroken boy from packing everything up and moving back to Geraldton defeated.

In school I had made a couple of good friends who were, like me, from small towns. We were all missing our hometowns and high school friends. One of my new friends, Paul, from the Maritimes, invited me to a party in Brampton. As I had nothing else going on, I went with him.

The party was a small affair with a few students drinking and listening to music. Paul had a girlfriend, Michelle, whom he’d met while commuting to school and she brought her best friend along. Her name was Linda.

As the night went on the four of us went for a walk. Paul and Michelle decided to go back to the party while Linda and I kept walking. She seemed nice enough, and she was smart. She was going to start nursing school in Toronto in the fall.

We walked for a bit until we discovered we were lost. I was totally out of my comfort zone. Geraldton was a small town. Even if you could get lost in Geraldton you just had to keep walking to eventually hit the lake, the tracks, the bush, or Main Street.

But Brampton is not small, and Bramalea, the subdivision we were lost in, was a series of crescents and cul de sacs that left me dizzy. To make matters worse, each section of Bramalea had streets whose names all began with the same letter of the alphabet. The section we were in, as I recall, was “G.” How many street names can you think of that start with “G”? There are quite a few, as it turns out, and it took about an hour for Linda and me to finally find the right street and make our way back to the party. In the interim we got to know each other and even managed to smooch a bit. I was homesick and heartbroken and Linda seemed nice. We began to date.

As I waited for replies from the fire departments I’d applied to, I moved back home to Geraldton for the summer months to work and save some money. My brother-in-law’s family owned an amethyst mine about a two-hour drive outside of town and they hired me for the summer to be a miner and general labourer. I drove a dump truck and bulldozer, repairing the road leading into the mine site. The job gave me valuable practice driving heavy equipment. While at the mine site, I lived in a small, beat-up trailer with a portable radio and guitar to keep me amused. My reading hobby was satisfied the day I found a box of Reader’s Digest volumes stuffed in a cabinet under the sink. They were of consecutive months from 1948 to 1952. Colourful ads posed questions like, “What will the new 1949 Buick look like?” or confirmed for every man that all he needed to do to please a lady was to buy her a Brand New Proctor Automatic Toaster.

Linda moved to Geraldton for the summer to be with me, staying at Chereyl’s house and getting a job at Marino Hardware: my brother-in-law’s family store. Mom didn’t like Linda much. “She’s got you under her thumb,” she would say.

Dad just wanted to see me happy but didn’t want me to become a firefighter. “Too many dead people” he would say. Later, I would find out that he was right.

After a week of working at the mine I drove back to Geraldton on the weekends to score some good home-cooked meals and to spend time with Linda. On one Saturday morning at the mine site I gobbled down my breakfast of bacon and eggs and bolted out the door of my trailer to drive back to town, leaving my dirty dishes in the sink. I came back to the mine on the following Sunday night to find the windows smashed on the trailer. The door was ripped off its hinges. Upon entry I discovered the inside completely trashed. Mud, dish soap, and peanut butter covering every inch of the trailer. My bed was torn apart. The culprit wasn’t a human, though; a bear had been drawn by the smell of my greasy dishes and had broken into the trailer. There were teeth marks in my guitar case, the dish soap bottle, the peanut butter jar, and the sugar container. The bear, I believe, felt trapped and broke through the window over my bed, leaving bits of fur on the shards of glass.

At the end of the mining season I packed up my clothes from the patched-up trailer, picked up my Fender guitar case with the teeth marks in it, and drove back down the mine road for the last time.

My brother-in-law John was a member of the Geraldton Volunteer Fire Department and for a few weeks in the fall of 1984, convinced the chief, Danny Koroscil, to let me practise with the fire crew, wearing SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) and performing drills to see if I felt confident I could do the job of a firefighter. I loved it. Chief Koroscil wrote a letter of recommendation for me to supplement the fire department job applications I was submitting.

I moved back to our apartment just off Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. Still in pursuit of a firefighter job, I trained for the physical testing by running up and down the stairs in my twenty-storey building. A few times a week I walked to the Toronto Reference Library a couple of blocks up Yonge to research Toronto Fire Department annual reports, hoping to get an inside scoop on the fire department that I could capitalize on during the testing process. The Toronto Fire Department was incorporated in 1874 and in 1984, the City of Toronto was celebrating its sesquicentennial. A 150 year anniversary Memorial Volume was published which I pored over constantly. In the fall of 1984, the Toronto Fire Department had a recruitment drive.

I rode the streetcar to write the exam at the Toronto Fire Academy. I wasn’t sure which stop to go to and asked the driver if he could tell me where to get off for the fire academy. He looked at me. “You’re too young to be a firefighter.”

“I’m twenty-one,” I said. He let me off at the same stop where, coincidentally, thirty-one years later, while struggling with the mental stress of being a firefighter, I was to come across a fatal motorcycle accident on my way to work.

The exam session was one of several the academy was conducting; there were four thousand applicants for only thirty-five positions. When I arrived at the fire academy, dozens of men and a few women were queuing on the front steps, waiting for their opportunity to beat the odds and win the coveted position of probationary firefighter. We were led into the auditorium where row upon row of desks were set up for the exams. The exam consisted of tests for basic mathematics and English and a series of drawings of gears, wheels, and levers for mechanical aptitude. At the beginning of the session a training officer read a number of facts about a series of streets and buildings, reading off road closures and traffic and weather conditions. The scenario went on for a few minutes, with the officer counting off the number and locations of hydrants in the area, the number of railway crossings and what times a train came through. Then we would have to answer a number of questions based on the facts we’d been given, testing our ability to digest information. I looked around the room at the dozens of applicants hunkered down writing the exam. All wanted the same job I was after. I believe that in life you make your own luck and at that moment in my mind I was going to make myself the luckiest guy in the room.

A month later I received a letter stating I had advanced to the physical testing round. I was going back to the academy.

When I arrived I found a series of testing stations set up inside the fire academy training tower. My adrenaline was pumping. I could smell the smoke from the gear.

The first station was a blackout maze to test if you were claustrophobic. A training officer spewed a series of instructions, but in my nervous state, the only words that stuck out were “We’ll fail you if you remove the facepiece.” The rest of his instructions were a blur. I donned my blacked-out facepiece and was led into a room. What did he tell me to do? I managed to remember that the man had told me get into a crawling position to enter the chamber. Shit. It’s a chamber? What did he say about a chamber? I can’t remember! I crawled inside and immediately came to a dead end. What did he say?! Feeling around with my hands I felt all sides of the chamber. It was a tunnel about three feet high. To my left was a chair or stool. I couldn’t get around it. My instinct was to pull off the mask and see what the hell I was dealing with, but I remembered the only instruction the officer told me. “We’ll fail you if you remove the facepiece.” There was no way they were going to beat me. I felt around, looking for a way past this obstacle, then realized I could crawl underneath. I continued to crawl down the tunnel and came to another dead end. Using my hands again, I could feel that I was blocked from the front. A wall. On my right was another wall. The opening must be on the left. Again, I was blocked by a wall. What did he say? I reached above me and found open space. I climbed up to the second level and continued moving forward, pushing things out of my way so I could pass until I came to another dead end. At this point I was comfortable in the chamber and went through my routine of reaching up and down, left and right. Then I heard the officer’s voice again: “Take off the facepiece.” I removed it, my face moist from perspiration, and took in my surroundings. I crawled out of the chamber and stood up to face my inanimate foe. The chamber was a metal maze with a series of windows on one side. If I had snuck a peek when I was behind the first obstacle the training officer would have had a clear view and I would have failed.

Back in the training tower a ladder was set up to the fifth floor to test applicants for a fear of heights. This time I listened to the instructions intently. Climb to the fifth floor. Enter the window. Climb back out and down the ladder to meet me here. Got it. As I climbed up the Bangor ladder it bounced. The aluminum rungs were freezing. I had never been up a ladder that tall and I was terrified. My knuckles were white from gripping the rungs. Going up was terrifying but I made it to the fifth-floor window and jumped inside as I’d been instructed. A training officer inside asked if I was okay. I lied and said it was no problem. But now I had to climb out on the ledge five stories up and get back on the ladder to climb back down to the apparatus floor. In my head I was saying Just do it. You’ll fail if you don’t. Just do it. I held my breath and climbed out onto the ledge. Nobody was going to stop me. Nobody. I made it down safely. I continued the rest of the testing with little problem. The butterflies in my stomach were gone and now I felt I could really do this job.

After about a year of applying to every fire department within a subway ride, I got the call. I was to report to the Toronto Fire Academy on January 7, 1985. The Toronto Fire Department wanted me on their roster.