At the end of 1988, a position came up on the initial attack fire team, and I was invited to apply. I got the job and never looked back. I loved fighting fires. We were 2 teams, 1 foreman for each and 3 crew members for a total of 8. The guys were pretty well-trained, really tough and awesome to watch in action. During fire season, all we did was fight fire, work on fire gear and practice working with our gear. I was a firefighter, but mostly I would just fight fire and build helipads. Sometimes a big snag would be hit by lightning, and I would need to drop it to put it out and the surrounding fire out. Then I was in my glory.
I did love my job, and a chance to drop a burning tree was pretty awesome. If you have ever got a stick burning and then waved it in the air at night, you will know what I mean. This was like that, but on a scale so much bigger, as the tree fell, the flames would roar, and then it would almost explode when it hit the ground. We would then make short work of the fire and be on our way home.
We did not start work until 10:30 am. Each morning after arriving at the base, my crew and I would do a 5-mile run, then we would do the 500 sit-ups and push-ups that were a requirement, but we would usually all do 1000 of each, and then we would head off to work. When the weather was wet, we would do slash and pile burns. This was good practice for firefighting. If the weather were hot and dry, we would be working around the base. Sometimes in really hot weather, they would keep us on standby at the base for another 4 hours at the end of the shift.
After 2 seasons, I was promoted to a team foreman, with better pay involved and more opportunities for upgrading my skills, I took every course I could get. Over the years, I was trained in fire weather, hiring of crews and equipment, fire cause investigation, air control, dangerous goods fire suppression, and numerous other certificates. I was the guy who, every year, certified personnel in hover exits for both the forest service and logging personnel from various companies.
When we would be involved in an interface fire, the local fire department would come to me and ask where I needed them to deploy. Campbell River Fire Chief Larry Lunigan and I would be involved in fires occasionally, and we worked well together. He called me up one time and told me to apply for a full-time position in his firehouse. I did, as they pay well and have awesome pensions. He called me up to give me the bad news that my age was too high; they only hired guys under 25. Damn eh. I was a man in his late 30s but looked much younger.
During the off-season, most of my guys would be back at university, and the couple of us left would do various jobs, mostly involving slash burns and trail building. Each year, they gave me a recreation project; one winter, it was exploring caves in our district to look for potential tourism opportunities. I love caving and dropped into my first hole when I was just 7 years old. It had become a lifelong passion. My objective in these missions was to look for potential recreation opportunities at these cave sites. Getting paid for several months to explore caves was a great way to spend the winter. Another year, I was given a chance to go fishing in as many lakes in our district as possible. I was to register how good the fishing was and if there was campsite potential, or perhaps trails that could be built in the area. These projects were awesome. There were many projects. I had my choice of who to hire for these jobs. I always hired my buddy Norm, who worked well with me.
In the spring, I would be put to work getting our firefighting gear ready for the upcoming season. I loved firefighting, but it could be dangerous. As I was getting our first aid gear ready, I got to thinking about the various injuries that we had all suffered. Most were minor ones like stitches, burns, twisted ankles or bruising from falls.
Some injuries ended careers in firefighting. During one tough and steep fire, we had a rock slide come rolling down the mountain toward us, and most of my guys got behind big trees. One of my guys had to jump behind a smaller tree than he would have liked. One rock caught him in the hip, shattering it, and his firefighting days were over. I had suffered a few injuries, a few of which led to some time off.
We had to hire a new guy after losing our team member to the rock slide. I sat in on the interviews and was quite impressed by one who had his first aid “A” ticket and had been a volunteer firefighter. With my urging, he was hired. He turned out to be the most useless tit to ever fight fires. One afternoon, I had him fuel up all our saws. The next fire we were sent to was a large burning snag that was on fire after lightning struck it. It would need to come down to put this fire out. After dropping from the heli, I grabbed my saw to cut it down. No matter how hard I tried, I could not start that saw. I looked in the fuel tank and to my horror, I saw it was full of oil, so I looked in the oil, and there was gas. I dumped them out and put a bit of gas in, shook it around and poured it out. I did this several times. Then I filled the fuel tank, and after much pulling and moving the choke in and out, I got it to start, and as long as I worked the choke, I could keep it going. At one point, I needed to use a wedge but needed someone else to pound it in, so I could work the choke.
This dickhead was all I had, so as I was working the choke and cutting the snag, he pulled back the axe for a swing and lost his balance, swung around and stuck it in the side of my frigging knee. I had to pull it free. He started to run to and fro, yelling to shut things down so they could get me off the mountain, and then he came at me with his first aid kit. I told him to get the hell away from me and just throw me your first aid kit. I wrapped my knee to control the bleeding, and my other crew members were arriving to see what was going on. I got the snag down, and with the help of my guys, we got a helipad built so we could get off this hill. It was my wife’s birthday, and I had plans to take her out to dinner, and nothing was going to stop me. We got home, and I got my wife out to dinner. In hindsight, I should have gone to the hospital instead. The next morning, my knee was twice its size, and off to the docs I went. He had to give me a bunch of needles right into the wound and peel all the scabbing off to stitch it up. 7 stitches and a week off work.
After we laid off our guys in the fall, I talked to my boss about getting rid of this employee, and he informed me that it was tough to just fire a guy, the union would fight it, and we would need a pretty good reason. So I put that on the back burner and just did my winter jobs. Come spring, it was cold, and I was still wearing long johns at the start of June. The boss called me in and asked me if I still wanted to get rid of the guy who stuck an axe in my knee, hell, ya, I said. He told me that if it stayed cold for a bit longer, we could stall calling back the crew until after the time when we were required to hire all the guys from last year. We made it past that time and had no reason to call him back. We hired a new guy to replace him, and all was good.
Later that year, during late summer, we were up on a fire on the slopes of Victoria Peak on northern Vancouver Island. There are 2 mountains here, one is Victoria Peak and the other is Warden Peak. I had climbed both of these mountains in the past and had been up Victoria Peak 3 separate times. The views from up there were pretty nice and well worth the climb to see them. In my time, we would travel part of the way under a glacier that had a small river flowing beneath it. The walls were scalloped and glowing blue from the sunlight shining through; it was a phenomenal sight to see. I hear this has now melted away.
While we were fighting the fire, I had longlined in some gear that had been brought in by truck to a marshalling area below. After the pilot dropped it in a clearing, I began moving it closer to where it was needed. I had a trapper Nelson pack loaded with hose on my back and a Gorman-rup pump in my hands, and was crossing a large natural fallen tree. My pack shifted, and the next thing I knew, I was tumbling down the slope. I could not get myself to stop; the slope was steep and consisted of a hard layer of duff covered in small hemlock cones, and only when I crashed into a tree did I stop. As I took my bearings, I saw that the tree was on the edge of a 50-meter-high cliff. I had been pretty lucky to hit this tree, or I would have not stopped till I hit the bottom below the cliff. Upon the realization of how lucky I was, I turned to jelly and had a hard time controlling how shaky I was.
I was lucky not to have gone over the edge, but not so lucky in damage as the trapper Nelson pack crossboard had seriously herniated a couple of discs in my back and as I was getting my bearings, the pain began to set in. My crew had to get me down below the cliff to a flat area where a chopper could land and haul me off to town. I feared my firefighting days were over.
My back was at least not broken, but I had several herniated discs. I spent more than a week in the hospital, but suffered severe pain for over a year. I kept wanting to see a bone bender, but the workers’ compensation board refused me, saying that I would give up all rights to my claim by going to one.
After several verbally high-strung arguments, my adjudicator from compo and I were not seeing eye to eye, and he closed my claim early in, so now here I was hurting like hell, not able to see a bone bender and needing to appeal my claim to feed my family. I was a married man with a 2-year-old and a newborn baby, not able to work and no pay coming in. I appealed the decision I won. My adjudicator was called out for treating me in the manner he did. My claim paid out just over 50,000 dollars in back pay. Bills were paid up.
Sometime after this, my wife and I were shopping for groceries, and I had one of those big sneaky sneezes that sometimes catch you unaware. It dropped me to the floor from the pain, and I had to go to the car and wait for my wife. But you know, every day after that, my back felt a bit better. If I had been allowed to visit the bone bender back when I first got hurt, I might not have had to go through all this bullshit. My back was never the same, though, and I knew firefighting was out.
This was something I had not anticipated. I had planned to continue my firefighting training with hopes of working in the fire control center at some time in the future. Firefighting was my life, I loved it, and I did not know how to respond. I was in a slump and was lost. The way Compo had treated me left me in a depression. So, what to do, I had always liked welding and thought it might be a good career change. When I was in school, welding was a class that appealed to me, and I was pretty good at it, so I decided to go for it.