In the spring, I was 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. Because of an injury, My Fire Fighting Days Are Over.
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 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 here was the 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 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, 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 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 Gormon-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 jello and had a hard time controlling how shaky I was.
It was fortuitous to have not gone over the edge but damage was done nonetheless. 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 workman’s 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 won my claim, and 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 would never be the same 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 now 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.
I asked Compo to pay my tuition but they said no so I cashed in a pension for 14,000 and went to school for welding. I decided to take all three levels at one time, so I signed up for my “C” “B” and “A” tickets. One of my classmates turned out to be a cousin of my wife’s named Mel. He was a great guy and his lady Cheryl was such a sweet girl. Mel and I talked during class about how expensive it was to go to school. We decided that they could move in with us, share costs and Mel and I could go back and forth in one car. This was great, we all got along very well. Mel was only going for his c ticket so he would be in school for about 10 months. After getting his “C” ticket, they moved to Coal Harbour where Mel was going to work for Cheryl’s dad.
Initially, the course material was pretty boring, I was doing things that I knew quite well. But I finally began to learn more once I was on my “B” ticket. I learned how to Tig weld both stainless steel and aluminum, and I loved the whole process. Here I also began to learn fabrication. My “A” ticket training was all fabrication with a bit of the aluminum wire feed pound gun. One day while learning some ways to tig weld, my welder shorted out just as my elbow touched the table, making a circuit. I came to my senses out in the hall. The power of that shock blew me 3 meters from my seat and rattled my teeth.
One day, I was helping a classmate in setting up his welder and in the process, I arc flashed both my eyes. I managed to get up to the hospital on my own, my eyes felt like they were filled with sand. Once there, they had to freeze my eyes and then bandage them, telling me I needed to keep the eyes covered for 48 hours. I had to phone my wife’s mom to bring up Dad so he could drive me and my truck home. For the next 48 hours, I was blind. Just to have a pee was tough. My wife had to cut my food and place it in a bowl so I could eat with my fingers without losing too much. This was the longest 48 hours of my life.
I specialized in stainless and aluminum. I loved aluminum welding and had dreams of working for a shipbuilding company. My instructor had been welding aluminum for many years, he told me I was better than he could ever be. He had me stay after graduating for several weeks so he could teach all he knew about this process, he was a great teacher.
After graduating, I sent in applications to all the boat-building companies I could find but only found work on a pile driver as head welder. We were putting in dolphins in booming grounds. Welding on the pile driver was a wet job and getting shocked was a daily experience. It was not bad work though, and they paid me extremely well. I had a young welder working under me and he did a lot of the shit jobs. He later got married to my niece and was now my nephew. The crew was a great bunch of guys and the head guy was the spitting image of Kiefer Sutherland, so I called him Kiefer.
Then there was a turn in the economy and the jobs began to have a lot of space between them. At least I had the ticket for future work.
I had been offered pipeline work in Alberta but refused anything to do with the oil fields. Brown and Root offered me work in Kuwait welding oil pipelines back together after Sadam and his army had a meltdown and set it on fire. The pay was to be more than I ever made before if I signed on for a year, but I had a wife and young kids that I wanted to see grow up. Some workers were being shot.
At the same time, some Friends of ours were going through a divorce, she and her husband had a construction company that they both ran, and the wife took that for her share of the settlement. She hired me as a commercial buildings insulation subcontractor, not my favourite type of work but it paid the bills. I was grateful for the job. One project had me insulating a new gas station in Courtenay. There was an on-the-job accident that resulted in my right big toe getting crushed, I had severe nerve damage and they needed to remove a neuroma from my toe, which consisted of a disorganized growth of nerve cells at the site of the injury. A neuroma is very painful. After the operation, my foot still hurt and I could not work for quite some time, back on and fighting compo again. After my hearing with the board, I was awarded almost 35000.00. This was awesome as I had heard about a government program to retrain people who had been injured on the job.
I applied and got into a 9-month program. The money from my payout helped with living expenses while I was in the program. I was looking to get my grade 12 and perhaps get into university. I liked to write and photography was a big hobby of mine so I thought perhaps journalism would be a good choice. After all, it’s not new to our family, my uncle Terry had been a war correspondent during the Vietnam War and after that, he signed on with CBC Radio eventually becoming the Executive Director of CBC Radio International. A position he held until he retired. I grew up on the stories my mom told us about my uncle. I thought that if he could do this, so could I. The program leader gave me the go-ahead for this, covering all costs.
I challenged the exams for grade 12, wrote the first-year university tests and passed them both easily. A particular piece of the exams had me write an essay about something that changed the course of my life. This was easy, I wrote about my childhood and my dad’s alcoholism and how even after having gotten away from it. It still changed me in profound ways. I was truthful and did not leave anything out, it was pretty gritty. My teacher called me into her office to talk about my tests, she had my essay on her desk and she was teary-eyed. She said that I needed to get some experience working at a newspaper so I could learn the different cogs of journalism involving newspapers and magazines. She felt I had what it would take to be a writer.
It was up to me to find a newspaper willing to give me the training. The Courier-Islander in Campbell River offered me the training. The first thing I learned was darkroom development, I loved this. Then I was out as a photographer. Then I got the chance to write, and it opened up something inside of me. One day while working on a story, I drew a graphic drawing to go along with it. My editor liked it and put it in with the story. I started doing more for other stories, next thing you know people were calling in to try and buy the drawings. I soon realized that I could make a living selling my art. They let me be a graphic artist to finish out my time on the job training. Seems a new career opportunity presented itself out of the blue.
There were forty of us who graduated from this course, I had become friends with them all and was going to miss them. I had tried to help each of them the best I could in achieving their goals and when graduation came, I was informed that I was voted valedictorian. It was both terrifying and an honour, terrifying because I would be giving a speech to and about my fellow students who would be joined by family and friends. And an honour because it was all my fellow students who voted for me. My teacher told me later that I was the only one they all voted for. This left me speechless.
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