creative non-fiction

Photo: Alan Westhaver

By Angela Street
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

Every year from May until August, initial attack crews are deployed from Canadian district fire bases to help contain fires (and occasionally conduct prescribed burns) in Canada’s boreal forest. Like intelligence operatives, fire rangers often work in isolation and obscurity, in a remote and dangerous world hidden from public view. Welcome to the Big Wild.

“Strangle!”

The command flies down the line like electricity running to ground. I clamp the steel stranglers around the hose, ensuring that I don’t pinch or pierce its woven skin.

“Strangling!”

My crew leader uncouples the nozzle from our hose line, attaches another hose length and affixes the nozzle to its free end: “Water!”

I release the stranglers - slowly, slowly - and water shoots back up the line.

“Water in the loop!” yells another crew member, and we’re in business again, 70 pounds per square inch of water pressure directed at the fire’s edge.

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Illustration by TJ Vogan

By Joelle Renstrom
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope;
for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars,
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
Albert Camus, The Stranger

1. The Sunday blues are back, familiar and unwelcome like symptoms of an old illness.

Sundays became my nemesis in high school, especially the nights, which I’d spend biting my nails and lying sleeplessly in bed, cataloguing all that was wrong with my life. I asked myself more depressing questions about my future on Sunday nights than at any other time.

The current relapse of the Sunday blues is even worse. Now, instead of attending high school, I teach there. When Sunday night rolls around, I feel as though I’m being forced into the spotlight in front of a tough crowd, and there’s nowhere to hide.

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