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(originally posted on Diaryland.com, 2003-08-29 - 1:01 a.m.)
It was an old funeral parlour in downtown Winnipeg, a building that had been untenanted for many years since the funeral chapel moved to bigger digs in the suburbs. It was right behind a drugstore I often use and across the street from the Medical Arts Building where I've sometimes gone for appointments, and only a block from where I catch my bus home every night that I work at Ipsos-Reid.
I'd never seen a building burn before. At 11 pm on a clear summer night, the billows of smoke are lit from beneath, orange and roiling and dark and heavy. They rise high enough to encircle twenty-story buildings in darkness. The smell of burning wood and crisp water make the air sharp to breathe.
For years the parlour had been at the corner of my awareness, part of the furniture of my mind -- the kind you never consciously think of seeing, but when someone mentions it you twig fairly quickly to which location they mean. Well, now it's gone forever. And I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.
It aches, mostly. Another intimation of mortality, both of structures and of human beings. And its destruction was something that the movie or television screen can't really capture.
The scale of it was awe-inspiring. The building was four stories tall and white, with no ground-floor windows and those false support columns on the streetside facing that are our culture's shorthand for "funeral home". By the time I worked my way from the bus stop (where people stood wondering out loud what was happening and why police cars were blocking off the streets, until one enterprising fellow walked up a half a block and came running back to tell us what he'd seen between the buildings), across the street and into the parking lot of the Medical Arts Building, flames had broken through the roof of the funeral home and were licking wildly up into the night sky. Each of them was three times as tall as my 5'2" height, easily -- and there was something both frightening and fascinating about them as they devoured the empty structure, sometimes beaten back, but always resurged against the streams of water flying into the heart of the building through numerous broken windows.
And there was no shortage of water. Seven fire trucks had arranged themselves around the site, two of them with the tall cranelike structures that shoot water in a massive cloud onto any target below them. While sinuous snakes of water, trailing mist, were shot into the inferno from street level, the cranes concentrated on dousing the roof (with intermittant success) and creating a wall of water between the parlour and an old heritage apartment block right beside it. Maybe twelve feet separated the burning building from the non-burning one, and obviously the firefighters hoped to keep it that way.
Still, standing there among the scatterings of people gathered in the parking lot behind the yellow DO NOT CROSS police tape, I found myself praying: Please, Goddess, let no one be hurt. Don't let the fire make the leap that will take another building down with it. I also found myself wondering if anyone in the apartment block had left their windows open that evening -- if so, I hoped that the damage from smoke and water wouldn't be too much. (There was a certain humor in the thought, though I'd be at pains to explain to you why I found it amusing at the time.)
At one point, one of the streams of water shot from the ground was directed almost straight up to let its load fall down on top of the burning roof. Have you ever seen how a wave on the ocean rises in a rippling curve, capped with foam and gracefully falling back upon itself? That was exactly what that water stream looked like, lit from beneath.
As far as the fate of the apartment building went, hoping was all I or anyone else watching could do. In our helplessness, it was heartening to watch the tall, strong firefighters move back and forth with such purpose, talking with confident police officers who kept an eye on the perimeter and gently directed people who got a little too close to stand behind it. Bicycle cops weaved in and out among the hoses and vehicles, stopping every so often to talk to a firefighter or another policeman; what they were doing, I couldn't begin to guess. But whatever it was, it somehow made me feel better to see them doing it.
It is so seldom that we who live in cities actually get to see the benefits of that infrastructure in action. They had mobilized themselves against an elemental force of destruction in order to contain and defeat it, and as we watched they slowly beat it back, each gout of renewed flame through the roof of the building seeming weaker and smaller than before. The flashing lights of the emergency vehicles lit dozens up upturned faces: teenagers, older couples, families who had been out for a walk, young romantics holding each other as they watched the drama unfold.
For an hour, we all shared one spectacle. People have been watching buildings burn since construction with flammable materials was invented -- for all practical purposes, we could have been a crowd from 1950, or 1850, or 1050 for that matter. The clothes and mindset have changed profoundly; the fascination, however, is eternal.
We watched the primal conflict between man and fire, that most capricious and seemingly malicious of elementals... and even though we live in the 21st century, with all the tools of technology and modern civil engineering at our command, there was still some lingering doubt that men would win this battle. Therefore it wasn't until the flames had died down and stayed down for several minutes, until the windows were utterly dark and sparks no longer spun upward from the rooftop, that I found the tension and sorrow inside me finally easing. It wasn't until then that I was finally able to turn around and walk away, leaving others still staring upward into the smokey night sky.
I'd been standing there for over an hour in the cold and dark. When I got home my husband had hot food waiting, and tea, and they were both welcome.
It was the first time I had ever seen a building burn. It was beautiful in its way, but Goddess willing, I will never have to see it again.
It was an old funeral parlour in downtown Winnipeg, a building that had been untenanted for many years since the funeral chapel moved to bigger digs in the suburbs. It was right behind a drugstore I often use and across the street from the Medical Arts Building where I've sometimes gone for appointments, and only a block from where I catch my bus home every night that I work at Ipsos-Reid.
I'd never seen a building burn before. At 11 pm on a clear summer night, the billows of smoke are lit from beneath, orange and roiling and dark and heavy. They rise high enough to encircle twenty-story buildings in darkness. The smell of burning wood and crisp water make the air sharp to breathe.
For years the parlour had been at the corner of my awareness, part of the furniture of my mind -- the kind you never consciously think of seeing, but when someone mentions it you twig fairly quickly to which location they mean. Well, now it's gone forever. And I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.
It aches, mostly. Another intimation of mortality, both of structures and of human beings. And its destruction was something that the movie or television screen can't really capture.
The scale of it was awe-inspiring. The building was four stories tall and white, with no ground-floor windows and those false support columns on the streetside facing that are our culture's shorthand for "funeral home". By the time I worked my way from the bus stop (where people stood wondering out loud what was happening and why police cars were blocking off the streets, until one enterprising fellow walked up a half a block and came running back to tell us what he'd seen between the buildings), across the street and into the parking lot of the Medical Arts Building, flames had broken through the roof of the funeral home and were licking wildly up into the night sky. Each of them was three times as tall as my 5'2" height, easily -- and there was something both frightening and fascinating about them as they devoured the empty structure, sometimes beaten back, but always resurged against the streams of water flying into the heart of the building through numerous broken windows.
And there was no shortage of water. Seven fire trucks had arranged themselves around the site, two of them with the tall cranelike structures that shoot water in a massive cloud onto any target below them. While sinuous snakes of water, trailing mist, were shot into the inferno from street level, the cranes concentrated on dousing the roof (with intermittant success) and creating a wall of water between the parlour and an old heritage apartment block right beside it. Maybe twelve feet separated the burning building from the non-burning one, and obviously the firefighters hoped to keep it that way.
Still, standing there among the scatterings of people gathered in the parking lot behind the yellow DO NOT CROSS police tape, I found myself praying: Please, Goddess, let no one be hurt. Don't let the fire make the leap that will take another building down with it. I also found myself wondering if anyone in the apartment block had left their windows open that evening -- if so, I hoped that the damage from smoke and water wouldn't be too much. (There was a certain humor in the thought, though I'd be at pains to explain to you why I found it amusing at the time.)
At one point, one of the streams of water shot from the ground was directed almost straight up to let its load fall down on top of the burning roof. Have you ever seen how a wave on the ocean rises in a rippling curve, capped with foam and gracefully falling back upon itself? That was exactly what that water stream looked like, lit from beneath.
As far as the fate of the apartment building went, hoping was all I or anyone else watching could do. In our helplessness, it was heartening to watch the tall, strong firefighters move back and forth with such purpose, talking with confident police officers who kept an eye on the perimeter and gently directed people who got a little too close to stand behind it. Bicycle cops weaved in and out among the hoses and vehicles, stopping every so often to talk to a firefighter or another policeman; what they were doing, I couldn't begin to guess. But whatever it was, it somehow made me feel better to see them doing it.
It is so seldom that we who live in cities actually get to see the benefits of that infrastructure in action. They had mobilized themselves against an elemental force of destruction in order to contain and defeat it, and as we watched they slowly beat it back, each gout of renewed flame through the roof of the building seeming weaker and smaller than before. The flashing lights of the emergency vehicles lit dozens up upturned faces: teenagers, older couples, families who had been out for a walk, young romantics holding each other as they watched the drama unfold.
For an hour, we all shared one spectacle. People have been watching buildings burn since construction with flammable materials was invented -- for all practical purposes, we could have been a crowd from 1950, or 1850, or 1050 for that matter. The clothes and mindset have changed profoundly; the fascination, however, is eternal.
We watched the primal conflict between man and fire, that most capricious and seemingly malicious of elementals... and even though we live in the 21st century, with all the tools of technology and modern civil engineering at our command, there was still some lingering doubt that men would win this battle. Therefore it wasn't until the flames had died down and stayed down for several minutes, until the windows were utterly dark and sparks no longer spun upward from the rooftop, that I found the tension and sorrow inside me finally easing. It wasn't until then that I was finally able to turn around and walk away, leaving others still staring upward into the smokey night sky.
I'd been standing there for over an hour in the cold and dark. When I got home my husband had hot food waiting, and tea, and they were both welcome.
It was the first time I had ever seen a building burn. It was beautiful in its way, but Goddess willing, I will never have to see it again.
