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Loneliness doesn’t often seem to be directly alluded to when people talk about what it’s like to be a Wildland Firefighter. Indirectly, yes.Long absences from home and loved ones are overwhelmingly the norm rather than the exception.
2023’s season in British Columbia, and Canada in general, was busy. An internet search will tell you the stats of how many hectares burned, how many ignitions, how many foreign resources came to assist. What it was like to live that can’t be represented by numbers, or by reading the words of someone struggling to articulate it.
Finishing up a fire had no prospects of relief because you knew there were others pending elsewhere. Mop-up, patrol (that’s “gridding” in American), demob gear, demob selves, get to base, get gear ready, replenish food and overnight kits, start sorting through the mess remaining from your and others’ fires knowing that your location that night would more than likely not be at the address you supposedly inhabit for the summer.
Fourteen days at a time, when you get your few days off you have to budget your available time/energy very carefully. Drive ten hours or more to spend a precious two or three nights with loved ones to burn another full day on the drive back again? You need to have enough energy left in the tank to take on that mission. You’re not even thinking about arriving back after the break and whether you’ll have enough left for the pull you’re about to start. The one you’re supposed to have cleared the slate for, arriving fresh with a blank canvas of physical and emotional energy. Which do you prioritize?
If you’re even lucky enough to have that option! Many of us hail from the other side of the country - many hours flight, drive, or a complex combination of both, making visiting loved ones in the usual short “reset” of about three days unreasonably complicated. Trips like this planned in advance would normally be expensive, but given we don’t usually know ahead of time when we’ll be reset they just aren’t financially or logistically feasible. Some of us come from different parts of the world; visiting close friends or family isn’t even in the cards.
I am very fortunate to have a very close community around me…in South Africa. The time difference to British Columbia is almost perfectly aligned so I can get some quick texts in late at night, or before work in the morning. Sleep or feel connection? If you have a free weekend, you get to sleep in a bit and connect with your humans too. The ones who can be available spontaneously, given you don’t know in advance for sure when you’ll have days off.
I worked out of a new zone this season (2023) and the proverbial fecal matter hit the fan long before we were ready for it.
On top of the regular chaos–the chaos most of us crave and thrive in–we also didn’t have time to build a strong social foundation between colleagues and in our new roles. Yes, we spend basically every waking minute with each other on the fireline, but somehow being in a work environment is different. Endless hours of fireline camaraderie sets the foundation for connection. But fireline hierarchies, the normal operating range of stress hormones, and the inability to represent the quirks of self that can't be expressed out in the wilderness; those are amongst the things that roadblock truly established deep connections.
It also takes longer if you come from a different social fabric - are versed in different slang and twang. If you aren’t fluent in the language of Copenhagen and Chevy’s, aren’t as versed in hunting and snow sports, knowing how to have a braai (an iconic South African barbecue) but not being practised at shotgunning Luckys. Connecting effectively involves figuring out how to communicate in languages that don’t exclusively use words.
A lot of these are “me” problems, but their equivalents also exist for the New Brunswicker whose significant other studies medicine in Newfoundland, the Ontarian whose rural close-knit community is far from an accessible metropole, the Australian whose loved ones are a similarly awkward time difference away. And certainly for everyone from even closer afield, right up to the overworked program lead who still has to carve out time for his wife and toddler, even though he sleeps under the same roof as them.
So on the infrequent days off, without enough emotional energy in the tank to take a trip somewhere fun or to reach out to people I don’t feel I have the rapport with to show up at their doorsteps, I end up on the couch. Regardless of how unmatched the genre is to my usual taste, I binge-watch any TV show that depicts close friendship or sense of community to patch the desperately intense loneliness. Not knowing that my everyday work companions are occupying the same real estate on the couch in their respective temporary dwellings.
Wildland Firefighting involves brutally hard physical activity, having the stamina of endurance athletes, exemplifying admirable qualities of preparedness, organisation, and cold logic under pressure.