BY BERNICE HALSBAND, TORONTO FIREFIGHTER, STATION 232-C
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rad Hoy’s first hiking adventure was a challenge. To be fair, it wasn’t something he was prepared for. But in typical firefighter fashion, he finished the hike anyway. La Cloche Silhouette is notoriously hard. Experienced hikers spend weeks planning everything surrounding the trip. Everything is important, from headlamp to footwear. Permits have to be booked, routes planned, sites chosen. The 78km loop that winds its way through the La Cloche Mountain Range in Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario attracts hundreds of visitors from all over the world every year. As Brad told me the story of his misadventure, salvaged by pure determination, I was impressed and slack-jawed in equal measure. I myself had spent months planning my hike on the Bruce Trail a few years ago, complete with a four day test hike, and I still made a ton of mistakes. I couldn’t believe that he just decided to do one of the toughest hikes in Ontario on a whim, with four buddies (Toronto firefighter brothers) in tow. After all, they ended up hiking with heavy backpacks, loaded with heavy food and equipment and very little research. He told me he wanted to quit every single day! A few years ago, I was
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interviewing a crew at Station 421 (oh, those were the days when we could just visit each other) and one of the guys said something that stuck with me ever since. “If you have ten years on this job, you’re cracked. I don’t care who you are. You’re a little bit cracked and you get more cracked as you go on in this career”. I was approaching the ten year mark and his words hit home. We had just run a call earlier that year that affected me in a way no other call had before, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it or what to do about it. This had never happened to me before. I remember running a motorcycle fatality when I worked at Adelaide, eight years ago. One of the guys from the other shift told me that it was OK to not be OK. Although I really appreciated his concern for me, my issue wasn’t “not being OK”. My issue was being OK. I wondered all week if there was something wrong with me. I felt like I shouldn’t have been OK with a guy scraping his face across 100 feet of pavement. We found teeth and brain like a breadcrumb trail all the way to his body. Why was I OK? If it was OK not to be OK, was it OK to be OK? In a way, hikes are not unlike our careers. We think we go into this line of work prepared, but really
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