The House That Teaches Two

Behind the station on Route 13, the Cortland volunteer fire brigade keeps a two-story concrete house with no furniture, no glass in the windows, and walls that are black to the ceiling. It has been burned, on purpose, several hundred times. Officially it is the training structure. Everyone calls it the smokehouse.

Training runs on Tuesday nights, and almost everything in it is done twice, or in twos.

First, the air packs are checked. Each recruit must open the valve, read the pressure, and say the number out loud; then their partner reads the same gauge and says it again. “If it isn't said twice, it wasn't checked,” says Freya, who has run the training for nine years and has heard every excuse there is.

Next, the fire is lit. Only straw and untreated wood are used, never plastic, because chemical smoke is not something anyone practices in. The smoke is real, though, and after four minutes the ground floor is dark enough that a recruit can't see his own glove. That was the part that surprised Aziz most on his first night. He had expected heat. What he got was blindness.

Then the recruits are sent in, always in pairs, never alone. Before they search anything, each pair must find two ways out and agree out loud on which one is closer.

After that comes the wall rule. One gloved hand stays on the wall, and doors are counted as they are passed — one, two, three — so that the way back can be counted in reverse.

Finally, a forty-kilo dummy is hidden somewhere on the upper floor. One recruit lifts it while the other assists and keeps hold of the wall. On the radio, Freya directs them from outside using nothing but what they tell her, which is why recruits are trained to describe a room in short, flat sentences.

The run is then timed, discussed on the grass, and run again.

Aziz said, after his fourth Tuesday, that he had come to the brigade expecting to learn about fire. The smokehouse does not really teach fire. It teaches the number two.