Aaron Williams was a smokin' good firefighter in Canada's forests. He was a provincial firefighter on B.C. unit crews (plus stints in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Idaho), climbed the seniority ranks to teach the profession, and was still a young man when he set down the pulaski and picked up the pen.
The forest firefighter's profession is much like a professional athlete's. It's for the physically stout and exceptionally fit. It isn't exclusively for the young, but it favours them. After being on the summer frontlines since 2006, Williams figured he was finished and on to his next chapter of life, literally, when the 2015 fire season flared up.
Little did he know that his empirical knowledge would hit the bookstore shelves exactly when his skills were called back into action for the hardest fire season in B.C. history. Williams can now call himself an author, since the release of Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir. He can also wipe the "ex-" off his firefighter title.
Williams basically has enough time to get showered and wash his ashy, smoky, dirty clothes for the drive up to Prince George for the local launch of Chasing Smoke. He was fresh - which is really the opposite word - off the fireline when he spoke with the Citizen about the book and his P.G. author's appearance.
"I honestly did not figure, when I wrote the book, that I would ever be doing that kind of work again," Williams said. "It felt awesome once I got over myself. I used to work on a ministry crew, the red shirts, and I went back to work on a contract crew. The ministry firefighters always looked down on the contract crews, so it was an ego blow to me to work on what I once considered a lower form of crew. But I came to terms with that old crap and had a lot of fun. The book had just come out and for that reason, too, I felt great about being back at it."
Williams did most of his firefighting in the Bulkley Valley region. He's a northern British Columbian who now resides in Nova Scotia where he got a Master's degree in creative non-fiction writing at King's College. He is pursuing his dream of being a professional scribe and he learned from the outset of that dream that your best chance of success on the written page is truth. Write what you know the most about. That, without any question in his mind, is fighting forest fires.
"If somebody else had done a book like this, I for sure would have gotten it to see what got said," he said.
Being closely connected to the topic gave Williams an advantage in the subject matter, but did it make it easy to get the words down on paper?
"No," he said, wearily, even these couple of years later, remembering how he started the process by journaling on the fireline.
"I remember we did four back-to-back two-week deployments that summer, crazy activity, and I remember one night knowing I had to go back to the truck and do the writing, and it was really difficult. My tent was to the left, my truck was to the right, it was literally a crossroads, and I was thinking oooooh damn, I am so sick of this, but if I ditch on it tonight where will that stop? I could have blown the project right there. It was a close call. I probably had enough material. The temptation was great to shrug it off that night, but I didn't, and that's what really cemented it for me."
He had to work at the process. For some writers, it's a compulsion, a behaviour that flows like river water to the sea. Not Williams. He liked writing as a child, but it was not a passion, just an interest. He actually got turned off of wordplay by a high school English teacher he didn't click with. But writing comes with the university territory and the more he did it during his undergraduate studies, the more it ignited his spirit.
He wrote the Chasing Smoke manuscript and submitted it for publication. Those inquiries are often slow, if not silent in their response. He decided to delve into the Master's degree in the interim. That required a major focus on a writing project as the thesis. And as he got immersed in that intense process, that's when he got an amazing and almost overwhelming call.
"I was sort of past the point of no return on the next book, and now that feels great but at the time I was feeling swamped," he said. "What I'll roughly say about it is, it involves logging, sort of. I've spent the past 18 months or two years working on it. In the middle of that, right when it was getting thick, that's when Harbour Publishing got back to me about the firefighting book. Wow. But all they really needed me to do was get involved in some editing, so that didn't hurt the Master's project, and now that is finished and I'm hoping to make that into the next book."
Oh yeah, and B.C. caught fire, right at the end of all that, and the province was in such dire need of firefighters that he dusted off his gear and flew back into the smoke and dirt.
He will talk about his latest deployment on the fireline, read from his debut book, and talk about the writing profession all at a public appearance on Oct. 16 at Artspace (upstairs at Books & Company) from 6-9 p.m. There is no charge to attend. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
