Decommissioned broadsheet presses, 2006

     "Hey! You with the camera. Over here."

    The fat railroad cop was standing beside the shattered ruin of the train. Portable arc lights threw the scene into sharp blacks and whites, highlighting splintered pieces of wood and metal and the lazy "CN" on the remnants of the caboose, which loomed up and over the locomotive like some prehistoric monster. A line of derailed tank cars stretched out until they disappeared into the dark.

    It was somewhere around 2 a.m. on a sultry summer morning. I'd trekked in along the tracks for half a mile from the highway, carrying what felt like 50 pounds of Graphlex strobe and Rolleicord camera gear. The air stank of petrochemicals from the refineries a couple of miles south, the smell lodged somewhere near the sinuses, making my eyes water.

    I lit another cigarette, and made my way carefully through the rubble. I was wearing the same clothes I'd been in when I'd heard the news bulletin on the radio, 60 miles and 40 minutes away. They weren't my best, but they weren't throwaways, either -- nothing was on pay of $75 a week -- and my soft-soled shoes would provide no protection against jagged debris.

    "See this?" the fat railroad cop said, pointing down at the ground. "Know what that is?"

    He waited expectantly. I bent down to examine a pane of glass that would have come from the locomotive's cab. Along the underside was a grey, gelatinous mass.

    "Ummmmm ... yup," I said, straightening up. "That's the engineer's brains. Looks just like a giant microscope slide, don't it?"

    Flash, wind. Flash, wind.

    I knocked off a couple of frames, although I suspected they wouldn't come out -- and knew they wouldn't be used even if they did. The fat railroad cop, who'd been trying to get under my skin, was plainly disappointed. I turned my back on him as surely as I'd turned the tables, and got on with documenting the sights and sounds for that day's paper. When it was over and the story and pictures were on Page 1, I'd been on my feet for more than 24 hours.

    I was 20 years old, and I loved my job.

    Many of my work memories are like that, snapshots of accidents, fires, suicides, homicides. Crash-and-burn we called it. Hard news. They always -- or the good ones, anyway -- seemed to happen at night. The ways people lived and died were my stock-in-trade. Even when it got on top of me, as it periodically did, I never threw up, never backed off, never flinched. It would have been ... unacceptable.

    Most people describe adrenalin as hot, a wire in the blood. For me, it was ice cold, something that slowed everything down, but sharpened my senses so that indelible images were captured as surely as if my skull held a roll of Ilford HP4 black-and-white film, my eyes set at a 60th of a second, aperture F8.

    Flash, wind. Flash, wind.

    I can and sometimes do take myself down memory lane, revisit the faces and places, hear again the sound of sirens, curses, shrieks. I see exhaust fumes from fire trucks curling up in the cold night air, grey-black against flames, accident scenes lit by headlights and roof racks, ice hanging off my moustache, outside almost as cold as inside. I smell the smells and taste the smoke, reach out and touch a still warm hand.

    I learned to keep coveralls in the trunk, along with an old pair of army combat boots, especially after the night I stepped backward into a pool of blood at a quadruple fatal and wrecked a brand-new pair of suede shoes. Plus a green garbage bag, which doubled as an emergency poncho to keep the rain off my Nikon F. And a disposable blanket, too, because once in awhile I'd be at a scene where there were injuries before the ambulance or the cops. Learned not to wear a tie because it was something that could be grabbed. Learned to work alone because I trusted no one else.

    But I did see the best and worst come out. A cop I despised as a bully displayed an astonishing tenderness as he shielded a grieving mother from a sight no mother should see. Another mother, on another day, holding a toddler in her arms, demanded that I find a way to make the cops let the two of them walk along railroad tracks littered with pieces of an elderly suicide. I want to see that, she said, licking her lips. Fuck off, I said. Hey, she said, offended, not in front of my kid.

    People....

    I learned that the best way to stay on top of what was happening was to work the streets, work the bars, work the copshops, work the courts, work the angles. Make friends on both sides of the law: police, firefighters, ambulancemen, nurses, doctors, pimps, whores, thugs, thieves, addicts, bookies. When a couple of bikers got murdered one Saturday night while I was on vacation, I got a call from the city editor. Can you help us out? We've got nothing here. Sure. I took notes from a confidential undercover report on gang rivalries and alliances, courtesy of a friendly police chief, and then confirmed the details with my biker contacts before writing an 800-word story. Without a byline: I didn't want my sources backtracked or compromised through my name.

    Through it all, that ice. That ice took me so high that I'd do anything to stay there, anything to avoid the inevitable crash afterward. That ice in the pit of my stomach when I went into some skidrow bar just to prove I could and would, getting people to talk -- cops, victims, criminals, lawyers, witnesses -- even when they knew they shouldn't.

    I couldn't do it all the time, of course: No one could. I spelled myself by switching off to more sedate beats and with stints on the desk, sometimes for years: action line columnist, education writer, copy editor, night news editor, op-ed editor. But I always somehow found my way back to the streets, where the ice flowed and slowed.

    It's impossible, really, to put into words, and I know only one other person who gets it the same way. He's a retired volunteer firefighter, and as we sat on his porch one afternoon last summer, swapping lies and drinking beer, I said to him, Bill, you know what the best part was? "Yeah, he said, "the rush -- I lived for the rush, getting in the truck, the run to the scene, first through the door. Just ... the being there. Yeah."

    Flash, wind. Flash, wind.    

    The last time I was on the street as a reporter-photograper was four years ago. Crash-and-burn veterans were in short supply, simply because no one wanted us or much valued what we brought to the newsroom table. Changing times, changing tastes, changing values, made us a species on the brink of extinction. We were an embarrassment. Perhaps that's a good thing -- I simply don't know.

    The journalism school grads wanted to cover politics, courts, environment, or, if they were desperate for a job, cops and fires -- as long as they didn't actually have to go to a scene, maybe get their mental Dockers soiled. And God bless the Internet, and instant -- if meaningless -- press releases from police "media relations" that newsroom drones could feed to the website, complete with loose ends and holes that no one could darn, because no one had the needle.

    In that apocalyptic post-9/11 world of news coverage, even small-town cops were wearing enough body armour and sporting enough weaponry to invade a Third World country, gunned on a sense of power, paranoia and entitlement, working out of reinforced concrete bunkers with metal detectors and bullet-proof glass, waiting for the revolution, or maybe Bin Laden. No one was talking to anyone. Once there were rooms set aside in hospital ERs for police, clergy and press, complete with coffee urn and telephone; now we weren't allowed in hospitals at all. Even the press club had shut down for lack of interest. We had let it all go without a pang or a whimper. Or a thought.

    So I backed off during that last go-around. I didn't bother developing a new network of contacts and sources, and ignored as many crash-and-burn calls as I could. Too much trouble to weed and feed the garden when it was never going to produce crops that anyone wanted.

    The moment I could leave, I left. I wanted no party, no fanfare, no retirement notice rehashing my 40 years. I just turned in my parking pass and swipe card at 12:30 one Monday afternoon, walked out the newsroom door, and kept on going. I've never been back. My arrival home an hour later was to the chorale from the Glorious Ninth wafting out the kitchen window, to a surprise committee of neighbourhood kids with a giant hand-made congratulations card, to the neighbours themselves with a celebratory bottle of wine. And to The Redhead, at long last, for good....

    No regrets. Not one.

    Still, you can take the kid out of the streets, but never the streets out of the kid. Every once in awhile, just before the hint of dawn, I hear a siren fading into the distance. Is it real? Or just the tag end of a dream I can't remember. I never know.

    I grope for my notebook, my camera bag, my old clothes, my boots. Once again, I'm ready to speed through the darkness to someone else's nightmare, the cold cold cold spreading through my arms and legs, the thrill of the chase, the pure joy singing in my ears....

    Flash, wind. Flash, wind.