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The Current Transcript for June 11, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: It was difficult to leave my country because I was born there, my family's there, my home's there, but I had to flee because of the need.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: How is it even possible that the number of people who have left Venezuela because of economic hardship is now at four million. That not conventional war but the consequences of a financial plummet on the availability of food, of medicine, of the necessities of life has sent so many people out of the country. That this rivals only Syria in the number of people on the move. Does Canada have an influential role to play in thi? We are on the story of Venezuela's deepening crisis in just a moment. And then you may know Eve Ensler as a groundbreaking playwright and a fierce advocate for victims of sexual violence. As one of those victims, there was always something beyond her grasp.

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VOICE: As a child I longed for my father to apologize to me and I thought well why don't I write my father's apology? Why don't I write the words I need to hear?

AMT: And so she has written The Apology in the voice of a now dead father to confront the sexual abuse that began when she was five-years-old. She hopes it sparks apologies for other victims. Eve Ensler joins me in half an hour. Also today, I don't know how much you know about herring. They travel in schools that can be as big as the island of Manhattan and most other creatures find them invaluable and tasty.

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VOICE: That's the power of these little fish they're the bread and butter of the marine ecosystem. When they do well, they do really well and everybody else is doing well on them.

AMT: Which is why fewer herring on both the east and west coasts of Canada have a lot of people worried and we'll tell you more in an hour. We're also revisiting my interview in the early days of The Current when Henry Kissinger reacted unexpectedly to an uncomfortable question. That's in just over an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How Toronto Raptors' breakthrough year helps inspire Canada's next generation of basketball players

Guests: Glen Grunwarld, Steve Konchalski

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VOICE: Six seconds remaining. Leonard back out VanVleet. VanVleet kicks it out Lowry. Lowry for the win. Won't go. And there'll be a Game 6 in Oakland.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Down to the last second. Disappointing of course, but can we just call it part of a prolonged win. After all the Toronto Raptors are still in the game and even that loss last night has not destroyed the faith of the crowds that claimed Jurassic Park and spilled far beyond to the streets of Toronto and across the country. And that is because these athletes are a shining example of what is possible. Credited with improving the sport for the generation coming behind them. Revered for inspiring boys and girls. Honoured for bringing so many people together. So on this sobering morning after a nail biting night before, we are looking at just how far reaching the influence of the Raptors is. In a moment I'll be joined by Glen Grunwald, former Raptors GM, president of Canada Basketball and legendary coach Steve Konchalski. Also today Madhur Jaffrey, a film star turned Indian cooking sensation, has a new role at 85 -- a gangster grandma in a rap video.

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VOICE: The curse words they aren't really hard for an actress. You just do them because they're written for you and I kept telling people, look, as Madea I killed my children. This is much better.

AMT: She is also adjusting Indian recipes for the hot pot. The queen of Indian cooking joins me in half an hour. And in one hour we revisit my conversation three years ago with three firefighters who had just left the frontlines of the Fort Mac wildfire.

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VOICE: Have you ever seen those television shows like Walking Dead for instance. You see cars are scattered everywhere. There's nobody. And then add fire on top of that.

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Raptors fans chanting "Let's go Raptors. We the North."

AMT: Toronto's Jurassic Park was electric last night. Crowds gathered across the country as well. And it was a heartbreaking and heart stopping game. The Raptors lost to Golden State by one point, 106-105, which means a Game 6 in Oakland.

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VOICE 1: It all hurts because Toronto's never tasted this yet and we'd rather lose like 30 than lose by one because it's like you're so close, right?

VOICE 2: It was a bold shot. It was a bold shot. Had Lowry made it, it would have been an incredible game winner.

VOICE 3: I am not giving up. Win or lose I'm going to still support them.

VOICE 4: We're heartbroken and we all expected a big win today, but Game 6, Toronto's the six. It's meant to be.

VOICE 5: This is what resilience comes from. So I believe the champions are going to rise and it's gonna make it a much more powerful storyline.

AMT: Well despite that loss the Raptors have made us all into basketball fans and my next guests say they've already changed basketball in this country forever, right down to the little kids shooting hoops in the driveway. Steve Konchalski has been pacing courtside for more than 40 years. He's about to enter his 45th season as the coach of the St. Francis Xavier men's basketball team in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. That makes him the longest serving university basketball coach in Canadian history, also one with the most wins, more than 900. And Glen Grunwald was with the Raptors back when it all began in 1994. He went on to become the GM and was responsible for bringing Vince Carter to Toronto. He is now the president and CEO of Canada Basketball. They're both with me in our Toronto studio. Hello and welcome.

Steve Konchalski: Thanks for having us.

Glen Grunwald: Thank you.

AMT: I just want to get your your views of the game last night. I'll start with you Steve Konchalski. What did you think?

Steve Konchalski: Well I mean champions die hard and I mean that team is a dynasty and dynasties die hard and the term you know having the heart of a champion, I think you saw that. Despite Kevin Durant's injury, two of the greatest shooters in the history of the game emerged in the last two minutes and hit those three straight three pointers. And they're just not going to die. And from a point of view of Raptor fans, well, I think you know if we waited 24 years, we can wait a few more days.

AMT: Where did you watch the game?

Steve Konchalski: I watched the game at a restaurant sports bar with some of our fellow coaches, with all the Canadian national junior team and a few of the players and it was really interesting to hear their commentaries as well.

AMT: What were they telling you?

Steve Konchalski: Well I mean we were kind of, we put a little bit of a friendly wager on the game and I knew that, I thought it was a lot of pressure on the Raptors coming home to win this. I think the whole city of Toronto was ready to celebrate and I actually think it's a, you know, going on the road on Thursday, is actually you know a better scenario for the Raptors to have to you know to dethrone the champions.

AMT: Glen Grunwald, where were you last night?

Glen Grunwald: I was down at Scotiabank Arena watching the game live and in person. It was a great atmosphere and notwithstanding the loss at the end, it was still a tremendous experience for I think for everyone there.

AMT: I was going to ask you what went wrong last night, but I don't know if that's the question. What are you thinking about what happened last night?

Glen Grunwald: Well I think the Warriors played pretty well and the Raptors didn't. You know the Warriors made 20 three-point shots, which is a record number of shots, three pointers made against the Raptors in the history of the Raptors. So obviously we have to stop that the next go round, but the Raptors didn't play their best game. I agree with Steve the team looked a little stressed, maybe a little fatigued from all the emotion associated with the championship run. And I think they'll catch their breath and I think we'll get the win on Thursday night out in San Francisco.

AMT: Steve Konchalski, you've been coaching basketball for nearly half a century. What's it like for you to see this kind of excitement in the sport?

Steve Konchalski: Well it's amazing you know to, in the 1960s I came up from New York. I eventually became a Canadian, coached the national team. I've been involved with the national team program as well over 30 years. And you know to see kids pick up basketball and well first of all to see to the effect that the Raptors have had since 1995 and how the game has grown, particularly in the GTA, but of course across the country and just to be able to visualize how much you know in the next 10 or 15 years we'll see the results of this tremendous playoff run that the Raptors are going through right now. Our next door neighbor I was chuckling to my wife the other day, our next door neighbor has a young teenage boy and he's everyday he's out there with a hockey stick and a hockey net and you know shooting the puck for the last two or three years. And in the last month they put up a basketball net and he's out there shooting hoops every day. So I think that's a real good indicator of what's going to happen across the country you know going forward.

AMT: And Glen, when all this began in 1994, did you ever imagine Raptors fans would one day be lining up to watch a game like this?

Glen Grunwald: Not really. I dreamed about you know our team that was our goal making it to the championship and it's even better to actually experience it. Even though I'm not directly involved anymore, to actually see the reaction of people not only here in Toronto, but across the country, you know gathering together in these huge Jurassic Parks, it's awesome. And I never would've thought it'd be that good, even if it was in the United States. This is even better than I could have imagined. The fans have taken this to a new level to follow with the team's new performance. So it's really awesome.

AMT: You know some of us had to be reminded that the Stanley Cup playoffs were happening. Did you ever expect that kind of juxtaposition?

Glen Grunwald: Well we need to get a Canadian team in the Stanley Cup finals. Come on and then I think it'll be more important. And again, it's just not about basketball. It's about the power of sport to bring people together and to really you know enjoy something that's fun and just something that's very positive. And I think this team has shown us such great resilience and toughness and in a way sort of a Canadian humility about how they're approaching this. They're not thumping their chests or boasting how they're better than everyone else, they've really performed in a very admirable way.

AMT: So talk to me a little bit about what you see in the generation coming up behind them because of what they've been seeing on the court this season.

Steve Konchalski: Well you know one of the I think big factors that has grown the game here and particularly the GTA is immigration. You know Toronto is such a diverse city and that's what makes it such a beautiful city. And I think that you know so many kids now are going to pick up a basketball, just like that kid in the driveway and that's how the game is going to grow. There, even the parents of young kids, they're the ones that are go into these sports bars and can't even get a seat to watch these games and they're going to encourage their children to go forward with you know playing the game of basketball. So I just think the game is exploding in our country already and this is just going to add to that and ensure that direction is going to continue or even exceed it.

AMT: Glen?

Glen Grunwald: Yeah and our timing is good. As you know Steve was just announced to be on the leadership council of junior NBA, which is an introduction to basketball program for kids aged five to twelve. And it's age appropriate, it's safe and it's fun and hopefully it'll encourage kids to get active and enjoy the sport as a participant, as opposed to just being a fan. So if if parents are interested in getting their kids involved in basketball, they can go to juniornba.ca and find out more about programs in their area.

AMT: And in fact that's why Steve, that's why you're in town. Actually you've been working with with Glen on this project.

Steve Konchalski: Well I've been working with that with Glen on this project, but also working with the national junior team program. What I've done, I've worked with the national team over 30 years in a bunch of different capacities. I was the head coach for four years of the senior team. I was assistant coach with the great Jack Donahue and you know prior to the Raptors, Jack Donahue had come up from New York where he coached Kareem Abdul Jabbar. He took Canada to four straight Olympic Games and that's something we've been you know something we've been trying to match since he retired way back in 1988. So you know I've seen a lot happen over those years.

AMT: And so what have you seen in terms of the young people that you're meeting who want a piece of this, Glen? What are you seeing that's different from the mid-90s?

Glen Grunwald: Well I'm seeing more and better players. For example, Steve's coaching our under-19 team, the juniors. We are world champions. Canada is the world champion, defending world champions and Steve's gonna get us straightened out so we can defend that gold medal next month. So we beat the U.S. in Egypt two years ago and our women's program is also going very strong too. We're ranked fifth in the world and our women will be a working to qualify for the third straight Olympics. So lots of things across the board. The Raptors have certainly improved, but they've also brought along the rest of the basketball in this country. And I think Steve you'll agree that university basketball this country has improved as well.

Steve Konchalski: University basketball has improved. You know the best university teams in new sports could compete with some of the top, not just mid-level, but even the you know top level NCAA teams. I mean I think I saw a stat the other day that in the late 90s there were seven or eight Canadian players playing in the States in the NCAA and now there's over 130. And it's the same thing when I was coaching the national team, again 20 years ago we had Steve Nash and Todd McCullough, that was two NBA players and now we have 13 NBA players. This year's NBA draft there's projected, besides RJ Barrett who's projected to be in the top three, there's four or five other Canadian players that are most likely going to be drafted in one of the first two rounds. So all round it's just at every level, the game has improved.

AMT: Do you see a lot more recruiters coming to Canada looking and what age do they start circling?

Glen Grunwald: Well it starts in high school. So we have the benefit of being in Canada, close to both the U.S. development system, which is you know very intense and great competition, but we also have alternatives here. So what we've seen here is prep schools and schools specializing in sports, elite sports development, coming particularly in Ontario and we see that spreading across the country. So basketball in terms of the development at the high school level has really improved and we have access to both the U.S. and the Canadian systems, which is great for our players.

Steve Konchalski: Now I'm a little biased about Canadian coaching obviously because I've been committed to it for the last 44 years, but that's another note to make is that we have three Canadians coaching in the NBA right now. Of course Jay Triano being the first head coach ever of Canadian, you know for the Raptors several years ago and Scott Morrison who coached, all three of these gentlemen coached in college and university ranks in Canada. Jay at Simon Fraser University, Scott Morrison who's an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics coached at Lake Howard University and just recently Roy Rana from Ryerson University was hired by the Sacramento Kings. So I think obviously if all these players had developed thre has be a coaching system in place and coaches that are that are working with these players to get them to this position.

AMT: And you know you make the point I mean you've been in this game a long time, but you stuck with Canada. You stuck with Canadian players coming up all those years. What was it that didn't make you want to go back to the States when it was bigger?

Steve Konchalski: Well I felt comfortable in Canada right away. That's wherr I played my university basketball and you know the States, I never had that. You know I never had that goal of coaching in the United States. I just feel very comfortable coaching in Canada. I think we think the Canadian universities have a very good perspective in terms of the balance of education and athletics and excellence in athletics. And in these days you know with the technology we have today, if you're a good basketball player it doesn't matter where you're playing. They'll find you in terms of play professionally or getting the exposure that you need.

AMT: And you found them.

Steve Konchalski: Yeah.

AMT: Do you feel like a proud dad?

Steve Konchalski: In a lot of ways, for sure. You know I mean I look back at you know starting out coming up to Canada in the 60s then you started coaching in the 70s. You know there's a lot of satisfaction there for sure to see what's happening right now.

AMT: And it's such an accessible game for the kids coming up. You really need to just have that ball.

Glen Grunwald: A pair of sneakers and a basketball and some friends to shoot hoops with. So it is fun. The other thing I'll say about our coaching is that you know as the national governing body for the sport here in Canada, FIBA which is the international governing body has ranked our coaching development program third best in the world and we want to become the best at that. And we've taken the experience of Steve and other coaches that have been here for a long time and put them into a program online on our game plan website, where people can learn about becoming a coach and understand what it takes to be a good coach and then get the technical ability to do so. So Steve does all sorts of clinics for us and not only does he coach our team. So we have the benefit of lots of experience here in Canada, but also again from the NBA and what it brings to the table.

AMT: And I guess that's the other thing, right, you're really inspiring not only players, you're inspiring those others who are part of the game that they see what's possible.

Steve Konchalski: Well growing our coaches is just as important as growing our players. I mean that's the grass roots level and I know when our national team program we try to involve as many young coaches as we can. You know expose them to coaching at a high level and you know giving them a pathway that they can understand, OK, this is how I could get to that level.

AMT: Gentlemen, oh go ahead.

Glen Grunwald: I was just going to say the other thing that you forget about is officials. We need more referees because we're playing more and more games across the country and sometimes it's tough to get to schedule a gym, but it's also tough to find a referee. So we're in the business now of working with referees across the country to recruit more and retain more officials, so that we can actually have a fairly officiated games and enough of them so that we can, all the people that want to play basketball can actually do so.

AMT: Which brings me back to our point, such an influential team because they're going to influence career choices now for a generation coming up as well.

Glen Grunwald: Yes.

AMT: Thank you gentlemen for coming in. It's good to talk to you.

Steve Konchalski: Thank you Anna Maria.

Glen Grunwald: Thank you.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: That is Steve Konchalski, Canada's longest serving university basketball coach and Glen Grunwald, former Raptors GM, president and CEO of Canada Basketball. Both in our Toronto studio. Now the Toronto Raptors may have ignited this country's love affair with basketball, but as you may already know, basketball's flame was first lit by a Canadian. James Naismith, a Canadian physical education teacher, chaplain, and coach invented the game in the late 19th century and he lived to see it thrive. Here he is recounting the birth of basketball in a radio interview from the University of Kansas archives from 1939.

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VOICE 1: Dr. James A. Naismith the inventor of basketball. Dr. Naismith, how did you happen to invent basketball?

VOICE 2: In the winter of 1891, when I was a physical instructor at Springfield College in Massachusetts. We had a real New England blizzard. For days the students couldn't go outdoors. So they began roughhousing in the halls. We tried everything to keep them quiet. We tried playing a modified form of football in the gymnasium, but they got bored with that. Something had to be done. One day I had no idea. I called the boys to the gym, divided them up into teams of nine and gave them an old soccer ball. I showed them two peach baskets I had nailed up at each end of the gym. I told them the idea was to throw the ball into the opposing team's peach basket. I blew the whistle and the first game of basketball began.

VOICE 1: And what rules did you have for your new game, Dr. Naismith?

VOICE 2: Well, I didn't have enough and that's where I made my big mistake. The boys began tackling, kicking and punching in the clinches. They ended up in a free for all in the middle of the gym floor. Before I could pull them apart, one boy was knocked out, several of them with black eyes and one had a dislocated shoulder. It certainly was murder. Well after that first match I was afraid they'd kill each other, but they kept nagging me to let them play again. So I made up some more rules. The most important one was that there should be no running with the ball. That stop tackling and slipping. We tried out the game with those rule and we didn't have one casualty. We had a fine clean sport. Ten years later basketball was being played all over the country and in 1936 I saw it played for the first time at the Olympic Games and the whole thing started with a couple of peach baskets I put up in a little gym 48 years ago. I guess it just goes to show what you can do if you have to.

[Commentary of Kawhi Leonard's buzzer beater from Game 7 of the Toronto Raptors vs the Philadelphia 76ers]

AMT: Well if there's any question a Canadian team deserves this championship, that was the inventor of basketball James Naismith, a Canadian from Almonte, Ontario recorded in 1939. Plus ,the sound of the call of an already iconic buzzer beater from Kawhi Leonard that no doubt would have made Dr. Naismith proud. Tomorrow we are taking you on a road trip. The Federal Government is poised to announce its decision on the fate of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion extension. The proposal would see the existing pipeline twinned and that would triple its capacity. For many, the project cannot come soon enough. For others, it is a symbol of Canada's lack of action on climate change. I traveled the route of that pipeline from Edmonton to the B.C. coast talking to people along its path. Those whose livelihoods and neighborhoods hang in the balance. Tomorrow we will bring you my documentary, On the Line. Right now the CBC News is next and then I'm joined by Madhur Jaffrey, the woman known as the queen of Indian cooking and credited with introducing the rest of the world to Indian cuisine is hardly slowing down at 85. She's even made a rap video. Stay with us. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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85 years gold: Why Madhur Jaffrey would rather spice up her career than slow down

Guests: Madhur Jaffrey

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, voices from the frontlines of the Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, as we revisit some of my most memorable conversations here on The Current. We'll return to that devastating wildfire and three men who dared to stand up to it, but first, into the kitchen with number one nani.

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VOICE: I have known him for a very long time. There is no woman who has known him longer, but as well as I have. And there have been many.

AMT: That was one of the first glimpses North American audiences would have of Indian actress, Madhur Jaffrey,s starring in a 1965 film called, Shakespeare Wallah. She plays a Bollywood star who is competing with a British Shakespearean actress for a man's affection. Her performance won her critical praise and a Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, but even so, acting roles for South Asian women at the time were not abundant. So she pursued another talent, which eventually brought her to the small screen.

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VOICE: In the hot oil that's left, I'm going to put in 10 whole cardamom pods, 6 whole cloves and an inch piece of cinnamon. Stir them around for a few seconds like this and then put in onions. Seven ounces of finely chopped onions.

AMT: She introduced television audiences to the world of Indian food on her 1982 BBC series Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery. More TV series followed, as well as best selling cookbooks and that's how she became known as the "Queen of Indian cooking," a title she can still lay claim to at the age of 85 and now, there's yet another role she's embracing, a rap video star.

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AMT: 85-years-gold, Indian American artist Mr. Cardamom is doing the rapping, but in the video it is Madhur Jaffrey mouthing the words, "I'm the number one nani," along with plenty of expletives. Just the latest role in a career that has been anything, but one note. Madhur Jaffrey joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello and welcome.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Hello. Nice to be here to the sound of the rap.

AMT: It's nice to have you with us. That's a fun video to watch.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Oh it was a fun video to do. Such fun, but hard because it's hard to. I mean they rap so fast for one thing. So you have to learn all the words, which there are many of them, you have to go fast and you have to follow the beat and it's not always easy.

AMT: But because you can act, you had the attitude right away.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Right, right.

AMT: Because you were one bad grandma.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Bad ass grandma they said.

AMT: Exactly, exactly.

MADHUR JAFFREY: And the curse words as it were, they aren't really hard for an actress. You just do them because they're written for you. And I kept telling people look as Madea, I killed my children. This is much better.

AMT: That's a good way to put it. How did appearing in that rap video become the next step in your long and storied career?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Well I always take up challenges that are thrown my way. I never let them lie. And I was asked by this wonderful young man, Zohran, if I would like to be in this rap video and I read it, I read the words, I heard the music and I said why not? Yes, yes I'll do it. I had no great hesitation at all in saying yes. It was just another role and a very different role to anything I'd done.

AMT: So tell me about your persona in the song. Nani means maternal grandmother.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Nani is maternal grandmother, mother's mother.

AMT: And how are you in real life as a nani?

MADHUR JAFFREY: I don't know, you have to ask my grandchildren. My grandchildren's reaction to the video was nani's cool.

AMT: And you've got this long flowing white wig on.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Right and a beret.

AMT: Which I really liked by the way.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yes.

AMT: And a beret.

MADHUR JAFFREY: And a yellow beret.

AMT: Yeah and you're counting your money because you're a gangster.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yeah. I'm a gangster. I'm a bad woman.

AMT: I want to talk more about your family because we would have to ask your grandchildren what they think, but what role does food play in your relationship with your family?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Food is the glue that holds our family together in many ways. It's like Jewish families, Italian families. You meet around food and you talk about food and you dream about food. And our family, everyone likes to cook. My grandkids have been cooking since they were little. They grew up around food and when they were very little they didn't watch cartoons most of them. This is funny. They watch food programmes on television and I heard my littlest granddaughter, I think she must have been three at that time say to her brother Baba this ganache. It's not what I want. Something else is ganache. I said how did she know the word ganache?

AMT: Those food shows are very good for that. Very educational. What are some of your earliest food memories growing up?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Well I don't really know and I'm sure I don't remember it, but the story has been told so often in the family that when you are born, when we were born in my particular family, my grandmother, my father's mother, would always come to the room where we were born and we were born at home and bring a little jar of honey and she would write Om on our tongues with honey, which means I am. I exist. And apparently when she did it on my tongue I just licked it up and I opened my mouth for more and I feel I remember this, but it's so mythical. I mean I, of course I don't.

AMT: But it speaks to your personality as a child then?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yes, yes. I'd like to think I remember it, but the real I think the first taste that I really remember as a child loving hot sour things. We couldn't eat very hot food when we were very little, so the minute you can graduate to chilies, you'd think you'd arrived. This is what the grown ups do. Now I can do it too. And we were lots of cousins in the same house growing up together and the little ones we would always climb the trees like the mango trees and we would take salt pepper, ground roasted cumin and chili powder in our little palms and we would cut the mangoes, peel the mangoes and eat them with this mixture that we took in our palms right in the trees and that's a wonderful moment.

AMT: That is a beautiful image to picture you doing that. That's really something. How do memories like that influence your approach to food and cooking now?

MADHUR JAFFREY: The funny thing is that I must have had a good palate always. Who knew anything about having a good palate? I didn't even know the word when I was growing up, but now that I look back on it. If you have a good palate it's just like having a good ear. Any sense that is really developed, you tend to remember what you either see or smell or see and it goes it's burned into your brain in a deeper way than if you haven't got a developed sense of that particular thing and therefore one is able to build foods up to what you remember. But people who can create foods or recreate foods, that ability must come from having a good palate and therefore good memory and therefore good files in the brain that retain all this information.

AMT: That's a really interesting way to look at it too. That makes sense actually, doesn't it?

MADHUR JAFFREY: It does. I mean I think I've just came across upon it as I was thinking you know somebody asked that we wear a whole lot of us friends were in France and my husband's a violinist and they said to him he was reading some Bach and somebody asked him, can you hear the music as you're reading it? And I thought you know this is the same thing. I can go to a shop, a grocer and look at the beans and say if I cook them in mustard seed then I taste it in my mouth. I can. Should I make that or should I? Oh I could do it with browned onions and peanuts and this, then I can taste it in my mouth and I pick and choose and reject or accept according to how it's tasting in my mouth for that particular meal. So I think it's the same with musicians as they're here remember. And that is what makes them able to be musicians.

AMT: Symphony of flavours.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yeah.

AMT: You lived through partition in India and the violence that came with it. How did that experience stay with you?

MADHUR JAFFREY: I wish partition on no one because it's the most horrible, wrenching, tearing of peoples that I've ever seen and we were, we grew up in Delhi and in my class, in my class it was a girls school. They were Muslim girls, Hindu girls, all kinds of Christian girls. We had no problems. We ate together. We were friends. It didn't depend on their religion., i depended on if we were had same likes and dislikes and other things. So in our little gang, we had Hindus, we had Muslims, we had Jains, we had Sikhs in fact. So there were five or six of us of different faiths that would invariably have lunch together and we would all have a very good time. The minute the talk of partition started, it was like a split, as if God divided the world in two, Hindus on one side, Muslims on the other. Each very angry with the other and unable to talk to each other and I remember being in the middle and saying can't we all get along and both sides were most annoyed and irritated with me. This idea of getting along was alien. And then I mean in every family there were deaths. I know one cousin that went out into the streets to get something to run an errand and didn't come back for two or three days and everyone was very worried and then he came back. He was literally out of his mind. We don't know what was done to him. I mean there were all kinds of things were going on, whether he was raped or he was beaten, nobody quite knows what happened, but he was never the same. And then we I know in my family we have we are Hindus and we helped a lot of Muslim friends trying to escape. So we all saw horrible things and we know the trains were going in both directions bringing refugees and then they would arrive at their destination, one side or the other, with everyone dead. Everyone murdered. They'd been attacked on the trains. So some people say about a million some, say two million people were killed and it was a horrible thing.

AMT: How old were you at this time?

MADHUR JAFFREY: I always like 12, 13 at that time, but it stayed. I mean it's like somebody carved it into my flesh that whole period.

AMT: And so I mean you see today, religious-cultural conflict continues on so many levels and right now it's almost as if we're experiencing a resurgence of that in this world. What do you think of the political moment we're in right now?

MADHUR JAFFREY: It's horrible. It's horrible. I know what this can lead to. This kind of condemning another group, just for the sake of condemning, they're not us. They're not like us. So who are we? How are we so wonderful?

AMT: And you lived in than the United States, you've lived there for a long time.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yes.

AMT: I'm wondering how you see changes in the United States. There are more, there seem to be more anti-immigrant, more racist attitudes that have been brought to the surface or arguably maybe not brought to the surface. they were always there. But what are you thinking about what's going on in the U.S. right now?

MADHUR JAFFREY: In one word, it's horrible. It's what can you say that, I mean you can't use any good word for this. Not recognizing that people need to save themselves. They can't be left to die where they are or starve where they are and what is this nation what is it made up of everyone who came here, including our president, came from somewhere else. So what what are we saying? I can come, in but you can't?

AMT: Do you think that is mostly because of anger or because of fear that people respond that way?

MADHUR JAFFREY: I think it's always based on fear. Fear leads to anger. But what are they afraid of?

AMT: When you arrived in the U.S., hoping to pursue your acting career, what was it like in the 50s and the 60s for a South Asian actor?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Well it was very strange because now I look at the young South Asians, who are different from me and I'll tell you why they're different. I came and I thought of myself as an Indian. I never thought of myself as a colour. It was not some, I didn't think that way. I said I'm an Indian. I can't get to work as an actress. I'm just going to cast because they don't understand who an Indian is. So I'm being cast as a Middle Eastern, generally as a harem girl or girl with a camel and it'll never be satisfying, so I have to do something else. So I started writing. So in my case I just said I'm not allowed to do this in the way I want to do it, so I'll do something else, I'll write. And I wrote about the arts. You know architecture, painting, dancing.

AMT: Did it make you angry that you were being cast that way?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yes it did. It did make me angry, but I see the difference between the young women in their 30s now of Indian descent who are now living in America. They're different. They see themselves as brown and entitled, that they can do anything they want. If they are food writers, they will write about anything. They'll write about Chinese food, they'll write about food in Singapore. They'll write about Italian food, if they want. I wasn't allowed to do any of that.

AMT: So you were typecast even or you were forced into that.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Totally typecast. Yeah I couldn't do a world vegetarian book. I was not allowed. You can do Asian.

AMT: But you went to Italy all the time, but they didn't want you to write about Italian food.

MADHUR JAFFREY: No. No.

AMT: But you ended up turning that into your own success.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Well I'm a hard worker and when I put my mind to it I do the work and I love research.

AMT: And you wrote your first cookbook in what was it, 1973?

MADHUR JAFFREY: It was published in 73. I was asked in 69. I started writing it and it was Judith Jones who was a wonderful editor and was one of the great food editors. She had Julia Child and all these people and she asked me how long you think you would take to write it? I said about three months, you know, it shouldn't take me long. It took me five years because then I tested and retested and as I said, a perfection. I had to do it right.

AMT: You like research.

MADHUR JAFFREY: So it took five years.

AMT: What kinds of attitudes did North Americans have about Indian cuisine at the time?

MADHUR JAFFREY: They knew nothing. They knew nothing. Generally, ahh Indian food. So you make curry and I wanted to call my first book, Curry: Myths and Reality. And my editor Judith said it's going to be filed in the philosophy section.

AMT: I was just going to say that sounds like a philosophy book.

MADHUR JAFFREY: They just didn't know anything about Indian food, other than it was brownish and had a sauce and you ate it with rice and it was spicy.

AMT: What's changed since then? How much has changed?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Some. They're not great changes. Some people I mean I know I have a lot of followers of my books. Other people have written books on Indian food. People have traveled more to India. So they, some people are beginning to understand that there is Indian food, which is very varied and different in the north and different in the south, but there are still the people who are afraid of migrants, who are afraid of any new food also.

AMT: Your new cookbook is called Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook: Modern and Classic Recipes for the Instant Pot, which is that Canadian invention.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Yes, I believe so.

AMT: Why is the instant pot particularly good for preparing Indian food?

MADHUR JAFFREY: It's not that it's particularly good. Indians started using the pressure cooker a long time ago, maybe 40-50 years ago just to hasten the cooking of beans and and rice and various meat. But what they did very often is put more than one thing in in the pressure cooker. They would put a tier with rice and daal, what we call daal, which is split peas and maybe a vegetable tiered inside a pressure cooker. So we know how to put things in a pot and we are used to putting things in one Barton and cooking them. But what the Instant Pot does is that it offers many other options. You can saute. You can slow cook. You can make perfect rice all by itself. You can make a video of Rice with things in it like saffron saffron rice. You can make. So what I've done is say OK I will experiment for you with the pot and work out recipe Indian recipes. I won't dump them down because as far as what I'm trying to teach you all or pass on to you all is authentic Indian food. So bear with me. It may have a lot of spices in it, but if you put two in, put three in, put four in. What difference does it make?

AMT: But you make it really, you make that really clear. You're not dumbing down. You're using all the all the spices that need to be used because it's all about the taste, right?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Exactly. It's that complex flavor that you get by adding things in stages or adding different things because we know the magic of spices and it's not just flavour, it's health. Each spice has food value, like turmeric is an antiseptic inside the body, outside the body. We don't just like yellow food. That's not why we put the turmieric in. There's a medical reason for it. And I remember when I used to teach cooking, it would be a six week course and people would say to me my students, I'm feeling so much better after these six weeks. I said because I'm feeding you each thing with the spices that make it easier to digest. So that's why you're feeling good.

AMT: We're talking about your cookbook. This is your 30th cookbook. You just did a rap video. You're 85-years-old, you're not slowing down.

MADHUR JAFFREY: I'm almost 86.

AMT: OK. 86-years-gold, I think as you say in the rap song. So are you, you're the kind of person who always needs to find a new challenge and keep on working. You didn't say I'm turning a certain age, that's it.

MADHUR JAFFREY: No I don't think I can ever sit back in an armchair for too long. I mean I do do it and read a wonderful book or look at a design magazine. I'm fascinated by design of all kinds. But then after a little while I am anxious to get on with it.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit more about that because I think that as people look at their careers, I think increasingly we look at sometimes because people need to continue to support themselves, but also because people are just always looking for more intellectual stimulation. There really is no age to stop.

MADHUR JAFFREY: No, no and I I love my garden. So for me just going out into the garden. I grow everything. I'm not saying I'm digging now at my age, I've stopped doing all that. I have somebody who helps and does it, but I'm in charge of a garden that grows all the vegetables that I need. It grows berries. It's an ongoing pleasure. My flower garden is an ongoing pleasure. So I get stimulation from all this and I don't ever want to stop. I like new things. I like challenges. I love to travel. I, for our 50th wedding anniversary, we went to Peru because I wanted to see how potatoes grew. I wanted to learn the history of potatoes because they came to India and Indians felt that in fact somebody wrote that the British have given us nothing that beats the potato. That's the best thing the white man has given us. It wasn't the British, but anyway they didn't bring the potato. It was the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Anyway, so we have a 100,000 ways of cooking a potato in India and we do more with it than is done anywhere else in the world, but I wanted to see the origin of it. It's just everything. The history of every food is interesting, if you start delving into it. So you need lifetimes to cover it all and learn it all.

AMT: It's worth mentioning too that the rap video talks about making a rap for nani and they are literally making a wrap, they're making you a sandwich, a sandwich wrap. Are you going to do another video? Another rap video, do you think?

MADHUR JAFFREY: Who knows. Who knows what's coming.

AMT: I hope you do.

MADHUR JAFFREY: I hope so, but who knows what will come.

AMT: Thanks for coming in it's great to talk to you.

MADHUR JAFFREY: Thank you.

AMT: Madhur Jaffrey is an actor and author who lives in New York City. Her latest cookbook is called Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook. She was in Toronto for an event at the Royal Ontario Museum showcasing treasures from the Indian kingdom of Jaipur. The exhibit runs until September. Well as you may have heard, after 17 seasons I am passing the mic as host of The Current and moving exclusively into the podcast world. So I'm extending an invitation to you. Thursday, June 20th, if you are in Toronto or nearby, join me for my farewell broadcast before a studio audience in the heart of the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto. It'll be an extra special live show with music, with the audience, special guests and more. I hear there's even a surprise or two for me that I don't know about and that I cannot find on the computer lineups. After the show I'll take questions from the audience in the atrium. So if you ever wanted to ask me anything, that is your chance. For more information about the show and to register for free tickets, go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. Coming up, we revisit another one of those conversations with people whose stories have never left me. With the wildfire season underway yet again, this one's timely. We'll hear from three firefighters who battled the Fort Mac blaze three years ago. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Anna Maria Tremonti's most memorable interviews: Firefighters in Fort McMurray

Guest: Mike Chyka, Steve Gillingham, Bryan Mroz

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. It was just over three years ago that people in Fort McMurray were forced to flee a terrifying wildfire bearing down on their city. You'll remember the pictures. The flames licking at the roads, the smoke. It was on a scale we had never seen in a Canadian city. I went to Alberta to talk to people about the mass exodus and the fallout from the blaze they called the beast and I heard heartbreaking and heartwarming stories from people who fled and people who dropped everything to help them. I also met with three firefighters who had just returned from the frontlines. As we revisit some of the interviews that have stayed with me, this one feels especially relevant with another wildfire season underway.

SOUNDCLIP

MIKE CHYKA: This is the very moment when we pulled up. We got out of the van.

[Indecipherable speech and heavy static]

AMT: It's raging.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Right, and there, how do you fight that?

AMT: They are used to racing up to a fire. This time they raced right into it.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Oh yeah, just flying embers.

AMT: Embers.

MIKE CHYKA: Another video of when we first got there. So you can see the wind-driven smoke and flames right into the building.

AMT: They’ve all pulled out their phones with pictures of just how bad it got. We’re at Fire Hall Number Three in the city of St. Albert on the northwest edge of Edmonton with Steve Gillingham, Bryan Mroz, and Mike Chyka .

MIKE CHYKA: So as you pan across, so you’re looking left to right. You can see the condos. They’re in good shape. The street lights are still working. Our fire trucks here.

AMT: They’ve seen a lot. But they’ve never seen anything like Fort McMurray.

MIKE CHYKA: So, we’re protecting those houses and then as you look down the street again, it’s okay.

AMT: It’s surreal.

MIKE CHYKA: And you can see the boom right there in the middle.

BRYAN MROZ: And the boys are right in there.

MIKE CHYKA: And right to our back, right from where this picture is taken, right behind us there’s a three-storey condo untouched.

AMT: They had lots of pictures. We’re sharing some on our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. And they had lots of stories, but I wanted them to start at the beginning. Here’s what they told me.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Tuesday is when they started talking about getting resources up to Fort McMurray. The initial-- We sent three, correction, four guys on an aerial. That was on Tuesday. And we deployed the next day, Wednesday, in the afternoon is when they sent our team of four up.

AMT: And how long were you there?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: We were there 51 hours total, I do believe. They were trying to cycle guys in and out in two, two and a half day cycles. Hard work, no sleep.

AMT: Right through?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Right through. I think we had four hours sleep total. I mean, when things are burning, right, you don’t stop.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah. So, we worked our night shift. We got off that morning. By the time we got called around 1:30 and we deployed at 4:00. 4:30 is when we left. We got there around 10:30-ish. And then we started going right to work. We actually went to one of, I think, one of the bigger fires that was going on at that point. They lost-- I'm not sure how big the subdivision was, they lost a good portion of that subdivision. And it was something to see. For the lack of-- The best word I can use apocalyptic. And turn to your left, burning, and turn to your right, the houses were gone. And everything's on fire. Everything is on fire. At that point we actually had to retreat the fire trucks and move back. And they had to move in backhoes and bulldozers to knock houses down so we could actually create a fire line. And we had to create a point where we had to protect. We said, this is the line we're going to protect, everything else is lost. So that's how we set up. And we started protecting those houses. To see houses that are being knocked down that are not burning at that point, but it was a necessity, right. Yeah. It's amazing. And people's cars getting pushed over, bulldozers piled up.

BRYAN MROZ: Lots of teamwork. Everybody working together, the excavators, bulldozer drivers, tanker drivers. Everybody’s working together. At that point they lost both their hydrants up there too and so we were working together with the tankers that aren’t normally supplying our fire trucks with water. And that’s how we got our water up there.

AMT: And so when you're working together, you're working with other teams as well?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Other departments, industry with their trucks, with their water trucks coming in from sites with Suncor. And, yeah, just getting those tender water trucks to get into a sequence where we can properly feed our trucks and that took a while to dial in but it worked pretty good.

AMT: You just went right to the scene and Mike talked a little bit about what it's like to just drive up and start working in this neighbourhood.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: It was eerie even driving into the city. All you saw was a red glow.

MIKE CHYKA: It looked like a second sunset.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Yeah. And there was nothing on the highway until we got to the point where the RCs - this was the evacuation point. There was no access. The cops let us through and you're driving down these highways where vehicles abandoned everywhere.

MIKE CHYKA: They were, like, the fire had passed that area, but things are still on fire. So, on the other side of the highway it was burnt. So, a lot of chaos going on and then, like I said, if you’ve ever seen those television shows they have, like Walking Dead, for instance, that's probably the best one. You see cars just scattered everywhere and there's nobody. And then add fire on top of that.

AMT: Talk to me, then, a little bit more. What was your impression, Steve, as you went in. What were you thinking as you…?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Well, I guess you get a real sense of the gravity of what's going on here, right. Losing entire blocks in a city, it’s just not common anywhere. As we're driving through, you could see fire everywhere. Then to our first call, the first call we had was that one up in Prospect and seeing 30 homes on fire. It’s a sight you're not going to easily soon forget. And then trying to figure out a way to fight that as also the entire fire line is retreating to a new point. So, doesn't matter how much experience you have on the job. You're going to be taken back by that much fire in that many homes.

MIKE CHYKA: It’s essentially a life time of fire fighting in an hour. Not even an hour. We were there for hours, but when you pull up to scene-- to get 30 houses, a whole block. a whole subdivision on fire, it's uncommon for that to happen.

AMT: Bryan, what sticks in your mind?

BRYAN MROZ: It’s the same thing. Watching the houses go was-- 30 seconds per house, it was just house after house, right, and the incident command there made a very good call when he decided to make that fire line, right. He realized how fast it was burning, how fast his excavators and bulldozers could work and make that fire line ahead of it, right. He ended up saving an entire neighbourhood with only losing a couple homes when he could have lost the entire thing. So, very good decision-making up there and very good teamwork.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: It’s tough to watch houses that aren’t burning to be bulldozed. Your job is to protect houses, property, and people. And you’re just watching these beautiful homes being taken down in seconds.

AMT: Why are they being taken down in seconds? Like, how can they—

MIKE CHYKA: There’s an excavator here. He just comes in with this boom, knocks the house down. The point is is to create a fire line. It’s kind of the only really proven way to stop a fire that’s raging like that. So you create a line and then you protect that line.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: So, that incident commander probably saved half of Timberlea, because there was no way to stop that fire. And you had a shopping centre that would have went up next. You had a seven-storey condo building that was right in line. So, the captain from Fort McMurray who made that call, he one wound up saving hundreds of homes.

AMT: And so the decision to do that depends on where the fire is and how it's moving and what you think you can save.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Absolutely.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, the wind direction is key, right. If the wind is not playing in your favour, those fires may move that much faster. The ashes, there are huge embers flying in the air. All it needs to do is land on a roof, catch, and then…

STEVE GILLINGHAM: That one’s gone.

MIKE CHYKA: Then you’ve really got to start really working.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: When we rolled on scene the crew before us was there and we were doing a switchover. We were fresh. They've been on there for about a day now. So they were retreating as we were pulling in and it was like something out of a war movie. These guys were blackened faces, charring. Everything is moving back because they're trying to re-establish that line. It was a fast handover. Things got handed over fast. There wasn’t a whole lot of questions. Incident command figured out where they wanted to make us, basically, make our last stand and everybody went moving. Trucks moved fast, water moved fast, bulldozers, front end loaders, everyone. Everyone got focused on the exact same task.

MIKE CHYKA: These are major massive trucks on the road. You have backhoes, water trucks, support staff. And all we did was pick up hoses and carry them to back the trucks up.

AMT: What does it smell like as you doing this? What's in the air?

MIKE CHYKA: Chemicals. That's really-- Black. Chemicals. That's it. Smoke burns your nose.

AMT: Do you have masks on?

MIKE CHYKA: At that point, no, we didn't. Because you just got to the scene and you're doing the changeover. You want it to go smoothly, but in that kind of situation there's a lot of things going on. Especially establishing a new point to fight for, right. Yeah, so sometimes safety doesn’t get pushed to the side, but for the greater good you have to bypass some of that.

AMT: But somewhere in that 51hours you would have had to put on masks?

MIKE CHYKA: Oh, yeah. Of course we did.

AMT: And so again what are you seeing in the sky and what are you hearing?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Explosions.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Fire raging. Fire sounding like wind turbines. It’s crazy. And you’re yelling to the guy next to you because you can barely hear what’s going on. So, when you’re doing handover with staff, you’re really hear the guys saying and yelling, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, we’re doing this. The only think I can think of is that everyone had their A game on. Nobody was lost. Things got—orders came and they were immediately carried out.

AMT: What was exploding?

MIKE CHYKA: So, within a house you have your hot water tanks, you have propane, people store propane cylinders. Anything compressed. Like a spray can even. All those things you forget you even have in your garage. All those things come into play. Sometimes they’re small explosions; sometimes they’re loud and so loud that it vibrates the ground. And you hear that all the time, constantly, because new houses are catching fire and that’s all you’re hearing. All those other sounds, like the beeping you at construction sites, well, magnify that. Plus, your trucks are running at high RPMs to get the water flowing. And, like Steve said, you are literally standing, like, as close as we are right now, inches from each other and yelling at each other just to have that conversation of the handover. And those guys we relieved, they’d been working for probably close to 30 hours. Pure exhaustion on their face to the point where they could barely string a sentence together. They were just exhausted.

AMT: As you face that and you're trying to work on the fire line, if you were to turn around, what would be behind you?

MIKE CHYKA: What you would see in a normal subdivision. The thing that was kind of amazing too is when you see the equipment moving the debris around. Like, everything is still energized, so you have a lot of wires popping and seeing a lot of electricity sparking. So just to see all that and, you know, the different materials burning, like, the coppers and things like that. So, different hues and different colours of fire. And just the smell, it’s such a powerful chemical.

BRYAN MROZ: Lot of plastics in modern construction, right. Everybody has vinyl siding, everybody has tires stored in their house. It just burnt black, right. You had the glow of fire underneath, intense glow, and then 10 metres up it was nothing but black.

AMT: You know, we were talking to the mayor of Slave Lake who also went up to fight and he said when you get that combination of a forest fire and an urban fire together it changes everything.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: The forest fire makes its own weather patterns. So it's got a lot of up draft as that air mass rises, superhot, so that makes the wind issue worse. It’s basically because you have this air-fuelled fire driving through your city and it picks its lanes. Like, if it’s blowing north-west, it’s going to burn north-west. And that’s hard to control. Usually, if it’s a city fire, you’ll have house or a commercial space will catch on fire and it’s contained, but once you get such a large forest fire burning and it's moving through your city it's virtually unstoppable.

MIKE CHYKA: The wildfires generate their own weather patterns and the wind-driven and these ashes can go for miles, so you can catch a house that’s in a subdivision that’s not even touched by fire. And now suddenly you see this whole area up in smoke and flames, right. So now we have to peel off from your crews that are fighting this frontline fire to that, right, and keeping in mind you have no water. You have to redeploy your water trucks to get to that scene as well, fire trucks. So, again, your resources are being drawn down to continue the fight. And, again, everywhere you looked around the city, like, you could turn your head 360 degrees and you’d see fire somewhere in the distance.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: It was Thursday, right, we were driving on 63 and we're on our supposedly down time, but we're trying to get out and rescue animals from their homes. And there was a fire just started in the middle of—Like, we were on 63, there was a block housing to our left and there was a fire, and it looked like it was in the tree, that immediately spread to the shed, to the back of the house and other fire crews eventually got to, but there was no fire, kilometres away from that site, but an ember just had landed. Everything was lighting up and it was just which way the wind was blowing and luck. You know, if an ember didn't fall on your house, it didn't burn.

AMT: So when you looked up at the sky, like, were embers coming down on you?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: It was pretty smoky. Hard to say.

MIKE CHYKA: At times. Depending, again, with the wind changing, like, you’d see actual just masses of ashes that are flying, that are lit, that are lit. Like, it’s not just ash smoke, right. It’s actually lit embers flying through the air.

BRYAN MROZ: Yeah, brands.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, brands, yes.

BRYAN MROZ: And they’re landing on the houses and that's what we were assigned to was protect that last line of houses there to keep it from spreading across the street.

AMT: How much danger were you in? How dangerous is this?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: All fire is dangerous, right.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, it’s tough to answer because there are a lot of factors, there are a lot of people there, there are not a lot of egress routes and the fire is moving quickly. So, again, yes, the potential for it to be lethal, I guess, you’re dependent on the wind. That’s really what it comes down to and your resources. If you don’t have the water and the wind picks up, it catches the houses, you can’t get the trucks out fast enough, things happen in a heartbeat. You're in a good battle. You're not really thinking about that at that point, right. You just want to get your tasks done and move on to the next task and keep machine rolling, I guess, right.

AMT: You said started rescuing animals at one point. Tell me what you did.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, so we had fought that night and then we had, again, a couple hours sleep. You just want to keep—You know, there’s so much to do. So, at the staging area that where actually everybody was staying, there’s soccer fields. It’s an indoor tri-leisure centre, right. So, there’s soccer fields, hockey rinks, pools. They did assign one of the areas for sleeping quarters and the other side was kind of more for eating and just rehab kind of stuff. They actually brought in brand new clothes for you if you didn’t bring any, just necessities, toiletries for you if you didn’t bring that kind of stuff. So, they also used the dressing rooms for animals. So, they had one room for cats, one room for dogs. So, you know, we kind of poked our heads in there, saw that there were some animals. Steve’s friend had actually contacted him about some animals that they wanted to get rescued. That’s kind of how it started for us.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: And then when we brought those two cats back, then the guy had a list, the guy who was kind of manning that pet inventory place for the pets that were lost or that were being rescued and brought back. So he's like, can you help me with these?

BRYAN MROZ: Well, he was a civilian, right, so he wasn’t allowed to go into the houses himself and rescue the animals. And he was heading to Edmonton that day to bring a load of animals down, so we said, well—He gave us a list and said, can you guys help?

MIKE CHYKA: So, our captain took the phone numbers and he actually texted each owner asking for permission to either break into their house, whatever necessary, if it’s okay if we can go into their house. And everybody was like, do whatever you have to do to get into our house. Our Captain Rob Bonner said people would reply ‘absolutely’ in capital letters in the text. Like, do whatever you have to do to get that animal.

AMT: So you went into some houses to do that? Tell me more about what the animals were doing in their house. They must have been terrified.

MIKE CHYKA: The one animal that stuck out for me was that little—I’m not sure—

BRYAN MROZ: Bubbles was—

MIKE CHYKA: Bubbles was the one.

AMT: And Bubbles was a little dog? Okay.

MIKE CHYKA: Very happy to see us. But there was a second one sitting on the couch scared, didn’t move, was just shaking on the couch. Bubbles was a—

BRYAN MROZ: Happy go lucky.

[All talking at once]

MIKE CHYKA: He met us at the door.

BRYAN MROZ: Yeah, came, jumped on us, right, and wagging the tail the whole time, happy to see humans again, right.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: But, you know what, they were starting to in rough trouble. They had run out of water. When we were giving the cat or dog water you could tell that they were starting to struggle, because they were very thirsty and they’re also very hungry. But, yeah, we spent our downtime on our second day doing that.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah. I just remember that one dog sitting on the couch. It wouldn’t even move. It was just shaking. Considering that were complete strangers walking into a house, most animals are protective of their owners, of their house—

STEVE GILLINGHAM: And Mike got bit.

[Laughter]

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, just once, but understandable.

AMT: Yeah?

MIKE CHYKA: Like, again, every animal reacts differently.

AMT: Which animal bit you? It wasn’t Bubbles.

MIKE CHYKA: No, no. Not Bubbles. Bubbles sat in the vehicle with us. We were going around for a couple of hours. He loved the car ride. It was awesome.

BRYAN MROZ: He loved it. It was great.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, it was—I don’ t know.

BRYAN MROZ: It was like a Pomeranian cross.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: That was the house with two dogs.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, and a cat in the basement.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Then we also found this cat there basement, but that one dog was just not liking it and gave Mike a little love bite. [Laughs]

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah. Even from the moment we stepped up, he was at the door barking at us, this thing. Again, for the most part, that’s how I expect to see most animals. It was the exact opposite. Most of the animals are very happy to see you, almost jumping into your arms.

BRYAN MROZ: Well, we picked up that Lab in the backyard, right. And he was barking, growling. His haunches were up the back. Then we went into the backyard, said hi, and then he’s rubbing against us, crying, right, because he hasn’t seen anybody in so long. But, again, protecting the house, but then realizes that we’re not there to harm him or the house. And they’re all happy once we get them, right.

MIKE CHYKA: They’re jumping -- Some of these dogs are huge.

BRYAN MROZ: Yeah.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Bentley the Pitbull.

BRYAN MROZ: Yeah.

MIKE CHYKA: He was so happy.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Greatest dog ever, right. He was just a beautiful, just a beast of an animal. Any other day he probably would have did some damage to us. [Laughter] But that particular day, I was feeding him out of my hand. And most animals sometimes they have a hard time jumping into vehicles or they don’t want to. All these guys jumped in, no problem. Like, where are we going?

AMT: They knew. They knew they had to. So you knew their names from the owners?

MIKE CHYKA: Yes. Yeah.

AMT: But this is on your down time. And then you had to go back and fight a fire.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah. All day—Or all night, rather.

AMT: I'm wondering, when you close your eyes what stays with you? What’s the image you can't forget?

[All talking at once]

BRYAN MROZ: Yeah, that Timberlea area. That first night, right. All those houses on fire was—Never see that again. You see the devastation in the other neighbourhoods that were already burnt before we got there, right, but just seeing that active fire.

AMT: So they were disintegrating in front of you?

BRYAN MROZ: Oh, probably 30 seconds a house.

MIKE CHYKA: Two distinct images stick in my mind. Like, as I mentioned, pulling into town with the vehicles just strewn everywhere, smoke, and both sides of the road on fire. And then pulling up to that subdivision and, again, the noise. All the senses being activated, right, when you see something of that magnitude on fire. Those two will always stay in my mind for as long as I live.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: It was see in those houses that were burning being dropped, because you saw people's lives there. These houses were fully furnished. Maybe they grabbed their documents. That was it. And these houses-- You know, there were TVs, there was pets—no, sorry, there wasn’t pets. You could see if they had a kid, right. There was toys; there was dolls there. So seeing those houses, I mean, like, you know that that someone's life being completely torn apart.

MIKE CHYKA: The evacuation happened so quickly. You know what? These people were at work. And they said, you're out of town now. Get out of town. Grab your kids and that's it. And you know, you walk into the houses, there's cereal bowls there with the spoon still in it. People were mid cooking dinner. Whatever they were doing, it was dropped and left. So it's easy for people to say, well, they should have grabbed this, they should have grabbed that, but when you're stressed out like that, you have a moment’s notice to grab a couple of items-- If you can sit back and think, okay, what would I grab? Well, when you're calm and nothing's going on around you, fine, you could think of all the things in the world, but when you have someone at your door saying, let’s go. It’s time to go.

AMT: Some people never even got to their house.

MIKE CHYKA: No. They were at work. And that’s why they couldn’t get their animals. They were lucky to get to the school to pick up their children.

AMT: I wanted to ask a question about-- You talked about the sight of the houses that were part of the fire line as they bulldozed. So, as they bulldozed those things, you could actually see into—

STEVE GILLINGHAM: It was like a bucket. If you had contents in a bucket , things were just spilling out of houses just by the way they were being torn down, right. They were coming out fast. Bedroom sets, dressers, kids’ room, toys, anything. Everything was just coming apart.

MIKE CHYKA: I remember the next morning after we kind of did some hot spots as well. Like, you’d see family photos just sitting in the debris. Just… just weird seeing, like, a tool here, a picture there, coffee cup there. Very interesting among all the other destruction.

AMT: Sometimes it's one little thing, huh? Instead of a pile of things, it’s that one thing that—

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah. It’s the family pictures. How do you recover those things, right.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: In certain homes, like, we had—one of the firefighters on scene, his mom’s friend said can you go by my place in Beacon Hill? And all that we could salvage was a little bit of wooden number of 224.

MIKE CHYKA: Address plaque.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Everything else was turned to ash. Everything. Most places there's a little bit standing. This place had literally turned into ash.

AMT: Is that partly because of the intensity?

MIKE CHYKA: Such a fuel load in the house. Just think of all those items in your house that just light up. Everything lights up. There was a motorcycle in that garage and the wheels were melted to a puddle. There was nothing. You couldn’t even tell it was a wheel other than it was right beside the bike where the wheel would be. That's the intensity of a fire, right.

AMT: I know you have a lot of adrenaline and you’re really focused when you're there, but when you come back and you think about that, I’m wondering, what other things you think about. What kind of emotions you have about what you've seen and what you know that destruction means to people?

MIKE CHYKA: Well, you certainly put a lot more value your family. Of course you love your family, but you realize the importance of that even that much more. And then material things, you see all these material things sitting there and really and true, that isn’t what counts. It’s having your family together. Yeah, it's devastating to see people lose everything. But, yeah, it really put things into perspective.

AMT: What about you, Steve? What do you think about now that you're back?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: You mostly think about the people who've lost everything. I mean, Fort Mac has always had issues with access to housing and stuff and now how bad that's going to be for those folks for a long time. But, yeah, that's the part, when I think about it, it's going to be a long time before that town is normal. It's going to be years before Fort Mac is back to where it was.

MIKE CHYKA: And also you think of the firefighters in Fort MacMurry, the actual guys that work and live in that city. Some of the guys lost their houses and they're still working. Where do they go? Right? That's their livelihoods. Their family is there. So, now they're separated not only from their family, they’re still working, and now they have no house. So, compound all those factors, I give those guys a lot of credit, right. And they weren't stopping. We saw crew-- One of the trucks, actually, I think they lost an engine. It burnt out, their engine, their fire truck. It wasn’t running. And those guys are beyond exhausted, pretty much walking zombies.

AMT: And they were still fighting.

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah.

AMT: Help us understand, because it is exhausting work, but really spell it out for me in terms of the physical exertion it takes for you to be fighting a fire for that long. What are you doing?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: The three of us are big guys and you’ve got to think everything with water is heavy, like the high volume hose with water weighs hundreds of pounds. The heat from it – you’re trying to wear gear that’s keeping you safe, that also retains heat. It’s just the-- I think a lot of people don't get how hard it is to fight fires. And I mean, you've got fit guys here and it's some of the most strenuous work you'll ever do in your life. And it doesn't stop until the fire’s out. You can’t say I’m going to go take a 15-minute break. That’s not the way it works. Then you're passing off that work to someone else. So, you know you're there and you know you are for hours. But it's hard, dirty, nasty work.

AMT: And it's very hot?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Really hot.

MIKE CHYKA: The day we pulled up it was, I believe, 30 degrees that day and it didn’t really cool off at night. Like Steve says, you’re pulling hose, but you’re also walking through debris. You have to move these things. There's a lot of things you can’t see- rebar sticking out of the ground, sharp objects, all these things. Our captain slipped on some debris, fell, sliced his arm at bit.

AMT: And are your feet wet? You’ve got water pouring around?

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah. Yeah, you’re filthy, right. You’re filthy top to bottom.

BRYAN MROZ: Well, water and sweat. You’re constantly soaked. You don’t get a chance to dry off. Dragging the hoses through that debris, too, they get snagged and so you have to go back, find out where the snag is and free it. A lot of times, especially on that first night, we had to move the hose back and forth because these big trucks needed to get through, these excavators, right, to help move the debris so could put it out. Yeah, these excavator drivers too, they’re sitting on top of the fire in their trucks and just in the smoke and heat of it too. And I give them big props for not being trained either for this kind of even, right. And then we would sit there and cool off their trucks, because they were overheating, with our water. Then they are steaming, right, because they're getting so hot, overworked with the engines and the fire heating them up too. Bucketful of fire, right, and those trucks did awesome for us.

AMT: How do you get resupplied with water and fuel to keep all that stuff running?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: We carry enough water for us, probably, for a good seven or eight hours, right?

BRYAN MROZ: For personal water, yeah.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: And that’s pretty much the only kind of break you're going to get. That’s one thing that you have to is just try to keep yourself as hydrated as possible. But these trucks, they run really efficient off fuel, so we get an entire night shift out of our aerial. When you go back to the evacuation centre and the staging area, there on Mac Island, you would refuel. That's the first thing you do. You take care of your truck first. You go back and you refuel and kind of take care of any issues with the equipment that you may be missing or that's broken.

BRYAN MROZ: They did have the mobile fuel guys driving around too. And they filled up our tanker for us. And then for a water supply for those trucks, we had the tenders. So, again, ones that aren't just designed to fill a fire truck. So, they were not as quick as, say, a fire truck tanker, but it was enough for us there.

AMT: Given the physical exertion and the sheer number of hours you're working, how do you physically just keep yourself moving? What do you do in your head to make yourself do that?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Everyone's doing the same thing. I mean, you’re not going to see anybody sitting down and taking it easy when there's hundreds of people around you working. So you kind of feed off that.

BRYAN MROZ: It’s an adrenaline rush. Getting up there and just going to work, right, and not stopping.

AMT: So when you got in the truck and you came back here did you just, like, collapse?

MIKE CHYKA: I was driving back and, you know, it was a van with seven or eight people in it. The van was quiet, because everyone’s exhausted. You know, whether they were sleeping or not, it's just exhaustion and some guys-- And one guy had a Kleenex box, he had it against the glass and sleeping. That’s what it was, this pure exhaustion, sleeping. That’s the thing. Steve, again, talked about the support staff there. The fueling. We had mechanics there looking at all the trucks. They sent up mechanics from certain departments just to look at our trucks to make sure they were running okay. So, all those things get kind of lost. There was a volunteer at Mac Island just doing it on her own accord, making us sandwiches. Just walk up, here. Here’s a sandwich. Whatever you want, take it.

BRYAN MROZ: Slept outside on a cot to make sure—

STEVE GILLINGHAM: She’s a member of their Legion and she did not leave that point. We were there for what? Two and a half days and she’d sleep there at night on the bench and every time you walked by her she’d ask you if she could make you a sandwich.

AMT: Where did she come from? She just stayed?

MIKE CHYKA: She stayed. And I asked her, why are you doing this? She said, I’m just from this community. I want to help. I said, where are you staying? She goes, that cot right there.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Betty was her name, right?

MIKE CHYKA: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And we were walking by to relieve our crew. It was about 2:30 in the morning. I couldn’t see her, but she says, grab some sandwiches. I was like, where did that come from? Like, she’s on the cot behind the table. She was still awake even when she’s trying to get some sleep. Non-stop. Always had fresh coffee for us.

AMT: So even the logistics of fighting a fire like this with so many firefighters from so many different places, who's at the top of that pyramid? How does that actually even happen?

MIKE CHYKA: Well, I mentioned they have an emergency operation centre and we actually sent one of our command officers as well to help out with that so. And then they actually had sort of a mobile command at the staging area just to kind of summarize the point of contact for us. So we’d come back. We could say, hey, we fuelled our truck, our truck’s okay. Or if we had any issues, we’d tell him and then say, do you have any assignments for us? Where do you want us to go? So that's kind of how it works. We didn’t really see the full breadth of the of the command system, but that's how worked for us.

AMT: Will you go back?

MIKE CHYKA: 100 per cent.

BRYAN MROZ: Yeah.

MIKE CHYKA: Without a doubt.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Absolutely.

MIKE CHYKA: I can assure you, everybody in this department wants to be there.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Yeah, everybody wants to be there.

MIKE CHYKA: And so a group of us has gone. Other people want to go. So those people are going to get the opportunity to go as well. But, yeah, if given the opportunity, I know all of us will go again.

AMT: And that's how the rotation works? You go in and you work flat out with just tiny breaks and then you just keep working until you can't and then you’re replaced?

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Well, it's because people still got to get back to the regular duties, right. We could have stayed longer, but we got back Friday night. We had to be back here 8:00 Sunday morning for our regular shift. So, there’s still—I mean, obviously, our main goal is to protect St. Albert. So we come back, we do our shift , and if we get off—Is it Wednesday morning we get off tour? If they ask us to go back again, get home, pack a bag, and head back up there.

AMT: Gentleman, it's really important that we hear, really, what you go through to do this. Thank you for sharing your stories. Thank you for your work.

STEVE GILLINGHAM: Thank you.

MIKE CHYKA: Thanks.

BRYAN MROZ: Thanks.

AMT: My conversation with firefighter Steve Gillingham. Brian Mroz and Mike Chyka. We were at Fire hall No. 3 in St. Albert Alberta during the Fort McMurray wildfire in May of 2016. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Canadian rapper Maestro Fresh Wes will be on the show for a special performance of his new song Jurassic Park, inspired of course by the Toronto Raptors. We're going to leave you with yet another song that the team has inspired. It's called "Raptor Foot," a reggae track from Scarborough musician General Genius. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

[Song: "Raptor Foot" by General Genius"]

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June 11, 2019 Episode Transcript

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