Bentley District Fire Chief Ian McLaren. (Photo Credit: Kathi Issler, Bentley District firefighter)

By Josh Hall and Sheldon Spackman

Delicate Balance

Principal writes book on ‘double life’ as volunteer firefighter

Dec 30, 2020 | 10:24 AM

From ‘regular life’ to emergency scenes, a central Alberta man is sharing his unique experiences as both a teacher and firefighter through the release of a new book.

Not My Emergency: The Double Life of a Volunteer Firefighter is written by Ian McLaren, principal at Eckville Elementary School and Bentley District Fire Chief.

The book recounts over two decades of his balancing his role as a volunteer firefighter, school teacher/principal, husband and father in small town Alberta.

“When I was taking my Master’s Degree in Education, and this would have been 13 or 14 years ago, I had to do a Master’s thesis,” he recalls. “My prof and I kind of arrived on this idea to do a study on volunteer firefighters. The idea was to do a number of interviews with firefighters and talk about the effects of transitioning back and forth between a ‘civilian’ role and then into an emergency scenario, and then back again.”

“I was about half-way through the study when I got a letter in the mail that said that University of Calgary no longer needed a thesis for Master’s programs, so I dropped it,” adds McLaren. “Fast forward 12 or 13 years later, I decided that even if I wasn’t going to do the study, which I may still do, I wanted to write a book about that experience.”

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McLaren says every firefighter has a few great stories that they love to tell when they get together with other firefighters.

“A lot of the book is just that,” he explains. “It’s just telling the stories of some of the more interesting or significant events that I’ve been to over the last 22 years.”

“Career firefighters are full-time firefighters. That’s their job, that’s what they do,” he continues.

“When they go home from their job, they’re done until their next shift. Whereas volunteer firefighters, we never know when we’re going to get called, we never know what we’re going to get called to and certainly, it interrupts our regular life with our family and our jobs and things like that.”

McLaren says the book is his first, and available in both paperback and Kindle Books as an e-book through Amazon.

“The push happened when I was speaking with a teacher at my school and she had published a number of children’s books and we were talking about that experience and I very casually said, ‘Someday, one of my life goals is I would like to write a book too’. Well 45 minutes later, she had talked me into it and I went home and I wrote the first chapter that night.”

McLaren notes some of the stories are humorous, while others are tragic.

“I have this huge appreciation for the members of my fire department, and the members of every volunteer fire department,” says McLaren. “That they are willing to do what I call a completely unreasonable job. It’s not reasonable to be woken up at 3 o’clock in the morning and at 35 below and you have to work the next day and to go out and deal with somebody else’s emergency.”

McLaren hopes readers of his book will develop that same appreciation.

“If I was able to help people see the amazing nature of people who are willing to do that, I guess that could be considered a goal of my book.”