At 6 a.m. one Friday this past July, I found myself once again loading gear into my truck outside my home in Sudbury, Ontario. Inside, my wife, Jessica, and our two daughters, who are four and two years old, watched me from the doorway. Jessica, then seven months pregnant with our third child, had just finished a 12-hour nursing shift at our local hospital, and she should’ve been sleeping. Instead, she was watching her husband disappear into the wilderness—again. She’d heard it all before: “I could be gone as long as 19 days. I don’t know where I’ll end up, or what conditions will be like when I get there.” I wasn’t trying to be dramatic. It’s just the reality of life as a wildland firefighter in Northern Ontario.

Wildland firefighters do the same job as the ones working in cities; the difference is we have access to provincial resources, like helicopters. When the alarm goes off at headquarters, we grab food, camping equipment, hoses, hand tools and set off, whether to chase a just-sparked blaze or to relieve crews who’ve been sleeping in tents for days on end. At 30 years old, and after 10 seasons in the field, I should be settling into a career as a veteran crew leader. But I’m finding it harder and harder to justify my job to myself and my loved ones. The sacrifices heavily outweigh the compensation.

When I started this job in 2016, I didn’t see it as a long-term career, just the perfect summer gig. Growing up in Sudbury, I spent weeks camping in every kind of weather, even snow, so I was confident I could handle myself outdoors. Even the hazards—chainsaws, wind-felled trees and frequent chopper flights—didn’t intimidate me. Once my week-long training was done, I got a job as an emergency firefighter in the tiny township of Wawa, and, later, a crew position in Chapleau, a town five and a half hours north of Sudbury.

I still remember my first fire: lightning had struck one of the tallest points in our sector, and I’d arrived as part of the second crew called to contain it. Each day, we hauled more than 50 pounds’ worth of lunch packs up several steep kilometres from our base camp. My coworkers, all used to that kind of terrain, were sprinting up the mountain. I, on the other hand, found myself gasping for........

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