Bittersweet Sands (10 page)

“Bushed is like walking through fog. When I finally got back home, it was a shock. All that noise, jerky people, flashing lights, and traffic. Cars coming so close you could touch them. And fast? Man, they were fast. Scared the hell out of me.

“On the way home from the airport, we stopped to do some shopping. The mall was torture. My wife would meet me at the airport and say something innocent, like ‘How was your flight?' but she sounded like she was screaming ‘I hate you!' and I winced.”

The man across from me nodded, and took a sip of his coffee. His eyes stayed on me.

“When my kids were small, I was gone. I had to pay off the mortgage, keep the wife and kids in Big Macs. My youngest daughter once told me that she doesn't remember me until she went to school. You know, that's the first five years of her life, gone. I missed them all.

“One year, I remember being away for eight months.

“That's the year the duffel bag never left the foot of the bed. Any conversations I had with my wife boiled down to grunts and money. I'd come home, we'd have a honeymoon for three days, then one day we'd wake up and we were strangers.

“One night, I just got home for Christmas. It was so cold that the snow crunched like biting into a fresh apple. But that Christmas turkey smelled so rich and it was so warm. We were a family, you know? A family.”

There was a clatter and a murmur from the camp kitchen behind us. Both of us looked up as a skinny kitchen staff member in starched whites walked by carrying a mop. After a while, I returned to my story.

“My wife was facing me, and the kids were sitting in their booster chairs on either side. My wife had made herself and the kids up, because Daddy was home. My kids and house were always spotless. I'll give her that—my ex was a good housekeeper. Their hair was all up in spiky little ponytails. Faces were shiny and scrubbed. My daughters all wore matching white sweaters and little kilts, red and black kilts with white stockings and black shiny shoes. Daddy was home.

“I'm babbling away to the wife. Happier than shit to be home, and a little voice came from one of my kids.

“‘When is that loud man going home?'

“‘When is that loud man going home.' I don't think I've ever been hurt like that by anybody. I was just numb. My wife gave me shit about not making a fuss about the way the kids were dressed. But I just sat there playing with the food.

“‘When is that loud man going home?'

“I tried to stick around a little longer, but you know, really, they didn't need me. Oh, they needed the money. But they had their own lives. They grew up fast.

“Everybody got used to me being away, and you know what? So did I.

“When I did take a job in the city, my kids treated me like an uncle. Still do.

“The more friends you have, the happier you are. Us boomers? We don't have friends. We slop back and forth across Canada like water in a pan, never talking to anybody. Our long-term relationships are a weekend.

“That year up in the Arctic, I made over a hundred grand. That's good money even now. The money's gone, and my kids? They have their own families.

“Their husbands don't travel.”

The old construction worker and I mumbled a couple of times but the fire in the conversation had flickered out. Awkwardly he rose. I raised my coffee cup in mute salute. He glanced at me, his eyes lingering an extra second or two. He nodded, then gathered his tray of dishes and walked away down the long row of dining hall tables.

I sat alone in that six-hundred-man dining hall, listening to the kitchen staff rattling in the distance. I held my coffee cup and stared over it south towards the highway. The late-winter afternoon sun made my eyes water.

Day Eleven
( C6 )

“Rick, I got a job for you. You and Teddy are welding the trays in C6.”

“What level?”

“All the way.”

“All the way?”

“Yeah, and don't you be like that pipefitter that got halfway up yesterday then told everyone he had to take a piss. They're still looking for him.”

“All the way?”

“Look on the bright side: nobody will bother you.”

Refinery towers are essentially pressure cookers that use heat and gravity to separate crude oil into various thicknesses. First, the crude is steam-heated. Then the fumes generated by the boiling oil separate as it wafts upwards. The lighter the fumes, the tinier the molecules, and the higher they float. The heavier the droplets of crude, the lower in the tower they will re-form, until the top of the tower collects light naphtha and the bottom of the tower drains off something akin to black toffee.

The inside of a tower looks like an acoustic testing chamber, except an acoustic test chamber has foam rubber sticking into the compartment. Jutting into a refinery tower, on the other hand, are razor-sharp steel shards. Workers crawling around inside a tower wear knee pads, elbow pads, hardhats, and coveralls that are sure to be ripped. After a couple of days of creeping through a tower, the worker is guaranteed to end up cut and bruised, his clothes in shreds. The interior of a refinery tower has all the comforts of an inside-out porcupine.

I could hear Teddy puffing below as I climbed. I stared at the next yellow rung, the next placement of my gloved hand. I didn't look down, up, left, right, or anywhere. I looked at the next rung, only the next rung.

My hands squeezed the yellow-painted rung as I felt the tower sway in the wind. I didn't think that was possible. Teddy chuffed and spat below. The next level was ten feet above my hands. I glanced down, and promised myself not to do that again. Teddy, with his battered hardhat and his massive arms, was below me, the crane the size of a tiny, perfect children's toy far below him. At this distance, the crane's massive diesel motor was a hum, almost a moan. Teddy's breathing was laboured. Teddy looked like a thumb, a thumb with a hardhat. He wasn't my height, but he was all of my weight and half again. His beautiful, ice-blue Slavic eyes crinkled and cried in the McMurray cold. With his red face, he looked like a quiet and sad Santa Claus.

The closest anyone could get to pronouncing Teddy's full name was something close to “Teddy Half-a-can-a-gas.” Everybody just called him Teddy, Teddy Consonants, or Teddy Alphabets.

Teddy had been a twenty-year-old welder in the Gdansk shipyards when the German army attacked Poland at the start of World War II. When the invasion started, Teddy had just enough time to drop his tools, change his clothes, join the Polish army, and get captured by the Germans. “Pretty quick” was his only comment.

After being captured, Teddy spent years twiddling his thumbs in a German POW camp. The camp was eventually captured by the advancing Russian army. The Russians greeted the Poles by putting them in an internment camp where Teddy and several thousand POWs sat for another couple of years.

Once the war was over, the Russians opened the doors of the camp and thousands of men, including Teddy, were let go. Teddy walked across Poland, Germany, France, and into Belgium, where he registered with the Allies as a refugee. The Allies gave Teddy clothes and food and put him in an Displaced Person Camp, where he sat for another year.

By the time he arrived in Canada, Teddy was pushing thirty.

On a landing halfway up, I called a time-out.

Teddy smiled. “High, eh?”

“High,” I agreed. Pointing to the steam clouds on the horizon, I said, “McMurray's over there, down in the valley. Suncor's over there. And that cloud, back over there, should be CNRL.”

“I was at Firebag last year,” Teddy said. “It's over the horizon, almost a hundred klicks. I was in a refinery once in California.”

I looked at Teddy. I was about to ask him how he got to California when he continued.

“It's got a twenty-five-storey tower there. Looks like a bullet. When we climbed up it, for the first ten stories we took a man-lift—you know, a vertical conveyor. No cage, no protection, no nothing. We stood on those foot angles, hung onto the hand-grab, and watched the refinery get smaller. If you let go, you died. When I stepped off the man-lift on the tenth floor, there's an outline of a body painted on the cement, and a name and a date stenciled beside it. Makes you look up. Where that guy fell from was where I was going.

“I climbed the rest of that hundred and fifty feet by ladder. And do you know what I saw when I got to the top?”

“What?” I said.

“You'll never guess. Not in a hundred years.”

“Okay I'll bite. What?”

“A bicycle.”

I stared at Teddy.

“Somebody stole his foreman's bicycle and chained it to the top railing of the highest tower there.”

“How'd they get it up there?” I asked.

“Dunno. When I asked, all they did was smile.”

“Putting a bicycle on your back and climbing the ladder would be awkward.”

“Pretty dangerous too,” Teddy said. “What if it got caught in the ladder's cage?”

“A crane would never reach two hundred and fifty feet, and besides, it would attract too much attention.”

Teddy nodded in silent agreement.

Teddy and I thought for a while, our minds far south to another, far warmer refinery.

“Rope,” Teddy said. “Musta been a rope. One guy climbing up, lowering the rope to another guy, pulling the bike up to the next landing, leapfrogging all the way.”

“Would have taken a couple of men hours.” I smiled.

“In the dark,” Teddy said.

“Yeah, night shift.” I smiled.

“Why would someone pull a bicycle to the top of an over-two-hundred-foot tower?” I mused. “The foreman must have been a real prick.”

Teddy smiled. “Naw. They did it... they did it because they could.” We resumed climbing. The swaying increased.

Climbing the ladder of a tower, you find out real quick if you have a fear of heights. The entire climb I never spat, because I didn't have any spit.

I stared at the chipped and worn yellow paint of the next rung of the ladder. What if I slip? What if I have a heart attack up here? What if Teddy does? Can I go on? What if I slip and fall into the cage with its steel bars like dull knives? What if? What if?

After a half hour of climbing hand over hand, I lay on the topmost steel grating. Nothing was above Teddy and me. We had made the climb, we were there, twenty-five stories. Off in the distance, the tops of other towers from other refineries dotted the landscape. Far to the south, you could see the valley where Fort McMurray is. We had done it.

Teddy gave me a puzzled look. He looked around the steel grating, and into the man-way opening where we were to work. He asked,

“Did you bring the grinder?”

( Email Day Eleven )

From: Doug
To: Dad
Subject: Ft. McMurray

Hi, Dad!

Three of us guys were working inside the coker and while we were waiting for a “lift” from the crane, we started talking hockey. One of the guys mentioned that the local team was playing the Okotoks Oilers.
The third guy, appropriately nicknamed Lobotomy, says,
“The Okotoks Oilers, where are they from?”

The job's progressing. For the first few days, all we did was load in a lot of equipment into and around the coker. Mostly, us apprentices and labourers just set up the mechanics and welders so they can do their jobs.

The guys tell me that the sand in Fort McMurray has a hardness factor of seven, ten being diamonds. So when there's anything that moves, shakes, flows, or tumbles the sand, it wears away real fast. The water and sand mix is so abrasive, all those shiny new-looking vessels that you see in the pictures? They're wearing away from the inside out. And I mean fast.
So during a shutdown, a lot of the welders will stand on scaffolding and just weld on the inside of the coker. Pad welding, they call it. For hour after hour, all they do is weld, huge shiny squares of weld. Just building up what the sand has worn away. It sounds boring, and it is, but if ever they miss a spot and the steel gets worn so much that there's a hole blown in the side of the vessel, you want to be someplace where you can say, “What was that?”

Pops told me this:
“We were working at the smelter in Ontario, on a smokestack. So one day we're going up the man-lift inside the stack, and about halfway up there's a power failure; everything shuts down. So we're sittin' there, about ten or fifteen stories up, inside this stack, for about two and a half hours. Its blackern' coal.
“Finally Carnage says, ‘Enough of this shit. I'm sliding down.' So he grabs the cable and goes over the side, and starts to slide down the hundred feet or so to the bottom. About halfway down, he hits a patch of grease on the cable, and starts to free-fall.
“When he finally got down, his gloves were all ripped, his boots were worn through, his pants were all torn. Carnage walked away from that cable a changed man.”

Two-Tall phoned in to Secretary Scary and said he couldn't come in. Something about a preliminary hearing.

Mongo and Shaky decided that they didn't want to live in camp, so they rented a room at a hotel in McMurray. Mongo was working days and Shaky was working nights, so though they shared the room, they never saw each other.

One morning when Mongo went off to work, he left Shaky a present. A whole package of firecrackers under the toaster with the wick inside the toaster, and wrapped around an element. Shaky came home for breakfast, put the bread in the toaster, and he settled back to enjoy his morning coffee... but not for long.

Mongo said, “I only took welfare twice in my whole life! Once for fourteen years and the other time for twelve years.”

Pops should be retired. Four marriages and a couple of liaisons means he'll never get to sit on that front porch and watch the grandchildren play. The way I figure, if he did retire Pops would only get a quarter of his pension. The rest would go to his exes.

There's a lot of these old guys like Pops in Fort McMurray, Dad. You see them everywhere, old men, still trying to do the work of thirty-and forty-year-olds. They are way past retirement age but they're everywhere. I can only imagine that they have either screwed up their personal lives, financial lives, or they are just trying to work one more shutdown, one more year, or get just one more payday under their belt before they pull the pin. The other day, somebody said a crew of ironworkers averaged fifty-seven years old. Some of the construction camps here in Fort McMurray are, by and large, populated by old men.