Bittersweet Sands (11 page)
I'll email again in a couple more days.
Doug.
Dougdoug stood inside the coker, lumps of black coke oozing into his already oil-soaked gloves. “You know, Rick, I've been thinking.”
“Always dangerous. What about?”
“Oil.”
“Oil? Of course! We're surrounded by it. If your fingers weren't so dirty, you'd be picking your nose with it. Why wouldn't you?”
“You making fun of me?”
“What ever gave you that idea?”
“Makes you wonder. Where did this oil come from? What was oil before it died?”
“Funny.” I tapped my hardhat in an exaggerated way, as if I had just discovered a great truth. “That's exactly what I was thinking.”
“Screw you.”
I smiled. “Pond scum.”
“Then why doesn't oil smell like pond scum?”
“Maybe trees in a forest. Shit, I dunno! Why don't you ask one of the engineers?”
“Then why doesn't oil smell like a forest?”
“Maybe that's what the forests smelled like back in the Jurassic.” “Naw, Rick. I've smelled forests before. This smells like... oil.”
“No shit!” I laughed. “Slow down thar, Wild Thang.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“Well, if I squeezed the shit out of you for a couple of million years, I'll bet you wouldn't smell the same.”
“Maybe that's why.”
“Huh?”
“Well, all the trees that this comes from are crushed together, so that's why the smell is stronger.”
“I had a girlfriend that smelled,” I muttered.
“If we diluted the oil... I wonder if that's what the forest would smell like? I mean, in the Cretaceous?”
“Everything spices,” I said. “Jeez. Everything.”
“Does oil from Texas smell different from the oil from Saudi Arabia?” Dougdoug asked.
“Whole house would stink.”
“Gas smells kinda neat. In small doses, I mean.”
“And fart! Holy shit, I'd have to staple down the sheets.”
“The trees were different millions of years ago. Maybe that's why it smells the way it does,” Dougdoug said pensively.
“What? I thought we were talking about my ex-girlfriend.”
“Oil.”
“Jeez, kid, stay with the topic!”
“Everything was different back with the dinosaurs. The percentage of oxygen in the air, the plants, maybe that's why oil smells the way it does.”
“It probably smelled the same as now,” I said.
“I don't think so. I read a story about Pearl S. Buck when she was a missionary in China. She said that the worst part after years in China and coming back to America was getting used to the smell of her family.”
“So?”
“She said all that butter and meat made us North Americans stink. It's what you eat that determines how you smell.”
I smelled my shirt. Dougie smelt his armpit.
“Oil,” we said in unison.
Turning to the young man I said, “Dinosaurs probably smelled like alligators, or snakes.”
“If you think about it,” Dougdoug said, “when you run your truck, the exhaust you smell is probably the smell of ancient pond scum burning.”
“Or dinosaur farts.”
“I don't think so, Rance.”
“Dinosaurs farted! They find petrified dinosaur shit all over the place. If cows fart, so did dinosaurs.”
“There weren't that many of them.”
“Bullshit! There were millions of them. You know, for a smart kid, you don't watch the Discovery Channel much.”
“Not as many as there were trees in the forests.”
“Dinosaurs farted!” I actually started to believe myself.
“How do you know?”
“Can't a guy just know?”
Dougdoug and I were quiet for a moment, reloading.
“Okay,” Dougdoug said, “maybe dinosaurs farted.”
“See! I knew you were a smart kid.”
“But you know what? I think the dinosaurs are killing us.”
“Dougie, what I just said about you being smart? I take that back.”
“No, really! The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is caused by burning fossil fuels, so actually it's the dinosaurs that are killing humans.”
I looked at Dougdoug.
Dougie looked back at me.
“Why couldn't I get an apprentice that only had Grade Nine? I'm sure they've got them.”
Dougdoug ignored me and continued. “Another thing. When I said that I wondered what oil was before it died, I guess âdied' was too strong a word.”
“How so?”
“âChanged form' is a better way to say it. Oil changed from a solid vegetable to a liquid, and now we're changing the liquid into a gas. A gas that's ruining the atmosphere, causing global warming, and will eventually poison the air.”
“Like dinosaur farts?”
Day Thirteen
( Redoing the Job Hazard Card )
“Okay, you three. Redo this.”
“What, you don't like our Pre-Job Work Card?”
“Redo it.”
“Aw, Jay...”
“Redo it.”
“You don't like the Hazards we put down?”
“Even if you are a Newfie, working with âOff-Islanders' does not constitute a work risk.”
“Depends.”
“And use your own names.”
“Hm.”
“So who's Separation?”
“Too Tall, he's from Quebec.”
“That makes Dougdoug... let me guess, Alienation?”
“Yep, Red Deer.”
“And who's... the Middle East?”
“Rick. He's from Winnipeg.”
“You tell the guys, Pops, no more walking out early. At 5 PM we start to clean up. Return all tools to the tool crib. At 5:15, we leave for the bus. The bus picks us up, and we're driven to the camp. You're the shop steward, you tell the men that they're getting paid until 5:30. No more standing around the bus stop at five like Stash and Too Tall did yesterday.”
“Okay then, how come the non-union assholes always get the early bus?”
“They have a different schedule, and why do you care?”
“âCause they all laugh at us. We play by the rules, and they laugh at us when we do.”
“Just don't look at them. When their bus drives by, turn your back to them. Jeez, Pops, tell the guys to grow up!” The foreman's boots clattered on the iron grating.
This fight wasn't finished, Pops grumbled. Over the years he had acquired a good understanding about how groups react to situations. So, Pops thought, you just have to create a situation.
Fort McMurray moves on buses. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, buses pick up and drop off workers either at work or back home at the end of the shift. Thirty-bus convoys are not uncommon and one-way bus journeys can run as far as a hundred kilometres. Highway 63 can have twenty-kilometre traffic jams. Buses play a vital part in keeping McMurray running efficiently. The smooth operation of the buses dovetails into the smooth operation of the refineries. If the bus arrives minutes late or minutes early, it is noticed.
Like ants on an oak tree, the buses climb from the city of Fort McMurray in the grass thirty kilometres all the way up to Suncor, then Syncrude, sitting like silver gatekeepers on either side of the highway. Suncor can't be seen from the road, but the bus traffic looks right down on Syncrude as they pass.
After Syncrude and Suncor, Highway 63 branches out in three directions. Off to the west is CNRL, so massive that it has its own airstrip. Another branch juts straight north and leads to Fort Hills and Aurora. The silver buses wander up another branch that is called Conterra Road, passing another airstrip then Albian Sands, Jackpine, and Kearl Lake refineries. Finally there's a branch off Conterra Road that eventually reaches Firebag almost a two-hour bone-jarring bus ride from Fort McMurray.
Around those refineries, like leaves on those branches, sprout white tin construction camps. Buses feed the refineries from all those camps. There's Borealis, Millennium, Lakeside, Barge Landing, Albian Village, and on and on, all sounding like exotic resorts, not the sprawling white trailer villages they actually are.
All those refineries and all those construction camps suck up transport and finally disgorge thousands of workers with an efficiency and timing that puts the meat processing of an abattoir to shame.
For the first week of the shutdown, the crew had stood at the bus stop and stared silently at a passing yellow school bus filled with non-union workers. When sports teams play too many games against each other, insults get remembered, animosity builds, hurts get compounded. So it was with bus number 32.
Night after night, the crewâPops, Stash, Dougdoug, and the restâwaited stone-faced at their bus stop as bus number 32 passed, always five minutes earlier than theirs. Oh, how they begrudged those minutes. That five minutes meant that the non-union workers were first to the camp, first to get the hot water in the showers, first at the dinner table, first to the telephones after the meal, first, first, first. Resentment filled the union members like the taste of pewter on their lips.
The coker just happened to be the first stop after the buses entered the front gates, and the last stop before the buses left the refinery. There was no use explaining to the crew that there wasn't some ulterior motive that determined their schedule; it was simply geography.
The feud had started with a skinny, pimply-faced little sucker who barked the loudest, caused the most fights, and never seemed to be around when the big boys went toe-to-toe. It was just a sneer the first day. But, like a tongue in a toothache, the crew couldn't stop searching him out as bus 32 rumbled past.
The next few days it was a giggle, a sneer, a one-fingered salute. The insults were reciprocated in kind.
Bus 32 was the enemy. Bus 32 was the lightning rod for all the real or imagined slights between the union and non-union workers. Bus 32 was going to learn a lesson in union solidarity.
After the foreman's warning, Pops called the crew together. That night, when bus 32 drove past, the entire crew turned their backs, just as Jason had ordered. Then, as one, they dropped their pants and mooned the bus. Pops was the only one who stayed upright, watching out for any company officials or cell-phone cameras on the bus. If he spotted any, he was to immediately call off the freezing of a dozen pink union buns.
Early next morning at the Toolbox Talk, the crew loudly complained to Jason about the obscenities inflicted upon their gentle union souls by bus number 32. No mention was made about the exposure of a dozen boilermaker buns to the cruel eyes of Bus 32 or the Fort McMurray winter. Too Tall, who had learned the welding trade during two years less a day in one of Canada's finest institutions, declared that he was shocked, yes, shocked and appalled.
A formal complaint was made. Pops the union steward made sure that the complaint was delivered late enough in the shift so that there would be no time for the accused to register a counter-complaint. Pops and the union crew could honestly say that they had warned the people on Bus 32. He just made the warning too late.
Pops made a special request to the Safety Nazi. “Stand with us at the bus stop,” he said. “See what kind of dirt they inflict on us poor, innocent tradesmen.”
At 5:15 sharp, Jason, the Safety Nazi, and several other foremen stood amongst those poor, aggrieved assault victims. Pops nodded to several of the workers as Bus 32 came into view. The crew aimed every cell phone camera they had scrounged that day at the passing vehicle.
As Bus 32 rumbled past the assembly, window after window on their side was filled not with grim faces scowling down at the union workers, but with the pressed hams of a dozen bald, pink, non-union rear ends.
“Isn't it beautiful when a plan comes together?” was Pops' only comment. His foreman suppressed a smirk.
Their plan didn't change the bus schedule one iota, but for days thereafter when it drove by, Bus 32 was empty.
( Email Day Fourteen )
From: Doug
To: Dad
Subject: Fort McMurray
Hi, Dad.
At lunchtime today, we discussed and planned the perfect heist. Modesty prevents me from telling you which worker was voted by the other welders as coming up with the next-to-perfect crime.
Last week, a young worker was killed on the highway between the refineries. His crew welded together a cross made of four-inch channel iron, took his hardhat, and drilled it onto the top of the cross. Then they took that cross and hammered it into the frozen ground with the blade of a front-end loader. It's about six feet into the ground on the side of the ditch where he was killed. That cross ain't ever coming out, not by human hands it's not. I counted five crosses in a four-mile stretch between refineries. It's a shame the government doesn't make enough money from the oilsands to construct a better highway.
A worker lost the tip of his finger when a pipe guillotined his hand. The report put the accident's cause down to a “blonde moment.”
The time to leave Fort McMurray is when you have a favourite restaurant.
In one of the refineries in Fort McMurray, an X-ray company inadvertently exposed a group of welders to a dose of X-rays. It happens occasionally, and normally it's not a big deal. But it did happen, so an “incident” was declared and reprimand letters were sent out to the X-ray company. In their defence, the X-ray company stated that the exposed workers only received the equivalent of a head-to-toe X-ray.
One welder brought the incident up at the next union meeting and announced that he was going to seek counsel and was going to sue the X-ray company. Even though he was nowhere near the incident, he claimed that he was feeling the effects of radiation. When the union president asked him to describe his symptoms, the man stated that he noticed that his feet were glowing.
