Bittersweet Sands Read online

  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 O
kotoks 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.

  I’ll email again in a couple more days.

  Doug.

  Day Twelve

  ( Dinosaur Farts )

  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 ‘died’ was too strong a word.”

  “How so?”

  “‘Changed 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 ‘Off-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.”

  Day Fourteen

  ( Frozen Hams )

  “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?”

  “‘Cause 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.