Alfred Cool's novel The 5 Cent Murder, set in 1973, follows a narrator who takes a chokerman job in a remote B.C. coastal logging camp. He soon realizes the company has hired work-release prisoners to fill out the full crew--including a dangerous, serial rapist. In this narrative comedy, the author captures the local color, danger and humour of those who did “run or die!” in logging camps, culminating in a confrontation for the finale of the story
BC Coast Logging stories
Excerpt
I can't recall if Dennis Braggs, my soon to be logging mentor, was as hung-over as I was when he flew into camp. But how could I know that? We'd never met. Somewhere there was an embarrassingly long book filled with all the things I didn't know, and in that book was the fact that Braggs and I were on a collision course with death. For sure. But that's hindsight. No crystal ball here. I live in four dimensions, moving along a linear time line, living it out not knowing what’s coming. Maybe that's the best part…
The worst part of this day started with loud pounding on my hotel room door. "Mister. Mister! You'll miss your plane. You're late for the plane.” Roop, the Pakistani room cleaner was providing me with a wakeup call. Jesus, this whole hotel stinks of stale cigarette smoke. I'd taken the room the night before after spending hours in the bar at the Quinsam Hotel, on a desperate mission to snuggle up with any woman equally desperate enough to take me home.
“Okay, okay.” My wakeup call came late. Like an idiot, I'd spent the last of my taxi money on booze. I was overdue now. All my plans were in jeopardy. I needed to be on that plane.
I sprung out of bed, pissed at myself for sleeping in, hit the can, then lifted my hockey bag over my shoulders, grunting under its weight, grabbed my ridiculously heavy leather caulk boots, and left the hotel on the run. I began jogging anxiously beneath bright blue May skies toward the Island Air seaplane dock at the farthest end of the Campbell River spit. All that stood between me and the plane was about a mile of Highway 19 in Cambleton then three miles of dry sand. At least it’s not raining. Every seaplane I heard taking off while I ran had me wondering if I’d pulled the big screw-up. The hung-over run seemed to stretch on forever as I hustled along to the ever-narrowing end of the spit. This strip of land was the last vestige of 'town' before I flew away from the real world into the months of logging I’d signed up for.
As I ran, I recalled everybody was having fun in the bar. Well, anyway, I was. Typically, I succeeded only in drinking what amounts to buckets of draft beer and shots of what I guessed was gasoline being passed off as Tequila. After all, no one goes into camp both unrequited in love and sober, so I covered at least one of my bets. All I accomplished was to be hang-dog miserable, late-night stupid and broke, left penniless to stumble back to my dreary, 1950's version of a hotel room. Just before sprawling face forward onto the bed, fully clothed, I soothed my wounded loneliness thinking, It’s better not to show up in camp with the clap anyway.
When I finally arrived at the seaplane base, stepping into the waiting room, I was foot-sore from jogging in cowboy boots. I had tossed my cookies before entering the pale, beige Formica décor, then checked in with the clerk, whose countenance was just slightly less pale and blasé than the reception area. Sweating and bleary eyed, I rated not so much as a second look from the paper-pounder. I was just another logger heading into camp. I was hustled outside, along to the seaplane dock toward the waiting Beaver, sent out the door with, "We held the sked for you. Your pilot is waiting for you at the plane. Have a nice day.” My heels clunked hollow steps on the grey boards of the float deck as I considered how much of an imbecile I was to go into camp in this shape.
Walking toward the plane, I saw my steps cause small riffles on the water, expanding across their universe through the wharf sludge which accumulates around all docks. Maybe it could have been the light off-shore breeze or the float plane causing the wave action, but either way, a sickening brew of seaweed, broken chunks of brown kelp, wood slabs and sawdust, cigarette butts, white styrofoam coffee cups and other detritus carpeted the brackish surface of the green-black water. We are a messy, littering society.
Daunted but determined, I continued my way toward the vibrantly yellow plane, my eyesight returning to a normal focus after my ignominious entrance. The plane was literally glowing in the sunshine. She floated impressively next to the dock, a powerful metal workhorse ready to be unharnessed to challenge the skies, delivering me away from the sewage and slop of town. Looking past the dock, I thought she looked fine against the back-drop which was to be my distant destination: the blue sky, blue water, blue-green, snow-capped mountains of Central BC. From here, you could approach, if you had, sometime, such a great notion, the moraines and ridges of the Mount Waddington massive.
Floating passively on the water, in the clean air of the morning sunlight, my ride rolled easily, radiating confidence on the gentle swell. Even as the finicky pilot attended to her, even as the clinging surface flotsam of the backwater slough oozed up against her silvery aluminum pontoons, a feeble attempt at negative attenuation, above it all, she was built to fly away from here. She was greased, squeegeed and gassed up for the aviator-glassed fly-boy with gelled, jet-black Superman-hair. He wore a fleece-lined, black faux-leather bombardier style jacket over a starched white shirt. His shirt collar displayed stitched gold pilot wings, catching the morning sunlight. Black RCMP pants and FBI Hush Puppies completed his ensemble, shouting volumes of "Ready to serve you, sir.” His name tag said 'Rick'. My smiling pilot said with a bubbling effervescence I was in no shape to reciprocate, "Good morning. Ready to go?"
"Yeah, sure. I know, I'm late. Sorry. Off we go all right. Good day to get on the bomber.”
"No problem. It'll be a little cold in there at first, but I'll turn the heat on for you right away. Give it a few minutes to warm up.” He was wearing reflective aviators. It was like talking to a major kitchen appliance.
I slung my hockey bag of clothes, with the forty-pounder of Rye rolled up inside in my towel and my work gear at his feet. I dropped my leather Dayton caulks on the bag. Rick grunted lifting it into the double-wide side cargo door to stow it.
Wearing only my jean jacket for a coat, I was cooling off from my run now, shivering and shaking, becoming even a little embarrassed. Before climbing in, I paused a moment. The cool morning air smelled of salt, heavily creosoted wharf logs, seagull crap, kelp and fuel. I inhaled a last great gulp of 'town' air to clear my senses, remembering the B-52 shooters I'd quaffed as well as the Tequila and beers. Resigned and wilting, I climbed into the plane, sagging down submissively onto a green, flop down seat and belted in.
Well, there’s always hope on the horizon. I thought with a miserably pitiful attempt at reviving, having a go at the lighter side of the current shape of things in my little world. I consoled myself, knowing my performance will be remembered by few by tonight, so it doesn't much matter anyway. This hung-over platitude would have to suffice for the duration of this flight as the disjointed film-clips of the night before were already re-playing for me before I could blot them out. Once was enough already. I could think up a batch of ribald lies for the boys later.
The dock flunky untied us, shoving us away from the float toward the twinkling surface of the open water, the pilot had already climbed into his bucket seat. He cranked the ignition, firing up the Pratt & Whitney power plant. It blubbered and kicked over hard, blasting stronger snorts, grabbing metallic lungs-full of air, as the propeller slowly began rotating spasmodically, blowing out thick black exhaust. Soon it revved up to a purring rhythm as we idled ourselves away to make our escape.
The propeller became a blur, and then disappeared entirely. The engine was roaring now. We were bouncing along, picking up speed past the last of the breakwater at the end of the spit. The plane was vibrating and rattling like a plane built in the 'forties should. We were ‘skipping over the ocean’, lifting suddenly off the surface, free in an easy climb away from Campbell River, streaming droplets of our last connection to town behind us.
I was officially past the point of decision, finally on my way to whatever life had in store for me.
Why is it, I mused, always such an easy flight into camp, so quick to get there when your jeans are empty but always a nail biting screamer on the way back to town? This question was only rhetorical because I already knew the answer. First of all, most of us fly into camp in the springtime, like I was, and come out during the fall or winter stormy season. But in my life, I always suspected there was more going on. Change has a serious payback component, where choice is a seductive siren flouting promises or disasters on the rocky shores of my life. As if that weren't enough, I was convinced there was a cosmic joker in our expanding universe who exists, mainly, to mess with me.
When I look back at it now, if I had known what was comin', I wonder, sick as I felt, if I'd have forced myself to get mobile, run four miles down the beach in cowboy boots packing that duffel bag, to get on that plane? If I knew then I was about to up-end my middle-class, turn the other cheek, golden rules nurturing, and be involved in another man's death, would I have run to this flight? Many, many wouldn't, but I know I would have. Because I also met Carleigh, and I'd do anything for her. This time the pay-off is worth the down side.
How, indeed, do we find ourselves in the moments we are living today? Fate, Karma, predestination, really bad luck? I don't know, but choice or no choice, 'it' is about change, and everything is always changing. No scurrying around it, no rock to crawl under, no way out, so live with it. I was already on the flight, so the coming events were set in motion.
I was the only passenger on this air buggy, a brightly colored Canary yellow deHavilland Beaver. I was flying through the looking glass again, piloted by your basic flight jockey, confidant and grinning a full set of Cheshire-cat Colgates, smelling of bargain after-shave cologne and loving his life. It still felt like a chunk of broken glass was floating at the top of my spine, slicing and cutting away at my soaked brain. I was suffering through what was definitely a world-class hangover with absolutely no one to blame but myself.
West Coast pilots are crazed air cowboys. Every day they mount their broncs, cutting in and out of the worst of the worst the coastal mountains can throw at them. Mostly, an unrelentingly loud motor, wings and floats offering only the rear flop down canvas bench seat or one of the six side-mounted, tube-frame seats for the passengers to sit on, these are no frills, dependable, cargo planes. These are the only planes I trust to strap on and get through any storm upside down, backwards or three days late back to the ranch. More than once I'd ridden in one of these bombers in just about all those conditions and made it through. Glancing out the window, half-dozing, feeling the heater bringing warmth to my legs, I lied to myself sleepily, like a drunk driver in jail, I'll never drink again. Well, maybe never for a while, at least.
Far below us, the calm waters of the fjords occasionally patterned rip currents or boat wash wakes, glistening and twinkling with the wave motion, reflecting pristine British Columbia sunlight, so bright I could spawn an epileptic episode. I risked temporary blindness looking out the window on the sunny side. Blue-green coastal mountains, gouged, broken and scraped over by ancient glaciers, leaving behind range after range of pristine peaks and valleys - uneven tree lines showed in the few logged valleys - all of them still deeply snowed in, lined up beneath us and stretching past both horizons. It occurred to me in my haze that maybe we were stationary up here, balancing tenuously on the tip of the finger of fate. If so, the joke was on us 'cause the mountains beneath us were being slow-rolled, a great tectonic Rolodex, flipping us endless new horizons of side hills and valleys. My cosmic joke theory deteriorated fast though when I looked at the pilot grinning and loving it all, cruising along at a hundred and fifty miles an hour on the gentle up-drafts. Besides, the finger usually pointed at me anyway - at least, that's how I see things. We all pay. My exuberance last night became my debt load today. The balance in the universe always corrects itself, and today it was adjusting smack dab in the middle of my hangover. But you gotta have some fun on the way through.
The mountains, my workplace, like an endless tide relentlessly pulling me back to their desolate magnificence, are vast and majestic. Probably a scene a guy in a different frame of mind would want to paint. The pilot began gaining altitude, had to negotiate a high pass no doubt, and sailed our airship up toward the bluest of skies.
I glided along on my thoughts, enjoying the familiar feeling of promise, even though convoluted because of the old tug-of-war between defoliation versus income. The polarity of that politics was too much for me at the moment. At least I have a job. Succumbing to my memories, I began drifting off to the sway of the plane and soothing drone of the engine. I was actually looking forward to again working as a riggin' rat. Headin' into camp, I felt like the last guy catchin' the last buckboard back to the ranch, aggrandizing the romantic aspect of the life of the backcountry range hand. Speaking of romance, like everyone else, I promised to myself to conjure up epic lies about last night.
The notions of regret for what I had just left behind are rooted in the very real possibility it was for the last time. A guy could die at this job, and hundreds, maybe thousands, had over the decades. So why take this job? I could not deny I was in a pure financial state of grace: I was officially flat broke. What did Joplin sing? "Nothin' left to lose…" and free as a bird. Well, I've attained that Zen moment. Gotta be freedom in there somewhere? And nowhere to land except in a logging camp way the hell up the crack of some sound off Knight's Inlet. Flying into camp can feel more like "Take a left turn at oblivion and work your way into chronic back pain.”
It was crazy but well-paid work, for sure, and somehow simpler than some of my other choices. Hemingway was not right. He said something like, if you're young, you're stupid, and can't see the danger, or worse, you like the danger 'cause you know you're close to something that could be big excitement for you. Yeah, right, and war is fun until you catch a bullet or watch a friend die. Well, anyone who said that had to be a guy who never logged. It just doesn't sound like anything any one of the riggin' rats I know would dare say. I mean, why mess with your luck?
Now, on the other hand, life can be good and affordable with little to fall back on. I like it when the rules are simple: don't get killed, don't get maimed, and don't kill anyone else. That's pretty straight up. And that's about all most of us have at first, on the way through and at the end. And Hemingway? Well, he was sitting up in the stands, nice and safe, half pissed on Spanish red, enjoying the 'spectacle' of bulls goring the guts out of horses, then being cut down in their prime by made-up mannequins hiding swords behind capes. He applauded that? No wonder he drank himself into a blown out liver and insanity, then brutally chased it all away with a mouthful of shotgun pellets. He glorified the bull ring where the blood meets the sword. Reality is more like "grab the bull by the tail, ready to face the situation", as they say, and find a way out of the jackpot. I believe in even odds, fist to fist, face to face. It's a little different, Hem, when you're at ground level, not sure whether to hold on tighter or let go.
I know the secret of how to stay alive; learn something new about logging each day. That accumulation of logging know-how directly increases my chances I’d stay off the 'Compo' stat sheets and keep finding work. Pull off the dodge long enough, and I just might get to spend the wad of cash I was about to earn in a sunny climate, eyeballing senoritas in any one of many cantinas all winter. I knew enough about this line of work to know being involved gives you the best odds 'cause it's much safer to know than to not know.
The bight is disguised, continual and everywhere. Logs can roll on you, steel-cable lines can slice you in half, your crummy can slip off an icy mountain road, the plane might ditch on the flight out, you can get poisoned in the cook-shack, you can get killed in a fight, you can slip and break a leg. It was all so easy. Often, the bight is so immediate; like when the thousands of feet of cables start whipping back and forth because of the tremendous counter-weight of the logs. When this happens, the cables themselves fly so fast they are invisible to the eye. They make a terrible "whoove whoove" sound of cold tempered steel cables slicing through the air. If you’re in the bight, that’ll be the last sound you’ll ever hear. Sometimes it's better not to have too vivid an imagination. It behooves the logger, if he wants to keep his name in the survivor column, to see the bight develop before it's that fraction of a second too late. In logging, except for the dying which they tell me lasts a long time, it can all be over in an instant.
I have to confess, I was way less conscious about slaughtering the pristine, primeval BC rain forest and much more interested in living through my hours, days, weeks and months on the side hills, so I could get back to the sweet life on the outside. I enjoyed the adrenalin too, spending the day dodging crushing logs and thousands of feet of murderous cables whipping wickedly around me, slapping the ground, scraping over rock bluffs, flipping logs around like pick-up sticks. The impressive strength and the controlled torque of the massive power plant on the yarder, capable of stretching tempered steel cable past the breaking point, reeling in massive logs, sometimes cracking and splintering in the steel grip of the choker's noose during the relentless drag to the landing. In the wake of the turn, what’s left behind is a rush of pungent, wet Cedar or Spruce spray and a freshly gouged mud trail across the once mossy floor of the fallen forest. It is something you don't forget. That's the winning side. Snapping one-inch steel cable has a pretty impressive bang too, and there is something powerfully visceral and addictive about being in control of all that raw torqued-up strength.
My lack of sleep was beginning to overpower me as I stupidly gazed out the window and listlessly considered in whose hands I was putting my life for the next few months. I knew better than to try to think anything through on a hangover but 'knowing better' meant little to this hammer head.
I wondered who I might be working with. At the top of the heap on any logging crew is the Hook Tender, or 'hooker', for short. Always a self-made, tobacco chewing, hollow-eyed, cursing, hung-over streak of mean whose guts every Rigging Slinger worth their wages hates because the hooker has the job the rigging slinger wants. In fact, think worse and be more aware of your riggin' puller 'cause, to a man, they are wanna-be hookers who have the life and death of the chokermen literally in their hands.
You see either of these guys in a bar? Ask yourself why they always sit back to the wall, whether drinkin' alone or at a table telling lies to a crew? Know you're not like them, and you probably don't want to know them. It's kind of like wearing a suit made out of meat and being near a hungry wolverine.
Lots of these guys are either just out of jail, avoiding court and a certain jail term, in jail and on work release, or in the middle of finding some way of getting back to jail. That’s one thing you never bring up. Except with Braggs. I wanted to know what kind of mayhem he wrought upon society. It would take us a couple of months to become good enough friends to talk about it. When things got out of hand, it was good to know he was in my corner. Jail. Kind of a touchy subject in camp.
As for other hookers, tread lightly, very, very lightly. And never show fear. Like a guy with a gun doesn't necessarily make him a fighter, I saw lots of guys in that job who were nowhere near making the grade. But until you become one of them, it is appropriate to adopt the mantle of grudging respect and self-survival. Offer no comment, for nothing is as useless to a veteran as a greenhorn choker-rat that can't tie his boots properly and couldn't pull milk out of a cow's teat, let alone keep a spot on his riggin' crew!
The first few weeks on any work gang can be tough on the uninitiated, let alone breaking in on a logging sidehill. My story started way before I ever laced up the caulks…
FRATERNITY OF WORKING MEN
I'd already been through the 'working-man test' by my sixteenth year. My parents flew me out to Toronto for the summer, giving me a break from 'my crowd'. I'd learned about all I needed to know concerning teen cruelty and clique dynamics, humiliation, bullying and soul-deflating penury doled out by drunken, barbiturate-addled 'teachers' sucking the life out of my youth because they'd consigned themselves to a life of hell. My mother was then in her sixth year at SFU - working on a four-year Political Science degree - and showing no signs of ever leaving that Masada of higher education. At her most ironic, she solved my Gordian-knotted confusion about the world saying, "You need a haircut, then a job." Just imagine my surprise when I talked my way into employment on a wire gang with CN Telecommunications in Toronto! My running away from problems at my parent's house seemed to have paid off when I got lucky finding the job as a ‘grunt’ or groundman, working on a gang. Somehow my mother had nailed it. I did want a job and to be in a working world. Besides, I was finished with high school.
Our crew was one of several maintaining the telegraph lines strung beside every CN track in western and northern Ontario. We labored in deep, leech-infested bottomless swamps and hanging high off windswept pre-Cambrian rock bluffs, raising forty-five foot poles with brute force, without the benefit of winches, trucks, or any modern mechanical aids. Hanging cross arms, stringing, moving and splicing endless rolls of wire, we moved or terminated services, moved sections of poles to accommodate new sidings, repaired winter and storm damage, and cleaned up after train de-railings. That kind of thing.
Our bunkhouse was an old, converted CN passenger car. The green, stained brass plaque mounted on the rusty, red siding by the door read, 'CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAY - 1921'. It spoke minimally of past glories. Of course, by the time it started doing service as our home, our luxury car was already denuded of its elegance and finery. The only semblance of a storied opulence, when rail transport truly defined Canada's golden age of travel, was our in-house maître'd.
Bob was a worried, little, balding man in a white apron who had constantly nervous hands. He was our cook. Unfortunately, Bob’s culinary expertise was limited to the school of 'boil it 'til it stops moving, then boil it some more, and it'll make soup'. Bob doubled also as our spiritual adviser. He was of the Jehovah Witness persuasion, and was always desperately forging his way toward the top of the list of those who would be accepted into JW heaven. I’m sure he felt closer to his rapture when, each day after I had started working on the gang, he'd leave a religious pamphlet on my pillow in a vain attempt to bring me along to glory with him. It took me some weeks to convince him I'd never make the Jehovah short-list.
Eventually I had to tell Bob to stop. Throwing the pamphlet I'd found on my bunk down on the only table in the bunkcar kitchen, I said, "Bob, would you please stop trying to make me part of your friged up religious cult?” We had returned to the bunkcar for lunch and to pick up another load of wire we were stringing along another rail spur we were upgrading. Bob looked up at me with hurt, childlike eyes. The sun reflected off his balding, forty-something head, but it wasn't too distracting as he was a small man and his bald spots were not yet fully developed. I knew little about Bob - exceeding already what I wanted to know about him - other than he could not cook by demonstrating to us on a daily basis that 'boiling' was his concept of food preparation.
"Why do you believe in that crap anyway?" I persisted like any other sensitive teenager might.
"Do you really want to know?” The poor man still thought he was reaching out to a potential conquest.
Ron and young Bob, two Toronto students working for the summer; Irish, the well-traveled quip from Dublin; Charlie, the block-head, moose-strong redhead from Nova Scotia, and Bill, the 'whina from Regina', oldest guy on the crew to never be promoted, were gathered around by now, sensing the unlocking of the secretes of the universe, so I said, "Sure."
"It's because of the wonder of it all.” He waved his arms in a big circle over his head, speaking as if a Ouija board had spelled his name and now the letters were floating in the air, and he was therefore compelled to launch into the 'voice' of the rapture.
It was too much. We all started laughing at him. The spell was broken, and Bob turned away angry. No JW short-list for me! Something of the nastiness I'd learned in high school was actually cashing in here. He spooned his soup around the large pot on the stove, muttering to himself, probably doing the math and coming up with the number 144,009. We ate voraciously, then left to finish off the afternoon. After that day, no religious pamphlet ever arrived at my pillow again.
My first day on that crew was a blur. At noon, I stepped off the train at the little town of St. Thomas, arriving from Union Station in Toronto. It took about three hours to arrive at my destination. When I wandered out of the train station, I was met by the crew. I got in the line-truck and was whisked out to a remote siding surrounded by pastures of furrowed fields. Our foreman, Hughey, immediately honored me with the nickname: 'the kid'.
That afternoon was highlighted, not so much as a triumphant celebration of my arrival, as by my dropping the steel tip of a 16 foot pike pole on Anson's head, knocking his hard hat off and into the swamp in which we were all standing. Anson, the sub-foreman, was retiring the next day and preferred, as he said to me, to go out with both his “ears attached like they had been for years now”.
We, or more particularly, the crew, did a lot of post-holing around in waist deep swamps, lifting the impossibly heavy and often submerged telephone poles out of the muck to raise them. As a result of almost taking Anson's ear off, however, I was relegated by Hughey to watching the crew ‘to learn something, for Christ’s sake’ for the rest of that day.
I did indeed learn something: the value of silence. When I offered to the men a simple observation of mine, as they peeled fetid reeds and black leeches from off themselves, standing in the complex quagmire of chemical run-off draining from both the fields and the rail lines, and after having just grunted as one and with impressive effort to raise a pole, I suggested it would be an easier job if the poles floated. The immediate and volatile response I received educated me to my lack of understanding of the vernacular and profundity of cursing, and the rightful attitude any new guy should undertake on any crew. A lesson I never forgot - which I still recall began with “Shutthefrigup!” - and neither have I forgotten the shower of leeches thrown at me.
Seven men comprised our crew, not including Bob. Hughey never lifted a thing, except his pencil which he used professionally to point out things others should lift. As I said, Anson was leaving the next day, so it was five of us doing the work. I was 'green' and did not know how to lift, so it was actually only four lifting for that afternoon. Clearly, I would have to develop back, leg and arm muscles – not to mention a propensity for swamps and leeches. It became crystal clear to me how useless the 'new guy' was to the crew. 'Get the frig out of the way, kid.' is not your basic inspirational pep talk, I can tell you. However, I made it through my first half day, and though deeply emotionally scarred, I was physically unscathed and felt pretty confidant I'd made good fulfilling the duties of silently standing around and observing the crew working.
After a supper of boiled hock, long hairs still attached to frightening animal parts, boiled potatoes and something boiled that was tangerine in color, perhaps rutabaga, I retired to my bunk. As no one had much to say to me, I read until my ability to keep my eyes open deserted me. I then spent what I would learn was the usually restless first night, listening to seven men snoring and passing gas, waiting for my first ‘real’ day on the job to begin.
My next day was a no mercy, full-on day of digging and pole raising. My short stint as observer was over. At shortly after seven AM, and a disappointing breakfast of runny fried eggs and burnt toast, another specialty of the cook, I was dispersed to a swamp with a nine foot 'spoon', a shovel and a forty- or fifty-pound, eight foot long Johnson bar with which to dig six foot deep post holes. I was to do this until Hughey brought the crew car back for lunch. "Keep the line straight." was my only instruction as he left me eagerly entering the swamp with my digging tools.
To my chagrin and some dampening of my enthusiasm, I discovered immediately the rubber boots supplied by my employer leaked. I found out later all the boots leaked. I was wet to the crotch the entire day and feared for my testicles becoming the nestling shelter of a new batch of leech young. At lunch I asked anyone if they knew how many were in a leech cluster and only got a sardonic snuff from Hughey for my attempt at conversation.
That afternoon, I dug again like I was born to it, until about the middle of the afternoon when we started raising four poles into the holes I had helped 'create'. This time I was made to lift from the deep end of the pole, arms under the massive weight, face in the water, turned sideways so I could breath. Hughey made a decisive gesture with his pencil then, without benefit of his muscles, we all lifted. I assume my end of the pole consisted of anti-gravity matter because the pole seemed to raise itself. I looked at my fellow crewmembers, their faces straining, red, grunting under the weight of their lift, sinking into the muck under their burden. Anson hurriedly rammed the 'cow' - a heavy pole with a cradle on one end that resembled the horns of a bovine - under the raised end of the pole to take the weight. This allowed us to shuffle quickly to acquire a better lifting position, lift, re-set the ‘cow’, move again, lift more, until finally Anson and young Bob could set their long steel-tipped pike-poles into the underside of the top of the pole. This purchase provided leverage to assist those of us still lifting with our arms and bodies. Eventually, the butt of our pole found the hole, sliding into a slightly more upright position.
Quick as you can say it, two more pike-poles were jammed into the top of the pole and it was erected. We corrected for perpendicularity, grounded the pike-poles firmly, then found and carried large rocks which were jammed in to the hole around the base of the pole. Eventually the pole could stand by itself.
We continued on in similar fashion until we raised three more poles that afternoon, each situation offering various degrees of lifting difficulty, rock packing difficulty, and hole finding difficulty. The constants of the afternoon were that never were we without leeches, mud, swamp filth and guidance from Hughey, the wise old owl, who broke neither a sweat nor the tip off his pencil.
Finally, the workday was over. Heading back along the track to where the line-truck was waiting, I noticed only a slight stiffness in my hands and a minor irritation in my palms. I was yawning already, there not being enough oxygen in Southern Ontario to replenish my muscles by simple breathing. To my worn surprise, I was no longer the least bit bothered about leech infestations or being soaking wet with muddy, rotting swamp detritus. At the truck, I stowed the roll of guy wire, two shovels, three pike poles and a Johnson Bar Hughey assigned me to carry back to the truck. Hughey managed his own pencil. During the drive back to the bunkcar, where Bob had no doubt prepared a repast of boiled something or other, I felt a warm glow and a magnificent release overpowering me.
At our bunkcar, I was overtaken the moment I saw my upper bunk by a sudden desire to become prone. I succumbed to the temptation, dragging off my sloshing rubbers, and rolling in 'for a minute' as my lack of seniority dictated I'd have to wait in line to shower anyway. I was immediately out like I'd been gunshot until the next morning when Bob woke me for breakfast.
Our fore-mentioned religious confrontation was still off in the future a week or two, so he was still kind enough to place a pamphlet on my pillow while saying, "Rise and shine, kid. Breakfast. God has brought us another glorious day."
I'd have probably enjoyed the glory of the ethereal blessing more if my eyes weren't glued together so tight. At that moment, I feared blindness and couldn't enjoy so much as a squint until I'd rubbed them vigorously. When I finally gained a fuzzy recollection of sight, I moved to sit up. I discovered I was losing what felt like a fistfight with my own body - which was obviously very angry at me as it fought back vengefully with pain and stiffness at every one of my attempts at any small move. Even my scalp was sore. Problematically, I could not unfurl my fingers which had curled up throughout the night, seizing into claw-like, mangled remnants of what yesterday were normal enough hands. The upside of this problem was that it facilitated the release of Bob's pathway to heaven pamphlet onto the ancient lino floor as I rolled my legs out of bed, dropping from the upper bunk to land painfully onto my feet. I soon was thankful I was still dressed in yesterday's damp, muddy work clothes.
On my way out of the toilet, a seat with a hole cut through the floor to the tracks below, I consoled myself at my good fortune of not having to pull socks on considering the struggle I'd already experienced with my zipper. At the breakfast table in the kitchen end of the rail car, I sat for some time trying to figure out how to pick up a fork and satiate the ravenous demon that used to be my stomach. I ventured a look around. The crew sat silent, eating, watching me.
I focused on conniving how I might work with a fork while in this condition. I tried, lamely, to pick up the fork by using my left elbow as a backstop, trying to slip it into the painfully crippled claw that had been my right hand a few short hours before. No go! Stymied, I studied my palms closely and saw that the skin folds of all the finger joints were blood stained, blistered and scabbed, particularly on the palms and at the base of each of my fingers. Baby calluses, I did not know beforehand, were spawned from repeatedly abusing bleeding blisters. On the back of each thumb, I was sporting a dime-size, oozing pus-blister where the leather glove seams conspiratorially rubbed my hands raw while I dug holes.
I was suddenly aware the crew was intently watching now. Hughey held a pencil in his hand that he was twitching back and forth, like a metronome counter. I felt it was time to make a move. There wasn't much about the next few minutes that were going to be good for me.
Resigned to my choice, I looked at my hands, thinking "Quit or eat.” I took a breath, held it, stiffened, looked around the table quickly one more time, raised a questioning eyebrow, then snapped both hands open as hard as I could, joining the fraternity of working men forever.
I'm not sure what expression crossed my face, but I can tell you a few of the guys looked away pretty quick. My recent speculation concerning my immediate fortunes was dead on. However, I never made a sound as I picked up my fork in what was now my bleeding right hand, a slab of toast with my mangled left claw, and dove in to the best breakfast of sloppy eggs and burnt toast I'd ever hogged down. I learned that pain, while a deterrent, will not stop you from eating if you're hungry enough. As I gorged myself, conversation began slowly around the table again. I cleaned up all the rest of the food as the guys lit smokes and chatted about the Maple Leafs and the lack of women while slurping coffee.
Digging in swamps again and again that month was repeated so many times it almost began to feel normal. Eventually, the pain from hard labor disappeared, I grew stronger, the calluses took, and the leech assaults diminished or became less important. I was accepted as part of the crew. Trial by fire - no way around it. You're in or you're out. I learned a few things then that are still true today: pull hard and she comes easy, always pull harder than the next guy or show the blood blisters from tryin', and no whinin'; there's always guys lookin' for your job if you don't want it. It's all small stuff, then cold beer and, if you're lucky, peelers after that.
CHAIN GANG
Later that summer, each day was sweltering hot as the thermometer climbed to over 90 degrees at King and Young in downtown 'TO'. Breathing was more like gulping for lungs full of oxygenated smog, gasping like a dying Coho on the deck of a gill-netter. Hughey gave me a 'soft' job. I was to go through a boxcar loaded with dozens of coils of new, coated copper line, matching them up for equal lengths best I could. He told me, “After we finish this stringing job, we’re going to be dispatched to Sudbury.”
The average weight on each roll was always just over 250 pounds. This impressive number was displayed prominently - when I could find it - on a tag on each roll. Matching the rolls for length made it easier for the splicer after we 'strung and hung' the new lines on the cross-arms, replacing the existing decades-old lines.
With each hour, I begrudgingly spent sweating in that boxcar, feeling sorrier for myself, ingratiating myself to the crew who I knew would not appreciate my efforts. I sweltered in the Brantford rail yard. A skinny sixteen-year-old kid, moving fifty or so rolls of wire around so the crew wouldn't be stuck doing their own math. That car was not as pleasant as a coffin buried in the cool earth, but was just as stagnant with dead air. Nothing moved in that rail yard, not a whisper of a breeze reached me, until an occasional freight train blew through the yard, thundering past the boxcar in which I toiled. The minute I heard one coming, I was hanging out the door until it finished passing, feeling the moving air cool and dry my sweat, succoring relief as the steel wheels clackety-clacked noisily past me on the uneven tracks. When the gusts were spent, it was time to get back at it. I was weight lifting in a dusty, youth-stifling sauna, and I had that chore, non-stop, for several days.
At mid-morning the first day in the boxcar, I appeared at the kitchen end of the bunkcar, and asked, “Hey, Bob, got a cup of coffee?”
He was sitting at the table, a huge pot was percolating on the stove; it had the distinct odor of boiling socks so I knew it would be our lunch. He turned to me robotically, and I saw he was reading a JW pamphlet which he flaunted, then he said, “Coffee?”
The meaning was clear; the cost of my break would be my soul going over to Jehovah. I couldn’t countenance spiritual blackmail, so I said, “Forget it. I’ll go with water.” Would the guy never give up?
Finally, it came time to move the rolls out of the boxcar and onto the line truck. This was accomplished as a small work detail and only warrants recounting because of the banality with which we undertook this small job detail and got it done with stone-faced equanimity - when in fact it was a monumental undertaking. The task required my rolling the matched coils over to the waiting grunt. I positioned the ‘Nova Scotia donut’, as Irish called them, so the grunt could flop the bundle onto his waiting shoulders after he stuck his head into the hole. I then released all responsibility for the charge, and the grunt assumed the weight, often to the good-natured laughing Charlie or Irish.
These two repeated this task most often, but the whole crew, other than royalty of course, moved coils. I watched them feel the weight settle on their shoulders. Then, with a strong effort, lift the roll, square it up for balance and begin walking the distance of a boxcar and a half alongside the adjacent tracks. Once reaching the end of the row of boxcars beside us, the burdened man had to step over three sets of tracks, eventually lifting the front edge of the roll onto the steel deck at the back of the line truck. Next, he’d re-grip the tenuously balancing weight, and shrug and lift simultaneously, pushing the coil up and over his head in one motion, where it flopped onto the deck of the truck. This released the man’s head from the donut hole. Not the kind of job accomplished by the twiddling of a pencil!
While I had been in the boxcar arranging coils, I began harboring ungenerous thoughts about the come-upance the guys would feel when they realized how hard I had been working while they were out lollygagging up to their crotches in leech-infested, fetid swamp water all day. Charlie, the big export from Nova Scotia, and Irish made three round trips before they started egging me on to ‘have a go’. Well, I was not going to be one to turn down the dare and besides, over the past two days I believed I’d become accustomed to the weight, so I took up the challenge. I took my place standing at the door of the boxcar, as they all had, and Jerry gently laid a ‘donut’ onto my shoulders. I became alarmed and, I was told later, quite instantly red in the face. I simply did not believe a person could carry such intense weight! However, with my head already through the donut hole I was determined - due more to fear of mortal injury should I fall with this weight around my neck than anything - and dragged the weight off the deck of the boxcar and fully onto my shoulders. I guess-timated the roll weighed a full hundred pounds more than I did even wearing leech filled swamp boots! Despite the pain of crushing cartilage and stressed shoulder bones, I found some way to turn, learning immediately to keep the roll balanced perfectly as any shift that caused one iota of imbalance would immediately cause great pain, spell imminent and permanent neck-bracing, and probably long-lasting crew-ridicule. I took a half-sliding step on the crunching gravel, staggering under the weight. My knees were not cooperating, threatening to buckle with each step, and with Charlie and Irish laughing at the end of the wind tunnel in my ears, I suddenly realized just how far away the end of the next boxcar really was.
I could see just over the lip of the ‘donut’. My arms were already aching, and my legs were screaming for me to drop the roll, but that just wasn't going to happen. I really do not know how I continued, eventually stepping over the sets of rails, but I did it. Aiden saw my struggle and kindly followed me back to the truck just in case I couldn't make the grade. He was ready to spot me should I fail, so I took some confidence from him.
The closer I got to the truck, the more determined I became to deliver the roll. However, arriving at the truck, my tank full of 'hero' was completely burned out and I couldn't lift the roll. Aiden, who had also delivered several ‘donuts’, encouraged me to ‘give 'er another try’. With the last of my strength, I was able to lift only the front of the roll onto the deck, but was fading really fast when I felt sets of hands lift the roll from behind me. Both Irish and Charlie were there, flipping the roll up and over my head. With the release of the weight, I suddenly felt that I could fly I felt so light. The wind tunnel echo that had been engulfing my ears abated and there were Aiden, Charlie and Irish slapping me on the back and asking me if I'd like another? I declined the offer, got back into the boxcar and happily arranged ‘donuts’ for the boys.
I reflected positively on myself knowing I'd made the grade, but never did I lose my humility because I can tell you it was touch and go all the way. Still, finding the gumption to lift my feet to step over the rails was soul expanding. I had almost failed lifting the roll onto the flat bed at the back of the line truck, but my crewmates had come through for me. My shoulders ached, my neck felt strained and I could feel my lower back telling me that I should consider taking ‘a desk job’ but I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone. What truly amazed me about that lift was the ease with which the rest of the crew made several trips - repeating what damn near did me in doing it once! Of course, loading the truck was only half the job, and the routine was repeated in reverse out on the track. We earned our bowls of Bob's ‘boiled socks’ soup that day and for quite a few days after!
Another display of strength in danger of passing away unnoticed forever involves all of us, but mostly Charlie and Irish again. After finishing the stringing job, our crew was working in Sudbury, thankful we’d escaped the oppressive humidity of a sweltering Southern Ontario July. We threw out our anchor north of town, close to where we were to move a line over for a siding the track crew was going to build after we were finished.
We arrived at prime 'fly' time, and the reality of the northern Ontario fly season myths did not disappoint. I soon discovered our hip-waders and boots were in better shape than the mosquito netting supplied by the company. Nets might have been some relief to us, had there been any reason to wear one other than to entice swarms of flies in and keep them 'biting close' for so long. On comparison, though, the netting certainly was more effective than the screens on our bunk-car windows, in which holes had been punched out over the years, making them helpful, I assumed, as portals through which to spit 'snoose' or flick cigarette butts, undermining any appreciable practicality of actually keeping flies out.
Each morning while in Sudbury, despite cowering each night with my head under the sheets, I woke up with a horribly disfigured and swollen face from bites, my ears always itching horribly. If I wasn’t coughing up acrid bile from breathing sulfurous, noxious smelter fumes inexorably wafting across the tundra like the heavy mists on the moors of South Wales, I'd curse the insidious and cowardly attack as I jumped out of my bunk. At that time, one could see on the horizon the soon-to-be 'tallest smoke stack in the world' was only partially completed. The murderous effluent from the famous nickel smelters - which the smokestack was designed to send afar carried away by prevailing winds - was still very much lethal and discharged to settle like a gaseous plague infecting the locals. To my dismay, the chimney was as yet inoperative, and my pristine lungs were apparently about to follow suit. This concept of protecting the environment was a classic micro-example of the rampant disregard for pollution control, employing engineering and planning strategies widely utilized in those days and which I refer to as, 'Huck it over the fence'.
Unfortunately, our crew's timing was off. We were not to enjoy the obvious benefits of this concept future generations of
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