The government of Mr. Ed is currently trying to figure out new licence plates for the province - Peter Lougheed's pink, white and blue "Wild Rose Country" markers apparently having fallen out of favour with the bureaucrats. (Canada's largest and most expensive bureaucracy always has to have something to fiddle with, being, like all modern civil services, little more than giant make-work project for all those otherwise unemployable liberal arts grads.) But if they must change the licence plate, perhaps the new one should have something to do with what Alberta has been about for more than half its life. May I propose:
Think it sends the right message, and the colours - the black oil, the golden fields, the Alberta blue sky - are an improvement on the rather bland, slightly gay combination that Peter the Red bestowed upon us 28 years ago. I hear the politicians are leaning towards the motto "Strong and Free" (a translation of the Fortis et Liber on the coat of arms), but that phrase (also contained in the Canadian national anthem) could only really be accurate if we weren't beholden to Ottawa. And with oil at $140 a barrel and natural gas up around $12 a giga-whatsit, Alberta is unlikely to sink into the sort of recession that fosters the discontent necessary for separation ...
Where was I before I veered off on this tangent? Ah yes: the jobsite in Sherwood Park and its merry band of men. Keymay, friend and protector to chilly pipelines, is the general contractor, meaning it pays for the job. Wrapex Industrial Services, my company, is the "prime contractor," meaning we direct the operation: hiring the assorted sub-trades (steel workers, electricians, plumbers, concrete guys, framers, dry-wallers, etc.) Wrapex's site supervisor is the previously mentioned Grade 10 dropout from Port Alberni whom I work under. Brian, an irascible 43-year-old journeyman carpenter hires and oversees the subtrades, making sure they are doing what the big engineers' drawings in his trailer office say they should be doing; he buys the materials and rents the equipment; and he assigns and oversees the jobs that fall between the cracks of what the sub-trades perform - the jobs that poor feckless Eric and I do. Brian is a hell of a carpenter who in more than 20 years in the trade has learned every possible trick and efficiency possible, tends to be a stickler for detail, and can be a bit of a prick about it. This makes things difficult for the green-as-grass likes of me, as I am constantly being upbraided for doing things the slow and stupid way. Things are, however, much more difficult for poor hapless Eric, who, through some French Canadian friend of a friend in Wrapex, was hired on as the "carpenter" whose charge I - as a carpenter's helper - was supposed to be.
Unhappily Eric is by no means a carpenter. He's a 37-year-old Quebeckian (to borrow Paul McCartney's catchy locution) whose two-year-old English gives him the slightly comical habit of pronouncing all words stating with vowels with aitches, while dropping them from the words that require them (calling to mind that ancient comedy routine where the pea-souper asks for "Two h'eggs, side-by-h'each") . Heric, as I call him, is a likeable enough guy, and has a picaresque biography that includes being born and raised in the shipbuilding town of Lévis, having worked building warships for the Canadian Navy, having been a hunting guide in northern Quebec, a rodeo rider all over Canada, a motocross racer, and an Okanagan fruit picker. In his spare time he paddles sea kayaks through dangerous waters, drinks 20 beers at a sitting, and loves to cook. He doesn't look very heroic. He’s maybe 5' 9', pudgy, and with a belly and a sharp nose that separates small, bright blue eyes, making him look a bit like a large, intense mouse. His last job was working in the yard of a big, amorphous oil-patch supply company where being a "carpenter" required little in the way of actual carpentry, yet still paid him around $100,000 a year with overtime.
On the strength of that wage, Heric bought a half-million-dollar acreage near Tofield at the top of the market (last fall) and could afford the $2,900 mortgage payment. But the big company lost a contract and laid Eric off, leaving him unemployed for four months until he signed on with Wrapex for $28 an hour (roughly $65,000 a year). It's barely enough to keep the beast from the door, especially considering the $40,000 in additional debt Eric has on his credit cards and his Mazda 4 X 4.
I tell him he should declare bankruptcy – having reluctantly done so myself a few years ago after the expensive failure of Provincial & Territorial Report. Bankruptcy is fairly painless these days and, under certain circumstances – like mine - one can keep one’s house. But Heric won’t do it, and instead is pushing himself deeper into debt by doing renovations to the house that he thinks will make it saleable, despite a depressed residential market that threatens to persist for a couple of years and makes his house worth less than what he paid for it. But his plan is to sell and rejoin his girlfriend in Lévis, who works as a legal secretary, speaks no English, and refuses to move to Alberta. “I love ‘er,” he told me, tucking into some delicious smelling curried noodle and chicken concoction he’d whipped up the night before for his lunch.
I’m of two minds. On the one hand, Heric is a nice guy. He also tends to catch most of the sarcastic ire of Brian, often delivered in front of the sub-trades (who look away, embarrassed.) This does tend to take the pressure off me (I’m supposed to know nothing; Heric is supposed to know how to be a carpenter). On the other hand, his lack of skills, his tendency to drag out jobs, and his difficulty understanding Brian’s curt and colloquial instructions makes him frustrating to work with. But I swear I didn’t do it on purpose …
A week or so ago Heric and I were putting in some forms for the outside concrete pads that will support the air-exchanger units for the building. I was using a sledgehammer to pound the stakes that hold the two-by-eights of the form in place. Heric, who is always trying to make a two-man job out of a one-man job, was crouching and holding the stakes while I pounded. When he decided to stand up, he placed his left hand on the top of the stake for support, just as my next hammer blow was at its apex. I watched the inevitable slow-motion of the 12-pound sledge coming down on Heric’s hand.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Heric,” I said. But he was off already doing the silent dance of pain around the yard.
Later I drove him over to a medical clinic in northeast Edmonton where x-rays showed there was nothing broken. But his hand swelled, and remains painful eight days later (according to Heric), meaning he is assigned to “light duties” that can be done with one hand.
I think the injury also kept Eric from being laid off. Brian, who alternates between feelings of pity for the poor guy who might lose his house, and anger over the so-called carpenter who can’t carpent, apparently can’t lay him off when he’s injured or it will cost the company dearly in increased worker’s compensation premiums. So Heric picks up supplies in the company truck, sweeps and tidies the building, reads his Western Horseman magazine in the trailer, and applies ice to his left hand. Meanwhile the building is getting to the stage where two-man jobs, such as insulation, are going recur. Therefore hapless Heric, when his hand is better, may survive at Wrapex a little while longer yet.
(*The name of this Edmonton bedroom community - which serendipitously remains a "hamlet," even though it has grown to 50,000 - was the brainchild of the original subdivision developer in the 1950s, whose enthusiasm for the mythical outlaw also led to the naming of streets such as Nottingham Blvd, Robin St. and Marion Dr.)
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