SHIVERING TIMBERS

If we make it through December
Everything’s gonna be all right, I know.
It’s the coldest part of winter
And I shiver when I see the falling snow

- Merle Haggard, If We Make it Through December
(watch a young Merle perform the song on YouTube)

For a while it seemed it wouldn't happen, but the prolonged and freakishly clement fall has ended abruptly and I am now plugging in the block heater and fantasizing yet again about abandoning the family to become a beach drunk in some cheap Hispanic tropicana. A couple of Thursdays ago, working outside, the temperature hovered around minus 14C and there was a wind. This is Edmonton and, ol' Californian Merle notwithstanding, it is going to get colder. In fact it already has. And after a miraculous November of days around zero and slightly above, this climatic inevitability seems just plain ignorant. I'm getting too old for this kind of shit - and even some of the thirty-something guys for whom I'm working say the same thing. Scaffolding is what I'm doing now. And it's damned hard work.

The carpenter's helper job in Sherwood Park with Wrapex, which itself had its arduous days, ended with the completion of the factory/office building in mid-November. If that job was any indication, there isn't, among the trades, a great deal of sentimentality attending the completion of a project. The electricians, who'd been pulling their wires and installing their switches, lights and boxes for almost as long as the site has been there - ground was broken in May - packed up their office trailer and their scrap wire and left for their next project (a major expansion of a Toyota dealership in west Edmonton) without a backward glance. The plumbing and mechanical guys (and one gal), with us for almost as long, were suddenly gone with nary a wave. Even my malignant master Brian, though having occasionally waxed appreciatively about the results of his six months of supervision, browbeating and abuse, spent most of the end days bitching about the deficiencies of the sorry trades and the flawed budgeting process at Wrapex that had forced him to hire such crap help. One might have hoped for a wrap party at Willy’s Pub, the site of our occasional after-work beers. But no. Everyone just went his own way, the customer (KeyMay/Key Thermal) moved in with its covey of immigrant sewing-machine jockeys who started making the blankies for pipes, and the half a year in which a patch of prairie has been transformed into a reasonably handsome 20,000-square-foot office/factory/warehouse was just over.

"I'll never fucking do this again," said Brian, looking forward to a couple of weeks off, and talking vaguely about taking on a framing job with an old buddy. I'd contemplated telling him exactly what I thought of his people skills, but decided against burning another bridge. God knows I've burned enough of those, and in this Decembrist economy one never knows whose bridge one might be forced to recross in one's abject desperation.

There are certainly few prospects my old trade of journalism. The Edmonton Journal, where I worked for eight years until dynamiting that bridge in 2002, recently gave another 30 or so editorial staff the buy-out - and had silver-parachuted (three weeks severance for every year worked) roughly the same number early in the year. Canwest's stocks are in the tank, and that cannot be blamed entirely on the filmic misadventures of the late Izzy Asper's prodigies, Lenny and Dave. Newspapers are going the way of the buggy whip.

I was just reading an article in a nine-month-old issue of The New Yorker that says independent, publicly traded American newspapers had lost 42% of their value in the previous three years. "Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared ... the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily newspaper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than 15 hours a month. Only 19% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is 55 and rising."

And this was written half a year before the current economic shit started hitting the fan. I, and even my girls, might enjoy the ritual of crumpling through the broadsheet sections of the National Post and the Journal at breakfast table, but the growing majority seem to prefer to get their news from the unblinking flat screens on their desk. While its true that a lot of that news comes from the digital versions of the same newspapers that my family soils with marmalade and coffee, and that those newspapers still require writers and editors, the trend is towards the Huffington and Drudge type products that produce information of dubious veracity with skeleton staffs paid peanuts. Good old Conrad Black sure as hell got out when the getting was good. Sadly the getting out landed him in the hoosegow on what perhaps are trumped up charges cooked up by a phalanx of envious investors.

(And, on the subject of Conrad, I wish to God he'd stop writing those thumb-sucking pieces in the Post on politics and the economy. I - and I think I speak for most of us - want to know what exactly life is like for titled press baron in a southern US jail. Is he, as that old schnorrer Peter Newman predicted, getting it up the ass? Somehow I doubt that. But the penal dynamics must be fascinating and worthy at least of a British sitcom. Maybe Lord Black will give us a book on life in the joint after Bush pardons him.)

* * *

Since leaving good old Brian and Wrapex, I am now shakily employed on a scaffolding crew with Benchmark, a company partly owned by Jonathon Hokansen. Jon was the guy, then full-time at Wrapex, who hired me in May, ostensibly to go to Nunavut as a carpenter's helper and make tons of money. Except Wrapex lost the contract, I was sent to the Sherwood Park site, paid less money, and had Brian inflicted on me to boot. Hokansen meanwhile branched out and started Benchmark (he retains a minor share in Wrapex and shares an office with them) .

The good news is that I am no longer working for Bri. Hokansen, who's 38, is a veteran of the scaffolding trade with the Popeye forearms to prove it. But despite looking like a blonde L'il Abner, he's a thoughtful and gentle giant who treats his workers with consideration and toleration. The other crew members appear - so far, anyway - to be similarly decent. Having spent five months being chided for every misstep and ridden like a mule, the courtesy and camaraderie seems like some weird dream. They even say "thankyou" when you hand them up a piece of gear! Very strange. But nice.

The bad news is this is really hard, repetitive, Sisyphean work. Also, since Benchmark is a small and new scaffolding company trying to make a name for itself in an oil economy teetering on the brink of something godawful, the contracts are sporadic and the company cannot be relied upon to provide the 40 hours a week necessary to keep the Dolphinarium afloat. I may have to turn to crime.

On the days I do work, the eight or nine hours are spent humping the assorted chunks of steel that make up the tube, clamp and "system" scaffold - ledgers, ply-decks, bay braces, right-angles, standards and planks. It's a bit like going to the gym for eight hours every day, but usually in far less clement conditions.

The first place I found myself was inside a 56-foot high, 25-foot-wide boiler tank being constructed by a Malaysian owned company called KNM based, peculiarly enough, in the boondock town of Tofield, about forty minutes east of Edmonton. This multinational company is building the boilers for the tarsands in Fort McMurray - I'm guessing to create the steam that is pumped into the ground to loosen the oil from the sand in the SAG-D process. Benchmark was contracted to build a nine-story, hexagonal scaffold inside one of these tanks so that insulators could attach fibreglass batting to the wall. Then the scaffold had to be taken down and rebuilt a foot and a half further away from the walls of the tank so that pipefitters could attach the heating pipes on top of the insulation. The scaffolding process was repeated a final time in yet another configuration so that "spiders" - temporary criss-crossings of steel-beam running the diameter of the tank - could be welded in at several levels, serving as a packing brace to prevent the vessel from collapsing on itself when shipped on its side by flatbed trailer to McMurray.

Because I am no good with heights, I have been designated as a "ground man." This means that while the journeymen, foremen and two-year scaffolders are up top hammering together or hammering apart the steel members, I am on the ground or a couple of storeys up hoisting or lowering the parts. Sometimes I am part of a "chain" of guys, one per level, handing up or handing down parts in a continuous stream of metal - giving each part a little twist to let the passer know you have a hold of it.

Scaffolders, I am learning, are one of those cocky trades, revelling in the physicality of their work. You cannot do this job without being fit, and I have lost about 15 pounds since I began. At night the aches and pains keep me awake unless quelled with Tylenol 3s. The high point of my week is the hour I spend with my therapeutic masseuse, an able 43-year-old Palestinian woman called Manal who is covered by my medical plan. But I'm just an old curiosity, not at all typical.

The foremen and other more experienced crewmembers are mostly smart-mouthed guys in their thirties. There's Mike, a stocky, curly-haired farmboy from Two Hills, who's been doing this for eight years and who currently lives with Yin, a petite 22-year-old Hong Kong-born girl with a Quentin Tarantino edge and larger than normal tits for an Oriental. Having scaffolded for a few months, she occasionally joins us on jobs and can haul gear and use the fuck patois with the best of them. Mike says she has her black-belt in Tai Kwan Do, which would fit the mold. There's Danny, a partner with Jon in the business, and a muscle-bound bodybuilder with a wife and a couple of kids. He bears a passing resemblance to Bruce Willis, but, like so many of we married men, suffers from a lack of conjugal activity. Although, as he pointed out one day in the tank, "If she gave me sex whenever I wanted it, I'd probably not want it by now." Tobias, an exotic mix of Lebanese and Irish from New Brunswick, seems never to want for female company or participation and, in his lilting Maritime accent, with the hazel, lady-killer eyes crinkling, likes to relate the stories of his conquests. On the same day in the tank that Danny was lamenting his marital drought, Tobias spoke matter-of-factly of the previous night's activities with the girlfried du jour. "I gave 'er two orgasms last night. She got one just rubbin' against my leg, then another when I popped it inside of 'er."

All of this chit-chat, you must understand, occurs while these guys are dancing around forty or fifty feet up, in an echoing tank with a heat blower roaring below, and with the hammers banging on steel like some cheesy Irish percussion act, while I and a bunch of other grunts - including a few Korean immigrants brought in by KNM - mutely hand up the ledgers, the standards, the braces, the tubes and the plydecks. It is, as the kiddies say, surreal.


* * *

I'd like to thank those of you who sent me cheques for The Book of Ted: Epistles from an Unrepentant Redneck. You should have received them by now. The cheques have certainly been cashed. I still have a couple of boxes left. The book, as already pointed out in the previous blog posting, is a delight to behold and makes a wonderful gift for one's favourite conservative. Again, if you would like a copy or four, send $50 per book (cheques are fine) to

Ric Dolphin
15916 Patricia Drive
Edmonton, AB
T5R 5N4

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with another excerpt, this one from Ted's Aug. 22, 1994 column about our friends the Indians.

...Take, for instance, the contention sometimes advanced on behalf of aboriginal culture. What is it that modern society can learn from it? It was unswervingly conservationist, we are told. The natives did not waste, and they lived in harmony with their environment. That's why the prairies teemed with buffalo before the white man came.

But was this harmony produced by native curlture or by a deficiency of native technology? If it was their culture, then when the natives gained that technology, they would have remained conservationist. The facts are the opposite. Within a hundred years of acquiring both the horse and the gun from the whites, the natives and the Métis eradicated the buffalo. In Canada, the great herds were gone before the white farmers and ranchers ever arrived, they were driven over the buffalo jumps and killed by the hundreds, most of the meat left to rot once the finer cuts were removed.

(Now watch. Having written this, I will be accused of bigotry, racism and so on. But there will be very little, if any, historical evidence to prove the contention wrong. "Oral history" may be cited of course, but if you ask for its credentials - i.e., some kind of evidence that it existed when it was said to have existed - this is declared impossible, because of it's nature. Before there were tape recorders, how could you record "oral history?" But then how are we to know that somebody didn't just, well, make it up? Maybe it doesn't go back to the "elders." Maybe it only goes back to the professors. Maybe they invented it. How are we to tell?"