FIRST POST - NAIL GUN

A couple of days ago I "got bit" - as my foreman Brian put it - by a nail gun. I was nailing together a bunch of two-by-two frames for the walls of two 40-foot freight containers we are converting to insulated office storage units on a construction site east of Edmonton in Sherwood Park. I was holding a two-by-two with my left hand and nailing into it though another two-by-two at 90 degrees that formed the cross of the T. Either through my incompetence or because of knot in the wood, the gun double fired and the second three-and-a-half-inch nail missed the stem of the T and hit the side of the middle finger of my left hand. It caught me just below the first knuckle. I guess it had hit the bone and bounced off, for, after howling in pain and dropping the Hitachi spiker, I found the nail sort of sitting on the side of my finger, its point held by the rim of skin on the deep hole that was not bleeding as much as you'd expect.

"You all right?" asked Eric, the French Canadian carpenter who was hired this week to work on the containers and who in theory is my direct supervisor. "Yeah," I said, "It's just a ..." I tried to think of something simpler and less idiomatic than "flesh wound" because Eric's English is only two years old and still needs much parenting. "Little hole," I decided on, then went into the office/lunch trailer to get an antiseptic swab and a band-aid.

I continued nailing for the rest of the morning and afternoon, and the finger swelled and stopped, more or less, moving. There didn't seem to be anything broken, however, so I didn't bother getting any medical attention that evening - despite the rather satisfying horror with which the girls considered the purplish sausage that was now my up-yours digit. "Ee-yew!" said Miranda when I went to grab some of the popcorn she was eating in front of yet another episode of Angel, to which the girls are all addicted. From what I've seen of the show, there's much gorier stuff in than nailed and swollen fingers. I grabbed some popcorn anyway and went into my office to watch the show I am currently addicted to - Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO comedy which stars Seinfeld creator Larry David (the inspiration for the George Costanza character) playing a supposedly fictionalized version of his rich Californian self. For a humble nail-spiker, it's an escape.

Next day the finger was still sore, but there was a bit of movement and by lunch time it was almost completely bendable again. Brian the foreman, a 42-year-old from the Vancouver Island mill town of Port Alberni, has been working as a carpenter for 20 years and if he hasn't seen it all, pretends to have. My little nip was nothing. "Once," he said, cocking his tanned bald head and squinting one eye in what I suppose to be a characteristic gesture, " we had this guy nailed two of his fingers together like this ... Took him to the hospital and the nurse, she says, 'Why didn't you stop hitting yourself with the hammer after the first hit?" Didn't know about nail guns, you see. Guys have put eyes out with these guns, hit themselves in the balls, nailed their hands to boards. My little nip was nothing.

It's been a while since I've worked steadily in this kind of blue-collar, workin'-stiff environment, though physical work has not been entirely unkown these last few years . When I worked for the self-described "Crazy Fucking Frenchman" (CFF) there were days here and there where I would be helping unload a container of furniture for our store, or helping with some of its renovations. Later, after the Frenchman pulled the plug on NiceStuff Quality Consignment, I became his general dogsbody, reminding myself sometimes of that half-crazed sidekick to the mad Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, who was played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now and who says of Kurtz, "He enlarged my mind." I helped the Frenchman - who was in fact born in the Kurtzian homeland of Belgium and raised in France - set up an export operation that sent container loads of shoes and clothes to Africa to support the orphanage he had taken over in Burundi and would sometimes be called upon to load the containers. When CFF decided he wanted to build some low cost rooms at his rundown resort on Lily Lake, north of Edmonton, to cash in on the impending boom from the oilsands upgraders in nearby Redwater, I became project manager and sometime labourer in the clearing of land and the moving and renovating of 16 ancient Atco trailers that were to be the rooms - before we hit a zoning roadblock erected by the County of Sturgeon. The roadblock killed the project and, on Dec. 31, ended my two and half years of partnership and employment with the crazed Frog. It was an interesting 32 months, mostly resembling a kind of theatre. Let's pretend we're starting a furniture consignment business. Let's pretend we're going to import Chinese furniture. Let's pretend we're expanding the resort. Let's pretend we're setting up a self-sustaining charity in Africa. Following on CFF's latest whim, and facilitated by portions of his $40-million net worth, we would do these things, but then would stop doing these things. The show's run was over. "The main thing is, Ric," CFF would ultimately say, "is that we gave 'er an 'ell of a try." Easy for multi-millionaires to be so philosophical. Oh well, at least I got a trip to China out of the deal (lining up factories to provide furniture), and how many people can say they ran a consignment store in Prince George, BC? How many people would want to?

For most of the time I worked for CFF, I retained ties to the world of journalism by being a regular political columnist for Ezra Levant's redneck Calgary magazine Western Standard. That ended in the fall of last year when the magazine went tits up. Alberta Report, my alma mater, had suffered the same fate in 2003, suggesting that edgy conservative magazines can't really survive in the watery porridge that is the Canadian media. Why Did the Canadian Cross the Road? To get to the middle. How do you get fifty Canadians out of a swimming pool? You say, "Okay, all you Canadians. Out of the pool now." It is true, even in Alberta, that Canadians are bland, moderate and docilely led by the country's liberal controllers in the judiciary, the media, the schools, the bureaucracy and the advertising industry. Look at the Harper government: The ridiculously anachronistic apology to the Indians. The kowtowing to Global Warming theology. The caving in on homosexual marriage. The bloating of the federal civil service. The shoveling of money into the fattest and laziest of all provinces, Québec. Conservatism in Canada - like belief in God in the United Church - is probably oxymoronic. Luckily for redneck columnists without a magazine, there remains the "blogosphere" - and isn't that a horrible fucking word.

I come to be spiking two-by-twos and fingers by way of Ted Byfield. He is, some will know, the founder of the aforementioned and lamented Alberta Report. That weekly newsmagazine died after 30 years not on Ted's watch, but on that of his dour son Link, now one of Alberta's "senators-in-waiiting," co-founder of the quixotic Wild Rose Alliance party, and a man without Ted's capacity for charming money from the trees.

In recent years Ted has charmed the money from an assortment of trees to finance a 12-volume series on the history of the Christian church entitled The Christians. This is Byfield's swan song and although he is still hale enough to consume a half dozen boilermakers in a sitting or write an eminently readable 7000-word chapter on St. Francis of Assisi in a week, he turns 80 next month, does not expect to see 90, and is therefore anxious to get the series finished in the next three or four years.

After I'd parted ways with CFF at the close of 2007, Ted was good enough to give me a bunch of stuff to write for Volume 7 of the series, which covers the 11th and 12th centuries and takes in the Crusades, the Mongols, the building of the Gothic cathedrals and an assortment of theologians including Aquinas and Abelard. Interesting stuff - which I will be bound to pretentiously reference in blogs to come - and it paid the bills until the work ran out a couple of weeks ago. There will now not another Christian history book volume for another four months, while the volume just completed goes into production and distribution, and while Ted beats the trees for the extra money that will inevitably be required to proceed with Volume 8.

One of these trees has been an old Christian venture capitalist by the name of Hokansen who attends the same Orthodox Church (St Herman's) as Ted. His son, Jon Hokensen, runs and holds a small ownership position in a company called Wrapex that is involved in a number of construction related activities. It was through Jon Hokensen that Ted got me this current job.

I had taken the job with the understanding that I would be going up to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, on a three-weeks-in, two-weeks-out basis. I was to serve as a carpenter's helper in a contract Wrapex had to provide labour for another company that was helping building the camp at Hope Bay. This would, I thought, be an interesting break from writing. More importantly, the money - close to 100K a year - would be sufficient not only to support the family, but to pay off some of the debts that had accumulated in the last six months.

So I'd been preparing to leave on June 15, had taken the mandatory two-day first aid course and the online construction site safety training, had been issued my royal blue Wrapex hardhat, had bought my workboots and tools, and was working half time with Brian on the Sherwood Park job site in an attempt to expedite the process of transforming a green-as-grass, pasty-faced, out-of-shape 52-year-old into something that would not be quite so embarrassing to the company when its Twin Otter touched down at the Hope Bay mine on the first day of work (The Wrapex carpenters and helpers were to sleep in a hotel in Cambridge Bay and be be flown in and out of the camp every day.)

The other half of the time before leaving on this Arctic odyssey was spent helping Byfield finish Volume 7 of The Christians in the modest West Edmonton office that Ted shares with two twenty-something male researcher, Jared Tkachuk and Peter Henderson, an office assistant called Veronica, and layout artist Dean Pickup, the guy responsible for making the volumes of this series as handsome as they are readable.

(I would encourage any of you out there who are interested in the 2000-year history of Christianity, or are interested in having your kids learn about the single greatest shaping force in western civilization - something largely ignored by the idiot public school system - to pick up the seven volumes that have been written to date. The books are a combination of text and colour illustration, a bit like those Time-Life series that used to be produced on subjects ranging from geography to home improvement. Byfield, the old newsman and acolyte of Henry Luce, insists that the text read more like a newsmagazine than a history book, and this makes the stuff fairly accessible and, for the most part, readable. Obviously Ted, an Orthodox Christian who seems to enjoy the chanting and droning of the bearded incense-wafting priests at St. Herman's every Sunday, is sympathetic to his book's subject. But the series is not, by any means, Christian agitprop, and does not gloss over the many failures and shames of Christianity through the centuries. Enough plugging. If you're interested in getting the books, go to their website: www.christianhistoryproject.com )

It was the Friday before the Sunday I was scheduled to leave for Cambridge Bay, and I was in Christian history office writing headlines for my chapter on the last Crusades (Hearts of lions, feet of clay) when Jon Hokansen called from Wrapex.

"I'm sorry, Ric, but it doesn't look like you'll be leaving on Sunday."

Seems that the company that had hired Wrapex to supply labour had decided it would now recruit its own. Later I heard from others that the labour Wrapex had sent was not up to snuff. One guy had started a fist fight with an Eskimo - sorry, Inuit - and another guy had made a nuisance of himself by whining about the working conditions.

And so I'm stuck in Edmonton for the nonce, wielding a nail-gun, though not quite so recklessly as before.