QUEBECKIAN BASHING

Our jobsite, on the fringes of the preciously named hamlet of Sherwood Park*, has, like any place of work, become a home away from home. We're building a 10,000 square-foot factory/office for a company called Keymay in a mud field. Out in the yard, Keymay's platoon of strutting 20-somethings in wife-beater shirts, along with several pieces of heavy equipment, build big concrete sleeves for weighting pipelines down in muskeg and other unstable terrain. In Keymay's existing factory, for which we are building the replacement, a coterie of Third World immigrants in white paper coveralls sews together big, quilted mufflers worn by the pipes of refineries, keeping them toasty in the winter. Just as the Brits treat their pets better than their children, so do Albertans love their pipelines. They are, after all, the conduits of oil, which is life itself here in Alberta.

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.)

TED BYFIELD, OCTAGENARIAN

My old mentor, boss and pal Ted Byfield turned 80 on July 10th and son Link and daughter-in-law Joanne threw a party for him at their acreage on the weekend previous. It was a pleasant outdoor event, interrupted periodically by those wonderful Alberta summer thunderstorms that snap, crackle and pop for a half hour, then dissolve into golden sunlight. There were not the media and political celebrities that populated Byfield parties of yore (they have been dying off), but there was a smattering of judges, businessmen and some Alberta Report and St. John’s School alumni. A big hunk of beef was roasted in foil in the embers of an open fire, and much was drunk. Amiable anecdotes were told, mostly concerning Ted’s relentless indomitableness as a publisher, as a leader of boys on canoe trips, as a sailor, and as a raiser of funds. A couple of speakers compared him to William Buckley. Ted’s younger brother John, a retired oncologist from Los Angeles who looks like a cross between Ernest Hemingway and Santa Claus, rambled comically and almost coherently about his and Ted’s doubtful consanguinity and their diametrically different politics. Ted, who looks 10 years younger than his age, told a couple of his own anecdotes before he and Virginia left early to drive back to Edmonton (Ted habitually retires at around 9 and rises at 4 to work on the history book.) The closest we got to media celebrity – if one discounts a brief appearance early in the evening by Lorne Gunter - was an email, read by Link, from Maclean’s publisher/editor, former National Post editor and Alberta Report alumnus Ken Whyte. This is what it said:

The Hinton train disaster happened on a Saturday morning and by mid-day I was flying by helicopter to the crash site for Alberta Report. I spent the day wandering around the wreck and then took a late greyhound back to Edmonton, arriving at about five in the morning. I slept for a few hours, and went to the office and stayed there all day Sunday and straight through until Monday morning, writing our cover story.

Ted came into the office early on Monday and I was the only one there. He said, man, you look awful, let my buy you breakfast. So we went over to the Mayfield inn and ordered breakfast and talked about the train crash story. After about ten minutes or so I noticed over Ted’s shoulder a guy sitting at another table, glancing at us nervously. I figured he was one of the legion of Byfield fans and I wasn’t at all surprised when he finally got up the courage to walk over to us, holding out his hand, saying hi to ted.

Ted looked up, smiled, didn’t have a clue who the guy was, and said hi in turn and shook his hand. The guy introduced himself to me and then says to Ted, thanks for agreeing to have breakfast with me this morning – you remember we’re scheduled to have breakfast this morning, right?

“Of course,” Ted lied. “Sit down.”

We had breakfast, the unknown guy – I can’t remember if he was an investor or a supplier -- did most of the talking. When Ted and I finally went back to the office, Ted asked to see the cover story and I gave it to him. He read it quickly, said he loved it, but that he wanted to change the lead. I was really fond of my lead. I’d spent most of Sunday night working on my lead. It was a description of the scene of the crash as seen from the helicopter -- the face of a victim had been visible in the window. Ted said just leave it with me, and I did. I went in the back took a nap and when I woke up the story was in production with Ted’s lead, all about the history of trains, with lots of train jargon, and a discussion of how trains were supposed to be the safe way to travel, and how no one expected an accident like this could ever happen. I was disappointed that my lead was cut in favor of his, but I was too tired to fight, and it was his magazine.

A few months later, I’m in a bar with Ric Dolphin. We got to talking about big stories and I mentioned that I’d worked on the Hinton train crash story. Dolphin says, “oh yeah, I remember that story. You worked that story? That was a good story. Yeah, I remember it had a great lead.” I was flabbergasted, and slightly offended, but a day or two later, I went back and read the train crash story again. Dolphin was right. It had a great lead.

Happy Birthday, Ted. I have to be in Banff tonight to ensure that my little brother finally makes it to the altar, otherwise I would most certainly be there with the Byfield clan to celebrate the dawn of what I trust will be your most productive decade. I miss you and think of you often – for me, you’ll always be the master.

As ever, Ken Whyte

At 80, Ted has lost none of his mastery over the language – as I rediscovered while working for him on The Christians, the 12-volume history of Christianity that will be Ted's most fitting swansong. He still rewrites leads, still makes them better, and he still infects those working for him with the sense of fun and discovery that he has always brought to his endeavours, and which so impressed and influenced us young reporters lucky enough to pass through Alberta Report in the Eighties and Nineties.

I came to work for AR in 1980 from a crappy little Thomson daily in southwestern Ontario. Ted paid almost twice as much, but demanded more than twice as many hours. Somehow, you didn’t mind. Early in my tenure, late into a Friday drinking and dope-smoking party at the house I shared with a couple of roomies, I got a phonecall from Ted. “Dolphin,” he said in the Bogart-like rasp we reporters came to know and imitate. “There’s been a tornado down near Medicine Hat, I want you to get on a plane first thing in the morning …” Hungover as hell, I somehow I managed to make the PWA airbus from Edmonton to Calgary, then some little puddle-jumper to Medicine Hat, then a rental car to the village of Hilda where the tornado had touched down. It was not a major disaster. Some CP grain cars had been blown off their tracks, and few shacks had been demolished, and debris had been blown through some windows, narrowly missing an occupant or two. The fire chief handed me a beer and drove me around in a pickup to view the carnage. I did some interviews, took some pictures, then drove back to the Medicine Hat Airport only to find all flights were grounded due to recurring stormy weather. I was therefore forced to drive the rental Ford LTD back to Calgary at around 100 mph in order to make the last PWA airbus back to Edmonton. I arrived at Alberta Report’s ratty west Edmonton offices in the small hours to find Ted waiting. “Wake me up when you’ve written it,” he said, pouring some Canadian Club into my coffee cup. I spent the next four or five hours on my old Underwood typewriter - it would be several years until we advanced to Commodore 64s - banging out a story, and woke up Ted at around 7 am to edit it “Good work, Dolphin, now go get some sleep. I’ll phone you if I have any questions.” He probably re-wrote my lead; I can’t remember. I do remember thinking, though, that I sure as hell wasn’t working for the St. Thomas Times-Journal anymore, and that that was a good thing.

I would spend six years at AR, and cover far bigger stories than a minor tornado touchdown in Hilda. I would sail with Ted in his 42-foot sloop, The Credimus, from Panama City to Grand Cayman. I would compile and publish a book of Byfield’s columns (The Book of Ted, Keystone Press, 1997). I would help him write and edit portoins of the 12-volume Alberta in the 20th Century history book series. I would accompany him on his marathon walks the length of Edmonton’s river valley (ending at the Beverley Crest Hotel tavern.) I would drink countless beers and whiskies with him, and ward off countless attempts to bring me around to his way of thinking on the small matter of Christianity. I would come to love Ted like a father and as a friend. But it had all started with that little tornado in Hilda and the three words with which he greeted me on the Monday morning following when I arrived back at my desk: “Good story, Dolphin.”

Happy birthday, Ted. I have a feeling there will be a few more yet. I sure hope so.

CISTERCIAN DIVERSION

MY PRESENT JOB IS - and perhaps I had it coming - an exercise in humility. It's been a while since I was as low on the totem pole. My later positions with newspapers suggested a certain amount of status - "senior writer," "political columnist" and what-not - and even when working for the (self-described) Crazy Fucking Frenchman, I was, whatever it was worth, defined as a "manager" or a "partner" and as such was the one in charge of whatever ill-fated project CFF dreamed up, be it a consignment furniture store in Prince George or a scheme to import and train African nurses to work in Alberta in return for donations to CFF's newly aquired orphanage in Burundi.

Even as a columnist for Western Standard, which, alas, never boasted much of a circulation, I was afforded the semblance of omniscience in being able to right the wrongs of the political world before an audience of forty or fifty thousand fellow rednecks. (Humility and punditry usually don't coexist - unless the pundit is talking about himself, where the tedious convention is for omniscience to give way to folksy self-depreciation.)

Now I'm working from 8 am to 5 pm at a jobsite where just about everyone else knows what they're doing and I don't. I get shit from a Grade 10 dropout ten years my junior (but already a grizzled veteran) who has to tell me how to properly hammer a nail or coil a power cord or rip plywood through a table saw because, in my occasional forays into home renovation over the years, I have always done it wrong. I'm constantly embarrassed by not knowing the very basic things: changing discs on a grinder, for example, or snapping a chalk line, or the proper care and use of a nail pick. Did you know that there is a something called a "rebar hickey" - a big pry bar that you use to bend down the rebar before the concrete is poured. A damned useful thing, I discovered, having spent a day bending down rebar. If, God forbid, I ever have another child, I might call it Rebar Hickey Dolphin. (Say it soft and it's almost like praying.) Am I humble? Damn right.

When I was writing for Ted Byfield's Christian history book, just before I took this carpenter's helper job, I encountered some of the big-time saints of Christendom - Augustine, Aquinas, Ambrose, Assisi, etc. A lot of these guys tended to have similar bios: sons of rich nobles, shunned careers as soldiers, tempted by (and sometimes succumbing to) carnal pleasures in their youth, threw it all over to pursue the love of God and write at great length on how to best do this. One of the common means to the divine end, was the practice of humility - an antidote to that greatest of the deadly sins, pride. Pride is the deadliest because it puts you above God and is therefore a sin that fertilizes the rest: we're greedy because we want to be better than the other guys, we're lustful because we want to screw more women than the other guy, we're envious because the other guy has attained something we, in our pride, believe we are more entitled to, etc. Primarily to beat down this most insidious of human inclinations - celebrated in the modern world as empowerment, self-esteem, or natural selection - the monastic orders were established. Although many of these orders inevitably went off the rails, they began as humble places where chastity, poverty and tough physical labour were practised with a view to imbuing the monks (or nuns) with the humility necessary to realize what absolute pieces of dreck they were in comparison to God.

One of the weirder of the monk-saints was Bernard of Clairvaux. Born in 1190 to predictable French nobility, Bernard was something of a mama's boy about whom much retrospective psychoanalysis might be possible were one so inclined. Mama, in this case, was a painfully pious creature who, while dad was off fighting in the wars that raged between various French duchies for much of the Middle Ages, raised and clothed her kids like monks, and paid special attention to Bernard, who she believed - presciently, as it turned out - to have a great future in the Church.

Mama died when Bernard was in his early teens, and the boy strove to live up to her expectations. When lusting after a pretty girl, so horrified was he by the resulting erection, that he jumped into a cold pond and stayed there for hours until the accursed thing subsided. (Erectile dysfunction has a different meaning to the saints.) On another occasion, some wanton creature - "possessed by the devil," says biographer William of Thierry - crawled naked into fair young Bernie's bed attempting seduction. He moved to the other side, went to sleep, and, when she woke him up, angrily shooed her away.

A married woman invited Bernard to a dinner party at her house, then in the middle of the night crept three times to his room in attempts to deflower him. Each time this happened, he cried, "Thief, thief!" waking the household, causing the woman to flee and hide, and receiving much ribbing from his buddies the next day.

"There really was a thief," said Bernard, according to the biographer, "and it was our hostess, who was trying to steal something very precious to me, the matchless treasure of my chastity.”

Today our - certainly my - initial reaction might be, "What a self-righteous little prig." But then I remember a friend of mine at high school in Cobourg, Ontario. Those being the sex-silly Seventies, most of us were sacrificing the matchless treasures of our chastities at every opportunity, but Mark held fast. Not only had he sworn off booze and dope, he was also very determined to remain a virgin until he married - and of course we enjoyed ribbing him for these afflictions. I remember once when we were walking along the beach, someone sniffed the fishy sea-weedy odor and said, "Smells like a bad woman, eh, Mark?" He was rendered uncharacteristically speechless and blushed more completely than I'd ever seen anyone blush.

But we by no means considered Mark to be a priggish freak. Although spectacled and a more serious student than most of us, he was witty, quick with a quip, and popular among the smart crowd with whom the rest of our group was not. He did not become a monk or a saint, but, after graduating with a BA from Queen's, joined his father's insurance agency, married his equally virginal Catholic sweetheart, and had four or five kids. (Much later in life, he would have a nervous breakdown and quit the business, but I don't attribute that to premarital chastity, rather his having to sell insurance.)

The point - for indeed there must be a point to justify this overblown tangent I've shot off on - is that Mark was a charming guy whose company we all enjoyed despite his not indulging in the vices practised by the rest of us. And the same was doubtless the case with Bernard of Clairvaux, who went on to kick-start the Cistercian order of monks - a recent and fearfully austere offshoot of the Benedictines - and make it an extremely popular outfit. He persuaded most of his family to join, along with those friends who'd kidded him about not getting laid. And he did all this on the strength of his charm, his charisma and his mesmerizing preaching style.

He rose to become a force in the Roman church sometimes more powerful than the Pope, to preach the Second (and worse than useless) Crusade, to take on and virtually ruin the iconoclastic theologian Peter Abelard, to heal a rift in the church brought about by the existence of two warring popes, and to introduce the worship of the Virgin Mary into the Catholic mainstream. (More oedipal speculation possible here, of course. The illumination at the top of this post shows the legend of Bernard being projectile-suckled by the VM at Speyer Cathedral. I call it "Bernie and the Jet.") He also performed the miracles (healing the sick, usually) that are a prerequisite to canonization.

But for all his worldly success and influence, Bernard swore he preferred the austerities of his Cistercian Abbey at Clairvaux. The Cistercians shunned all luxury and pleasure save the ultimate pleasure that Bernard insisted is derived from loving God. No reading, other than the Bible, no artistic pursuit, no decoration of the abbey, no meat or wine. At Clairvaux Bernard's humilities bordered on the obsessive. Although physically slight, he worked himself like an ox in the fields. He shunned all food that could be considered pleasurable, in favour of some sort of tasteless gruel. He often forgot to eat at all, and became emaciated and developed severe gastrointestinal problems. A special receptacle was built in choir into which the Holy Abbot vomited. For this reason St. Bernard is the patron saint of bulimics (I'm kidding - I think.) Perhaps he suffered from what the modern clergy – aka the psychiatric profession - are this week calling "bipolar disorder" (the disorder formerly known as manic-depression.) William of Thierry writes:

All the time there is a conflict in his heart between his great desire for souls and his great desire to remain hidden from the attention of the world, for sometimes in his humility and low esteem of himself he confesses that he is not worthy to produce any fruitful increase for the church, whilst at other times his desire knows no bounds and burns so strongly within him that it seems that nothing can satisfy it, but the salvation of all mankind.

Putting aside for another day my pet theory that everyone is bipolar, Bernard certainly sounds like he might have it. What is it that drives a powerful man like him, a man who could easily have become pope, to take so obsessively to the rough and self-punishing life of a humble monk in the humblest of all the orders? I think it is another manifestation of pride.

My former colleague CFF has a net worth of between 40 and 50 million, but when he goes traveling, he always stays in the shittiest of hotels andd, where possible, hangs out with the poorest of the residents. When he took his seven-year-old twin girls with him last summer to visit his orphanage, the Frenchman did not book a room for them in the three-star hotel in nearby Bujumbura, but rather had them all stay for a full month in the bare, insect-infested rooms at the orphanage, without air-conditioning or even fans, let alone TV or the internet. I asked the brighter of the two daughters what it had been like. “It was hell,” she said, without hesitation, mouthing a favorite locution of her father’s. CFF, who could never be called a humble man, takes great pride in describing the hardships of his journeys, partly by way of boasting how much money he has saved (like many self-made multimillionaires, he’s a penny-pincher), but partly to be perceived as a kind of Global Everyman who can mingle with the masses. In other words, CFF takes pride in his humility.

I think Bernard, who was sometimes accused of phariseeism by the Benedictines, took pride in his humility too. The extreme privations might well have been the pathological manifestations of an obsession. His mother, who, from the little we are told, seems to have ruled her family like the Mother Superior from hell, probably had a posthumous effect.

CFF’s mother, according to CFF, was “zee bitch from ‘ell.” She was – and still is – an intellectual Catholic. CFF, assertively atheist, calls her “God crazy” and uses this same disdainful adjective for anyone religious. Once when he was a young man, CFF told me, his mother announced to him, “I don’t like you. I don’t think I ever did.” She entrusted much of CFF’s raising to a grandmother. His father, some sort of roving playboy, was never around. I believe CFF’s life to have been a fruitless search for mother love denied. Having been a multi-millionaire for thirty years, it has been virtually impossible for him to identify true love among the various large-breasted girlfriends and ex-wives who have come and gone. I’d like to think I’d still be friends with CFF if he were poor, but I’m not absolutely sure I would.

Anyway, humility; we were talking about humility. And the point being made was … what? That humility is generally a sheep’s mask on a prideful wolf, or something brought on by an obsessive need for love from the nasty bitch one calls Mom. (And why on earth hasn’t Hallmark identified this niche for Mother’s Day? What about deadbeat dads on Father’s Day? If any one wants to send me a sample verse for this line of greeting cards, feel free. Could be a business opportunity here.)

My mother was and still is a sweet and loving woman who’d walk over fire for her children, and is only religious in the sense that she attends the United Church (which this week, I believe, is celebrating its trans-gendered families with a vegan potlatch.) So I don’t have the evil-mother excuse, but still I’m drawn towards the humility of menial labour and it’s got nothing to do with loving God, either, for God does not exist.
(I'm almost positive of that.) What then is the appeal? Let me think about it some more ...