MUD-SILLS

Edmonton in an early morning ice fog, taken with cellphone camera from top of scaffold, U of A site, Feb. 2009

Although perhaps having little choice in the matter, I entered the manual workforce last May with the conceit that I'd try it for a year, see how the other half lived, then return to the twee world of popular letters a stronger, better and humbler man (And proud of it.) As those of you who have been following this blog are aware, I worked for six months as a carpenter's helper under a petty tyrant who, while barely bearable, taught me a few things about hammering nails, sawing wood, pouring concrete, leveling, squaring, plumbing and co-existing among the hourly wage slaves whose inner clocks tick away the minutes to that blessed time of escape known as end of shift.

When that job was completed in November and no other carpenter's helper positions seemed extant, I moved into the scaffolding trade. This was thanks to Jon Hokanson, the muscle-laden gentleman who had hired me on behalf of Wrapex in May, and had since branched out to start a scaffolding company - Benchmark Industrial - with three partners. While no longer working for a tyrant, I now faced an even harder kind of work, much of it outdoors in frigid weather, humping the steel components up to or down from a scaffold being either constructed or torn down by those whose inner, quitting-time clocks ticked even more furiously than those among most other trades.

As well as being more strenuous, the scaffolding work was sporadic. Benchmark was a start-up company in a construction economy that, by November, was starting to falter. Nonetheless, following the few fallow weeks that bracketed Christmas, Benchmark seemed to be on track to providing steady work. The beginning of February brought tidings of a several-month project at Husky's Lloydminster plant (due for one its periodic maintenance shut-downs) starting in early March. Benchmark had already dispatched a quickly assembled crew to a big condo development on Edmonton's south side. And my crew - the previously mentioned Mike, his apprentice Andrew, Mike's Quentin Tarantino-issue Chinese girlfriend Yin, a couple of laggards recently laid off in Fort McMurray, and an older (mid-40s) New Brunswick francophone journeyman called Robert, late of another idled megaproject in Fort Saskatchewan - was embarked on what appeared to be a month or two's work at the University of Alberta's $470-million Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science (CCIS).

On this big site, overseen by that Edmonton-based god of the construction industry, PCL, we were to build several 130-foot-high, four-bay, 20-deck towers. These were to enable subcontractor Gracom to brick the outside of the concrete elevator shafts that will provide a semblance of architectural congruity with the neighbouring Chemistry and Biology buildings that CCIS' will dwarf. It joins a mongrel array along Saskatchewan Drive - paeans to the assorted architectural styles that have erupted like rhetoric in the booms that have occurred in Alberta since Alexander Rutherford and Henry Marshall Tory created the province's first university in 1908.

The photo below gives a ground's-eye view of our scaffold almost complete.











While older and more decrepid than most of my colleagues, I'd developed enough knowledge of scaffolding - the names of the components, the knots required when tying the equipment to be hoisted, the sign language used when calling for specific pieces of gear when ambient noise precludes oral communication, and the rudiments of hammering together the ledgers, standards, braces, tubes and clamps - to be useful. I had also started to overcome my phobia of heights. And unlike the lazy fucks who are by now issuing from the unionized - but disappearing - megaprojects in Fort McMurray, I tend to show up on time every day, work as hard as I have to, and don't drag out the breaks or make too many trips to the porta potty. This makes me a loyal and reliable worker in a province where, during the fat decade that has abruptly ended, such virtues had not been necessary to holding a job. And with the storm clouds amassing to the south, jobs that really weren't worth holding now are.

The sojourn at the U of A campus reminded me of the gap that exists, even in egalitarian, semi-socialist Canada, between class that I now belong to and the one whose edges I once inhabited. As is often the case on the larger jobsites, we newcomers were made to endure a safety lecture before being allowed on the premises. In one of the PCL trailers near the gate, a well-worn woman in her mid-forties, with the unlikely name of Gigi, took us through the various requirements for PPEs (personal protective equipment such as hardhats and safety glasses), the proper ways to secure ladders, the "muster points" in case of emergency, and so forth. Because the worksite is bisected by path that takes students between lectures, Gigi also warned us against any vocal expressions of appreciation aimed at passing females. "And watch your, language," she warned. "Some of the professors have been complaining about the F-words."

If indeed the profs had been complaining, this struck me as a little patronizing. I cannot think of any university professor of my acquaintance who wasn't capable of using F-words with equal facility - although possibly with less frequency - than any construction worker. And while there might be certain swattish sub-groups of students who don't swear - one thinks of those timid giggles of female Oriental pharmacy students who pass in threes and fours - the majority, I think, do - including, as I discovered with mixed feelings, in print.

The cause of the mixed feelings was the revelation that my number-one daughter, Alice the English major, was the authoress of a salty opinion column in The Gateway, the U of A's student newspaper. Now I knew that Alice - who you may remember from an earlier posting in which she berated me for swearing like a teenaged boy during a beery conversation with a brother-in-law last summer - was writing some music reviews for the paper. Until I happened to pick up a copy of the Gateway on campus, I did not know anything about her periodic bylined and photo'd column.

The column in the paper I read was a relatively tame riff concerning a website that offers an appraisal of how "hot" you are based on a submitted photo - a predictable rant, not badly written, about the superficiality of the beauty culture. But a visit to the Gateway's own website archives turned up another couple of columns, one about the current mania for vampires in which Alice mentions the creature's "cold hands, cold lips, and a cold cock." The other column was a satirical (I think) treatise on manipulating men with one's feminine wiles and contained the following paragraph:

Don’t worry if you cry—it’s more permissible for a woman to shed a tear than a man. So by all means, if you’re watching a sad movie, don’t feel afraid to let your tears trail softly over your upturned face. But, for fuck’s sake, do wear waterproof mascara. And giggle when your friends tease you. If you feel an urge to weep, remember this—boys aren’t even allowed to get misty eyed during a movie. They have to swallow hard and cough to disguise any traces of emotion. If they were to allow their sentiment to show, they would have to be castrated immediately, as that man is no longer worthy of bearing proud balls.

Oh, my sweet, virginal daughter! Where on earth could she have picked up such language? Perhaps she was infected by our construction site.

When I suggested to her that the editors at the Gateway might be put out by her usage, Alice was typically dismissive. "Dad, it's a student newspaper. Get over it," she said, then strode off with her head tossed back, leaving me to silently digest all those things I've said about the swearing becoming redundant. I certainly did not want to put her columns up on the fridge and have her younger sisters or (worse) her Nana reading them. At the same time, I couldn't help but feel a warm little flush of paternal pride. All fucks aside, she isn't half bad as a writer...

But I'm off on a tangent again. The subject was the division between the working and the thinking classes.

A century and a half ago a US Senator called James H. Hammond made a speech in which he stated:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.

The senator's use of the term "mud-sill" catches my ear. Mud-sills, as well as once having been the foundational planks for houses, are items used in scaffolding. They're the square pieces of lumber that rest on the ground and support the base of the metal screwjacks on which the first uprights (standards) are placed. And those qualities of "vigor, docility and fidelity" are what make a grunt like me useful to the company. Of course Sen. Hammond was not talking about the paid help, for he was from South Carolina, speaking three years before the Civil War. He continued:

Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.

We no longer keep slaves per se. But just as the mud-sill is required beneath the feet of the towering steel scaffold climbing the wall of the CCIS building to prevent it from sinking into the dirt, so must we grunts continue to provide the sub-strata that saves our superiors from having to descend into the mire themselves. We exist in a society that pretends to be classless and pays lip service to the fantastic fiction that all men are born equal. But, every so often, comes a little reminder - watch your language, boy; the master's children might take offense - that there is and never can be a society of equals. The trick, I supp0se, is not to mind too much. We are, after all, no longer whipped for our transgressions. And the pay - at least at present - is not half bad. The trick is not to mind too much.

Mostly - in part because of my try-it-for-one-year conceit - I am able not to mind too much. Sometimes, though, this can be difficult.

Last week as we were finishing building the first tower of our scaffold at the University, foreman Mike took me aside to tell me that Jon Hokanson - my mentor - was no longer a partner in Benchmark. His two working partners - Dan the bodybuilder and John the British Columbian bawdyman - had, in effect, voted Hokanson off the island. They'd done this by persuading the fourth and silent partner, holder of 80 per cent of the shares, that they could no longer get along with Jon.

I am not privy to the exact reasons, but I suspect from snippets of grumbling that I'd heard from Dan and John, that it had something to do with Jon's tending to low-ball the bids on projects to an extent that there was little or no profit. As I would later learn from Jon, his ejection came as just as much of a surprise to him as it did to me. It was especially galling to him, as he had been the one who'd conceived of the company in the first place.

But Jon quickly rallied. A couple of days later he was up and running with his own scaffolding company, and proceeded to take back some of the projects that he'd earlier obtained through his own contacts on behalf of Benchmark. These included the remaining work at the University. On the Friday of last week, I learned from Dan that I was to be laid off because there was no work.

This past week, I called up Jon and got a couple of days in at a waste water treatment plant near Fort Saskatchewan. This was one of those jobs that made it hard not to mind being a mud-sill. For we were, quite literally, working in a shit-hole: putting up a scaffold in an emptied-out, partially underground tank - 45 feet in diameter, 25 feet high - that is used to separate the "solids" from the sewage produced by the towns to the east of Edmonton. Its rotating agitator had corroded and split from two of its retaining bolts, requiring a scaffold so that the sewer workers could climb up and fix it. One of the workers at the plant assured us that he had hosed the tank out fairly well, but the smell was still present and there was still the odd lump of something unpleasant here and there. Our crew was comprised of Jon, an old scaffolding friend of his called Roger, a former Benchmark grunt of my own age called Allan, and myself. I spent two thirds of the time outside the tank, standing on top and tying and roping gear down through a hatch to those building the scaffold. But this was not very pleasant either, for the temperature was below minus 20 C, with snow and sharp wind. The tank, by comparison, stank, but was heated with blowers to above freezing. It was, in fact, better to be in the shit-hole than out in the cold. Another metaphor for life in a world that's full of them.

The only good thing about work like this is the pure delight that comes when you know it is over.

* * *

Here's a slideshow I made using the rest of the pictures taken with the cellphone. They are accompanied with a song by a ukelele player called Melvern Taylor to whom my middle daughter Miranda listens. I find the refrain particularly poignant at this time in my life.