By Lucy

It was the Ides of April when my life changed.

I still don’t know why someone posted the travel card job in the Sister’s in the Brotherhood chat. They never post job calls there. I’d heard of travel cards before, but they were for other people, better people, more competent people.

Starting May 23rd to June 15th – 2023 we are looking for an additional thirty scaffolders working seven days a week.
Travel to site and return is $1,500.00 for any workers outside of the Thunder Bay District.
Single occupancy rooms have already been prebooked. Board allowance is currently $61.00 a day. An additional allowance may be available.

It had been a long, cruel winter, preceded by a long, cruel summer.

I had barely scraped by all summer when winter had brought with it the usual slow-down in carpentry. I applied for social assistance and waited almost two months before receiving it. I resorted to sugar dating once that money ran out. The day before the job call was posted, I’d finally given up and gone to a temp agency for work.

I had given up on my apartment a year previously and was renting a room. I’d sworn off dating – my relationships hadn’t gone well and I couldn’t pin down why. Despite having broken up with James almost a year earlier, he continued to drag me into his life. I needed a reason to tell him to stop coming around.

I’d stopped writing, drawing or crafting 3 or 4 years ago. My desk was scattered with aspirational tools.

The money stuck in my thoughts. I had no expectation they would accept me, but with shaking hands I called the number and gave them my information. I was told I was put on the list.

They’ll never call you back.

It was literally the next day I met Rich. Despite breaking up with Winter almost two years earlier, we were still pseudo-dating, and she talked about me a lot on stream. We’d made plans to go see Renfield in theatres, and he messaged me under the pretense of talking about the movie. It wasn’t the first time that has happened, but it was the last.

April 17th the job called me back.

The job had been moved back a week. I was to report to a hotel for an orientation on Saturday, May 27th. I’d get the money for the travel as long as I reported for that meeting. This was all stated matter-of-factly by the man on the other end of the phone – I’d been on the list, made the cut for some indiscernible reason, and I was hired. Simple as that.

It started with a book.

There is no such thing as perfect recall. Humans are not machines and the squishy blobs of flesh in their skulls are vulnerable to the ravages of time and drugs. Nonetheless, I have as good a memory as humanly possible. I remember every wretched detail of my miserable childhood.

I’ve been in therapy and had many a baffled therapist assure me that most people would not recognize the treatment I suffered as abuse, as young and as clearly as I did. I always credit He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named for that. He was in it for his own selfish reasons, but he methodically broke down the logical fallacies my parents had employed to keep me loyal.

I was trauma-bonded to him. But we finally broke it.

He’d broken up with his wife in November of 2022. I waited patiently – surely he would finally choose me, once he’d had time to process the break-up. I bought a book in the meantime, The Body Keeps The Score. I wanted to know why everything slipped through my fingers when I made all the right choices. I wanted to know why everything kept hurting even when the doctors told me the tests said I was fine.

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, responsible, practical
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Clinical, intellectual, cynical

The book kept coming back to one thing: what do you want?

What did I want? I had no idea. My parents had spent years trying to shove that square peg through that triangle hole, and my edges were bent and broken. I felt like I was experiencing the world through a pane of glass, separate from my body. “What I wanted” was a dangerous question, better left unasked.

The book also asked you to reconnect with your body. I hated it, but I bought the book and I was gonna follow its advice whether I wanted to or not. I forced myself to go for a walk every day, for ten minutes or an hour, regardless of the weather. I bought a Fitbit and a year of Fitbit premium and did some of the guided exercises.

He chose another girl, in early February. It started the process – I snapped. I wasn’t and I would never be what he wanted. Ten years of waiting, wasted. He was my beginning, but he wouldn’t be at the end of my story. The fury roared out of me like a screaming Valkyrie. On the back of the rage, I filed for divorce. How long had I been putting that off, how long ago had I left my husband? 4 years, 5 years?

And here I snapped again, with that phone call in April. I had been subsidizing James’ lazy ass for two years. Immediately after we moved in together, he had quit his job and refused to get another one. Traumatized, he said, but I was traumatized and fighting my own body and I managed to drag myself out of bed every day. I wanted kids, desperately, and I just needed to keep him around until I got them. I had broken up with him a year ago when I gave up on the apartment, but he was still a drain on my mental and emotional resources.

I just

One more

Just

I broke.

My mind fixed on Dryden as a singular point. Once I’d made my money there, I could come back and keep going. Rich was also a creature of buried rage, and we reached each other through the darkness and mistook it for love. Every time one of us shoved the other away, the surprise realization that we’d found someone who hated everything as much as we did brought us back together. There was no cut deep enough to scare him away. I toiled away at the temp job. On May 27th, my life would change, but not in the way I expected.

The Trip to Dryden

I had fuzzy memories of driving out to Thunder Bay as a kid, on a road trip to Alberta. The walls of stone on either side of the highway, etched with the lines of the drills they used to place the dynamite, sharp as a knife where the shale splintered. The thick deciduous trees – maple, oak and birch – and rolling, grassy, hills, give way to sparse evergreens thrusting up through the bare rocks.

I had never driven there myself. I’d been in the passenger seat when my dad had driven the 1’600 kilometres to Digby, Nova Scotia. There’s a few rules for driving such a distance in a day or two, which I already knew.

• You stop every couple of hours. Don’t just eat and go to the bathroom – walk. Stretch. Get the blood going.
• Bring gum, to help your ears pop as you go through pressure changes and keep your bowels moving.
• Bring someone with you to talk to or switch out with, or have a playlist lined up that lasts that many hours, or a couple of podcasts or audio books to keep your mind busy.
• Get a good night’s sleep – coffee will only get you so far, and you’ll have to stop and go to the bathroom more.
• Don’t drive too fast – an extra ten clicks an hour won’t get you there that much faster, and you’ll ruin your fuel economy. Most passenger vehicles use about 20 per cent more fuel at 120 km/h than they do at 100. A 25-km journey takes 15 minutes at 100 km/h, while going 120 km/h would get you there in 12.5 minutes. Do you like those numbers? I don’t.

One other female in the SIBs chat said she was going to Dryden as well, so I told her I’d done the drive before and we could go together. Sharing a hotel room meant we each got to keep more of our live-out, and we’d split the cost of gas. I’d never met her before, but she’d be my best friend for two weeks.

I messaged the chat asking to borrow a suitcase, and lucked into Margaret, who also loaned me a confusingly large textbook on scaffolding. She offered me a scaffolding wrench, but I opted to buy one. Also, the rule in carpentry is to never show up with new gear. When you buy something, immediately go outside and throw it at the ground a few times so it has some scuff marks.

We left at 6AM on Thursday, May 25^th. I had booked the cheapest hotel on offer in Thunder Bay, which we have affectionately nicknamed ‘the cinderblock prison’. The rooms were cinderblock or some sort of rough brick, the power run across the outside of the walls like a factory, and the key slid across a desk separated from us by a barred window.

Friday we left late, had a proper sit-down breakfast at a local restaurant, and stopped at Fort William Historical Park and Kakabeka Falls (both highly recommended, if you’re in the area). We gained an hour driving west, and the hotel wouldn’t let us check in til 3pm like usual, so we had a leisurely day out. We showed up shortly after three and talked fast to convince the lady at the front desk to give us a room. The hotel was almost completely booked by people going out west to fish and hunt, but the other hotel on offer was a total dump that no one wanted to stay in.

So that was how I ended up in Dryden, an 19 hour drive from my hometown, with less than a hundred dollars to my name, a brand new scaffolding wrench, a powerful sense of imposter syndrome and Adrianne, who knew even less than I did (although at least she had done scaffolding before).

Despite my lukewarm attempt to study the stupidly large textbook, most of what I did was hauling gear and required no real experience, just common sense and quick wit. My trick for talking to the other guys was to bluster through and pretend I was talking to my dad, which has worked so far.

It’s at this point the Vagabond comes in, much as I’d like to avoid this part. It’s hard to tell this story without him.

I expected to catch some eyes. Me and Adrianne were 2 of 3 females on the entire site – to easily fifty guys, maybe more. Adrianne is slight and passes for a guy if she wants to, and the other female excelled at staying out of sight. As you can see in the above pictures, I had just refreshed my hair to firetruck red, and that was partially on purpose. People might not remember my name, but sure as shit they’d remember the redheaded chick. Adrianne got lucky and was carpooling with a guy on her crew named Mark, who’s a decent guy and took her under his wing.

On the Saturday I walked into the orientation at a hotel meeting room. I noticed him right away, but didn’t think much of him noticing me – who wouldn’t?

Then it turned out he was on my crew. I mentioned this story before and I remember it clearly – the first time the foreman asked for volunteers, I said nothing. The second time, I threw my hand up, and he said, “feeling ambitious, girl?” It pops into my head whenever I’m debating doing something, well, ambitious! I imagine him wink and smile, and I double down.

I never wanted to just stay in the hotel and go to work. Even after work, I drove around Dryden, checking out different stores and stuff. They have a museum and a man-made marsh with a walking trail! The Vagabond invited me to join a group of 4 or 5 guys who drank in front of the hotel every night and most nights I joined them.

He showed me pictures and told me stories of his travels; scaffolding in Venice on old churches, two years doing carpentry in Africa, random trips to South America, the time a woman bought him a plane ticket to visit her in Alaska. I remember distinctly, looking at a picture taken from a rooftop in Venice, over the tiled roofs and cobbled streets, and saying “I wish I could do that.”

“Why can’t you?” He asked.

Why indeed…

Then I went back to my room and called Rich, who was very much in love with me. I told him he aught to break up with his girlfriend of 13 years and live single for a bit before deciding on me. But he was my rock when everything was strange and new.

Eventually the lay-offs hit. That’s how mill shutdowns go – you work twelve or more hours a day for a week, maybe two, maybe three. The mill needs to be powered down while you work, and every day down is millions of dollars lost, so they want every body slamming out as many hours as they can to get it back up. Then you’re gone. Some guys, and soon me, make a living travelling from shutdown to shutdown. It’s better than good money, with the travel, live-out and long hours.

I got laid off before Adrianne. I spent a couple of days hanging around, chasing leads for jobs in the area and coming up empty. Adrianne had to be back in town by June 14th, so if I didn’t find a job before then I was gonna drive her back.

The Vagabond called me down to the front of the hotel one night, just me and him – everyone else had been laid off and split right away. He hadn’t been flirty in any way, and I had convinced myself that I was imagining the attraction. We talked for a few hours – I mentioned a ghost town about an hour’s drive away that I wanted to visit, and he offered to take me the next day cuz he was going to call in and take a day off. We exchanged numbers and I was about to call it a night when he kissed me.

I told myself it meant nothing. It was a momentary madness. I was going to go home to Barrie and be a proper, middle-class woman, and settle down with Rich and have kids. The way things were supposed to be.

Right?

Me and the Vagabond drove out to the ghost town, but didn’t end up finding it. The day after the next, Adrianne asked to be laid off and we started the drive back. We stopped at one of the amethyst mines Thunder Bay is famous for. We got to talking with the owner about where we had been, and turns out he was the father of my team lead. He offered me another job in September, in Thunder Bay.

I went back to Barrie nonetheless, my rented room and my pedestrian life, and started looking for work to tide me over for two months. I applied to a couple jobs – one guy called me and asked if I could meet him in downtown Barrie. We talked for a bit – I mentioned Dryden and he talked about a few times he had done travel cards. He mentioned a few people he knew from those jobs – he specifically said “a very Italian man”. The Vagabond’s name popped out of my mouth without even thinking, and we both froze. “Yeah, that’s him!” He exclaimed, with a huge smile. I was hired.

I started drawing again.

Rich broke up with his girlfriend, but as I said before, I felt he should spend a few months single before deciding anything. I was stuck between him and the Vagabond, unable to decide who was ‘the other man’. Rich knew about my infatuation, and was ok with it – I’ve told every partner I’ve had since high school that I’m not monogamous and won’t commit – and the Vagabond knew nothing of Rich. We’d made plans that I’d go visit Rich in England after this job and before Thunder Bay.

The job had called me in early, scuppering our plans. Rich hastily ordered a passport and booked a flight to Canada, over my protests. Then the Vagabond decided to come visit that same weekend. They both got here on the Thursday.

I spent a couple of days with Rich, showing him the sights. I remember distinctly being curled up on the couch with him, watching TV into the evening, trying desperately to convince myself to kiss him, but I couldn’t. Rich made all the sense in my mind – middle class, on the straight and narrow, a bleeding-hearted liberal like myself – but it wasn’t what my heart wanted. The next day, I ran to the Vagabond’s hotel room and stayed with him for a couple of days.

It finally clicked, what the book had been telling me, what had been wrong with me all my life. I had been making decisions based on “what made sense” and Rich was another choice “that just made sense”. It’s hard to explain that without sounding like I didn’t have genuine feelings. The Vagabond and Dryden had showed me another kind of life – the life I had always really wanted. I always wanted a motorcycle, just like those long summer days of biking around Innisfil, footloose and fancy free. I fell in love with Thunder Bay from the days I had spent there. During my treatment “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi had become my anthem – life isn’t about just surviving, but thriving. 

I spent the day after avoiding Rich completely. Finally I called him and told him whatever we had was over.

The Job In Thunder Bay

The first week in Thunder Bay was not easy in terms of living arrangements. The job had left us on our own for places to stay, and while Adrianne was able to stay with Mark, the scummy hotel I had booked had bedbugs and no wifi (hard to say which is worse). I spent a single night there, and found out they had entirely locked up my credit card, leaving me with just shy of 200$. I managed to find a hostel -a hostel! in Canada! – with space, and they could be convinced to let me pay day-to-day so I could afford food.

I enjoyed the hostel. I shared a room with two females who were attending Lakehead University and apartment hunting. I learned more about living out of my car, what I should pack, what I can and can’t do without. I was brave and I was overcoming obstacles I would never have dared to attempt before. I saw my new life starting to come together. We sat in the main room in the evenings and played board games or did jigsaw puzzles together. I drove around town, checking out the sights, thrilled to bits with my audacity.

The weekend was fully booked at the hostel, and I didn’t have enough money for a hotel. I still had days to go until my first paycheck. I probably could have crashed with Adrianne, but she convinced me to call the Vagabond, who was just back in town, and ask if I could stay there.

He wasn’t happy about it, but he agreed.

We woke before dawn and walked a kilometer in to the back of the site every day. We worked 8 – 10 – 12 hours a day. Adrianne was regretting the job, just like she had for Dryden, being so far from home. As I skipped in to work every day with a song in my heart while everyone schlepped in after me, I realized I was made for this. I’d danced on the knife’s edge and made it, and that was exhilarating, and I wanted to do it again, and again, and again.

The Vagabond never likes anyone saying they are ‘fine’. Answering ‘fine’ starts a round of questioning. “Why are you just fine? Why not good or great?” A question that had been on my mind more and more as the year went on. This was it. This was good, for me.

A Short Romance

I assume he was worried I was trying to pin him down. He made me promise “not to cause any complications” but his worries were woefully misplaced. I spent several days being good, with honestly good intentions – I dressed modestly, hid in my room when I was home, ate canned soup I could store in my room so I wasn’t taking up space in his kitchen, and only spoke when spoken to. I made plans to hang out with other people after work and generally be out of the way as much as possible. I even made plans to return to the hostel during the week if we didn’t gel well, after the hotel finally unblocked my card. He broke his own rules.

It started with food. He was upset that I was eating take-out and canned soup, and insisted I join him for dinner. We settled into a pattern – I’d come home from work, shower and change, and do something by myself for a bit. Then he’d cook dinner, and I’d sit in the kitchen and chat with him while he cooked. After eating, we’d talk for a while longer, then I’d do the dishes and he’d retire to the living room to smoke a joint and watch tv.

He’d tell me all his stories; stories of travelling the world with a devil-may-care attitude, riding around on his motorcycle, being a carpenter on other continents. I felt plain and boring next to him, but it filled me with a hunger to have stories of my own to tell. No longer did I wanted to brag to people that I had worked at the same factory for five years – I wanted to tell them stories about hopping on a plane to a random country on a whim, like he did! I wanted that!

Then the Labour day long weekend happened.

Labour day is a civic holiday in Canada, a three day weekend. The shutdown was set to start in earnest the next week, entire crews of guys showing up overnight. We would be going back to guarantied twelve hour shifts and working through the weekends. It was our last free days for two or three weeks. It’s also my birthday.

I came home and the pump in the basement had failed and the basement was flooded. I was tired and in desperate need of a shower, but I went downstairs and spent an hour helping him unclog it and clean the basement. That done, he turned to me and exclaimed “I’m so glad, I could kiss you!”

What could I say to that? Nothing. I shrugged and went upstairs to shower and change.

At dinner, he commented that I hadn’t replied to his outburst. I fired back that he had told me to keep my hands to myself. He conceded my point and we went our separate ways early that night.

Saturday, he offered to take me out for my birthday. We went on the motorcycle, down the lakeshore road, then up the highway to a place they call “the Sleeping Giant”. We hiked out to the ‘Sea Lion’, and he hopped the fence and found a secluded place over the water for us to sit down.

We talked a lot, on that rock, on that day. That I’d discovered I was born with the same affliction as himself – wanderlust. They couldn’t and they never would get my square peg to fit in that triangular hole. I’d made a lot of decisions about who I ‘should’ be, and I was finally letting all of them go.

He admitted (as if it wasn’t obvious) that he was having a hard time keeping his hands to himself, and we opened a bottle of wine that night.

I slept in his bed instead of going back to mine from then on out. He went back to work, out of town, so I had the house to myself Monday to Thursday for a couple of weeks. When there was time, he took me out; on the bike, for dinner, for a hike or a local arcade. When I was finally laid off, I hung around for a week, checking out the town and confirming to myself that I wanted to live there. He lamented it when I decided I should go back to Barrie, and told me I could keep the house key so I could come and go if I needed.

You Can’t Go Home Again

So I went home back to Barrie. I put myself on the out-of-work list, not expecting much, and gave myself two weeks to pack. I booked a Uhaul and a plane ticket back, but as I was packing I decided that I might as well go all the way in on the Vagabond lifestyle. I decided to sell my furniture and pack only what couldn’t be replaced. I stuffed the car with things and drove up to Thunder Bay for a weekend. He took me out on one last motorcycle ride in the freezing October rain, and I belted out “It’s My Life” at the top of my lungs. I got a small storage locker for my stuff and came back to Barrie.

That’s how I got here. I knew there wasn’t going to be work in Thunder Bay for the winter, and I didn’t want to try to find a place to stay when my place in Barrie was fine. I still had to organize a few things, like my doctor. I’d been slowly whittling down my belongings to what will fit in my car for the next, and final trip, to Thunder Bay, before it became home.

It’s hard to organize this into a clear narrative, because life is not a book. Healing is not linear. Time passes in strange lurches and lulls. We tell ourselves the story we want to hear, and even hindsight isn’t 20/20. Even if you’re taking two steps forward and one step back, it’s still progress. It’s always worth asking yourself,

What do I want?

and

Why am I just fine?

It’s your life, after all. Start living it.