By Lucy

I still have a bruise on the finger I smashed on my first day at Dryden, 3 weeks and forever ago. I’m kind of marveling at how much damage I managed to do to myself!

The drive to Dryden was even less eventful that last time. Fully rested, safe in the knowledge my oil was fresh and my axel wasn’t about to bounce away, all I had to do was squint into the setting sun and think “huh, that’s why I should leave earlier in the day”.

Or so I thought.

I just passed Ignace when a large, dark coloured bird appeared out of nowhere. I had no time to even tap the brakes, but even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have – I was being tailgated by a tractor trailer who would flatten me into paste before he could hit his own breaks. Indeed, he passed me less than five clicks later. So a soft thump ensued. I cringed as I glanced at the rear view mirror and noticed an explosion of dark feathers. Hopefully it had died before it had time to realize its fatal mistake.

What should I do now? I had never hit and killed anything but butterflies before! Should I pull over?

When I was a kid, a bird hit my dad’s car. I mean it – it flew straight into the grill, with such force or at such an angle its head got stuck and its tiny body was pinned to the front of the grill. It was still there when we got to Oma’s and he had to remove it somehow.

Was there a dead bird stuck to the front of my car? Blood painted across the front?

I ended up just continuing to drive. Even if my car was painted with a coat of blood, there was nothing I could do about it stopped by the side of the highway. When I got to the hotel, I did a quick check around the front of the car – no blood, no bird corpse.

Phew.

I checked into the hotel. I’m unsure if the woman at the desk recognized me from last year, but she was disbelieving that I was travelling alone and had no pets and gave me a hard time about it. I paid up front and she gave me a key. She gestured to the part of the hotel that it was in, but there was no need. I recognized the number.

It wasn’t the same room as last year.

No, just four down from it. Room’s exactly the same, so it makes no difference.

I drove my car down to it and parked in front of the door. Unlocked it with shaking hands.

Memories flood back.

Exactly the same.

Almost exactly a year later too. To think, I really thought I could get in the car and drive away and leave it all behind. But hindsight is 20/20, and life moves in mysterious ways.

Shake my head to clear my thoughts. I made it through the last couple of weeks without getting lost, get it together.

Unpacked the car, walked down to Subway and stood in line while a new kid failed to properly make me a meatball sub (which is impressive unto itself). Walked back to the hotel as a branded company truck rolled up. Out popped Eli.

What kind of vibrational nonsense is this? He was really twenty minutes behind me on the highway and we were staying at the same hotel? I might as well have just asked for a ride with him and his buddy, saved myself the kilometers on my car and the hole in my grill! I greeted him and agreed to drive him to Wally Mart after I was done eating dinner. I was two hours late and the colicky cramps had set in before I had hit the bird – I needed tea and Tylenol.

I made a tea, ate as quickly as I could, and ended up having to lay down for ten minutes for the cramps to pass. Finally I texted Eli that I was ready, and went out to give my car a thorough inspection before the light faded completely.

My poor car!

That grill had been entirely intact before the collision. I turned my flashlight on and checked the space behind it – no bird entrails. Still, what was a flimsy plastic grill would probably cost like 500$ to replace, and it is protecting the condenser/ radiator. I wonder what the size/ weight of the bird would be, to do that.

I was still having cramps, so I shopped quickly and went to wait for Eli in the car. Which was a mistake, because without the white girl there to vouch for him, the staff started giving him a hard time. Or, you know, they just shouldn’t harass someone for being indigenous!

Eli asked me if I got my oil changed and complimented my clean back seat, which left me somewhat flattered that he had remembered what my weekend plans were. I am still half-waiting for him to abandon me because I have issues.

When I got back to the hotel, I ran myself a bath. Aunt Flo finally decided to show up, what excellent timing.

I plugged in the hotel fridge, but it immediately started this awful whining sound. I gave it half an hour, but it showed no signs of abating, so I threw my food in the car and unplugged it. I wouldn’t be able to sleep with that noise, and I was gonna get take out. I could keep my lunch in the work fridge, and it would be cool enough overnight in the car.

I went to bed early but slept fitfully. Around midnight I woke up, too hot. I threw off most of the sheets, got up and turned the thermostat down, and took another Tylenol. I woke up at 5 AM freezing. Did I throw off too many sheets, turn it down too much, did my fever break? I was awake before my alarm, but I wasn’t getting back to sleep again. Bollocks.

Everyone was still sitting in the same spots as usual. I debated sitting with Eli and the rest, before resuming my usual spot at the front. There was still a chance I might end up on the Vagabond’s crew, and if I did I definitely didn’t want to sit with them at lunch too and work myself into another depressive rage.

I was not. I was put on a crew with Kentucky and sent out to the yard to pack up the gear that had been sent in just for the shut-down. It’s menial work, but considering that I had spent the weekend dying of the plague while pushing myself too hard, and now I was dealing with Aunt Flo, I was fortunate to be doing something slow and methodical.

I definitely emailed the office about my name change, but apparently it hadn’t trickled down because they still address me by my old name. I signed all the usual safety paperwork with my new name and wondered when someone was going to glance at it and exclaim “Who the hell is Lucy?”

It was a nice day out. Sunny in the morning – cool, but it warmed quickly. After lunch, it clouded over, but that just cut the heat and made sure we didn’t burn, so I was ok with it.

Shortly before lunch, there was a deep roar, as if the sky itself was tearing asunder, like Hades from Horizon Zero Dawn screaming in rage. I startled, and every bird within a kilometer radius took off like death itself was coming for them.

The other guys kept working like nothing had happened.

“What was that sound?” I finally asked Kentucky.

“Oh, they’re just venting steam.” He shrugged.

Right.

A few minutes later, another crew trudged up and started asking us where they were needed. Turns out they got gassed out in the building that had belched steam – the smell and/or gas was so bad one of the guys had puked. They puttered around with us for a couple of hours. Gas doesn’t clear right away. When we went back in for lunch, there was a red light flashing over one of the doors into the main plant and it stayed flashing the rest of the day.

At lunch Eli finally made me come over to sit with him. The Vagabond had gone back to treating me with icy detachment, before abandoning ship halfway through lunch and going to sit somewhere else again. I wondered if this was his way of honoring my obviously hurt feelings. It felt more like I was being punished for voicing them.

He’s gone back to being more of his old self than I expected, and by old self I mean pre-dating me knowing him. When I met him last year, he was trying to swear off alcohol and sugar for his health and struggling with it. He’s given up both causes now, and has wandered around the lunchroom more than once almost literally mugging people for their cookies, but he looks to be in even better shape than last year. Different meds?

Also, turns out the water had died in both bathrooms when I thought it was just the ladies room. The guys just hadn’t noticed cuz they all use the urinals and don’t flush.

Finally I approached the foreman and informed him I had changed my first name. He was the first person to exclaim “for real? Legally?” Before telling me it would take a while to get used to.

I shrugged. I wasn’t so attached to it to throw a fit if someone used the wrong name. Who knows if I’d even be here next week?

After work was quiet, I got KFC and sat at my desk all evening.

In the morning, they did address me as Lucy, which was nice. Everyone else glanced around, confused, but no one said boo. Back out in the yard, nice and cloudy, but warm. Good outdoors working weather.

First task: count 1500 swivel clamps, into boxes of 500. Have fun!

The lead hand apologized and looked slightly concerned that I might refuse. But such is the lot of the apprentice. If they want to pay me 500 dollars a day to count clamps, it’s their money to burn. I sighed wearily and said “makes sense. Us Germans are good at counting, after all.”

Kentucky jumped up. “Have you watched Hogan’s Heroes? No offence.”

No… offence? Why would I be offended? We started a stupid war and we lost said stupid war. I laughed. “No offence taken, ‘Tuckey. We know what we did wrong.”

I settled for counting the swivels up to 100, then writing it down and starting again. Counting to 1500 is a lot easier when it’s 15 batches of 100.

The labourer who cleans the lunchroom has decided she likes me, for whatever reason. Not that I dislike her, it’s just interesting because we are very different people. But I always try to be nice to the help and she was proof of why. She kept calling me aside for ‘help’ when all she wanted to do was gossip. So I get all the juicy rumors only the people who clean your toilets know, muwahaha. It was slow this week.

After I finished the swivels, it was 4 foot ledgers. Good to know I have distinguished myself for my counting skills.

The Vagabond never went back to sit with Eli and the rest, despite the fact I also refused to go back and sit at that table. He kicked some of the kids off of their table at the back and took it over for himself. Great, now there’s gonna be rumors as to why both of us left the table, instead of just me, which would be unremarkable by itself. Jerk.

I went over to hang out with Dylan for a bit after work, and then chatted with Eli while we watched the sun go down at the hotel. In the morning, we threw our bags in the car and left the keys on the table again. Starting to get into a habit of fleeing like a thief in the night. We also confirmed the hotel charged me more than anyone else. I suspect it’s because she remembers that my bright red hair ruined all their beautiful white towels last year, even though I no longer have said bright red hair!

Thursday it was raining. Everyone refused to work in the yard while it’s raining, which just made me roll my eyes. It’s not like we live in the great white north, where it snows 6 months out of the year, or anything! Instead, we got sent to the back, to sort and band gear that Kentucky brought in with the zoomboom. I nicknamed the back “the graveyard”, partially because there’s gear back there that’s been untouched for so long it’s covered in a thick layer of dust and dead spiders. Partially because it’s also the corpse of one of the old paper machines.

Can a machine leave a corpse? I think so. These machines are so big, they are the size of two or three football stadiums, and it feels like you’ve stumbled upon some fallen goliath. There’s an old decommissioned boiler in Thunder Bay, they cut it open with saws to get all the valuable stuff out and left the rest. So its steel skin is split open, spilling guts of insulation and chunks of rebar like shattered ribs. It’s really quiet in those parts of the mill, the lights permanently off because no one goes there, but us, so it feels like a tomb.

This one is less dramatic, because they tore out entire chunks of the machine, so there’s just large indents in the concrete where it was. Severed wires, ladders to nowhere.

We had some down time – the mill decided to paint the elevator. The elevator to nowhere, because it literally only goes between first and second floors in the room with the dead machine, so only we use it. But we didn’t know that, so while the elevator was down, I wandered off into what used to be one of the operation booths. It’s been dead for a while – someone said they had it yanked out when the internet took off, and it was declared that paper was dead because everything would be email. All the old CRT monitors, slots for floppy disks or older. Like I stepped onto the set for Alien.

I love wandering around the old forgotten places in the mill. There’s a certain solemness, a sense of ancient history. It reminds me of Portal 2, when you explore the old buried parts of Aperture going back to the forties.

They called it a day at 3 – just an 8 hour shift, what is this? – and laid most of us off, including me. I suspect they would have kept me if I hadn’t been called back to the mill in Thunder Bay, but them’s the breaks.

It was raining the entire drive back to Thunder Bay.

I just pulled onto my street when the check engine light popped on.

How?! Why?! Good timing! I did a lap around my car for obvious causes. Seeing none, I dragged my stuff upstairs and crawled into bed. I had an appointment first thing tomorrow – more likely than not, my car could limp a click down the road to the shop in the morning.

I was starting to regret the room change. The guy who’s room I’m under now has a small child with him, and I assumed he would be quiet and early to bed. Apparently he’s also a sports fan (based on googling “sports games”, I’m gonna say Timberwolves) so he was up til midnight cheering and stomping on the floor. He was up again at 5, listening to music, which I would have slept through if I hadn’t had to go to the bathroom.

7 o’clock came early, shiny and painful. I laid in bed til 7:30 before pouring myself into some clothes and dragging myself back down to my poor car. The check engine light was still on. To the mechanics!

I pulled into the lot and stood there, blinking in the chilly dawn, before I realized he was trying to wave me into the store. I went in, introduced myself, and handed over my keys. I told him about the code but not the bird – it seemed silly to mention hitting a bird. Such a small thing. I walked down the road to Timmies and grabbed breakfast and walked back.

So, turns out the bird tried to take out my car with it! Not only did it crack the cosmetic grill, it also destroyed the active grill shutters. Cracked the housing. The car uses it to control air flow to the rad and it panicked when it couldn’t control it.

Touche, bird.

The whining sound is the center axel bearing. Somehow, magically, both wheel bearings are fine, which makes me wonder how I damaged the center one. Probably has something to do with the incident when I cracked the oil pan. Hopefully that’s the last of that! Only 600$ to fix, which ain’t bad. The guys were even nice enough to take me into the shop and show me, and we were all standing around cracking jokes about the cost of Mopar parts. I like a shop that respects my interest in knowing what’s going on with my car. Shops that try to talk down or assume you can’t understand are a red flag to me.

One of the people at the shop offered to drive me back to my place while I waited. I told them my landlord’s name and everyone immediately went “oh yeah, I know where that is!” It’s a party trick at this point.

When I picked up the car, they told me they found the bird’s corpse in the wheel well and that it wasn’t especially large, so I’m still kind of confused how it did that much damage. I would have asked for the body back if I had anywhere to burn it, to apologize to the sky for this needless death of one of its children.

When I got back home, the guy who’s room is above mine was in the hallway, so I cheekily asked “Timberwolves won last night?”. He blushed and asked if I could hear him cheering (it wasn’t the cheering, it was the two footed jumps on the ceiling!). He said that it was a later night than he prefers as well and it won’t happen often (we shall see).

It was criminally nice out that day – warm, sunny, slight breeze. An excellent day to be on a motorcycle… a motorcycle I did not have.

Ah, but I did know someone with one, didn’t I?

On a whim, I texted the Vagabond and asked him if I could go for a ride. I expected no response as a way of declining, but he surprised me by actually making plans for one that afternoon.

Long story short, we went on a bike ride and he drove us out to this park where there is zero cell service and we had a long talk there. I want to jokingly refer to it as being kidnapped – jokingly, because I assure you if I had expressed discomfort, didn’t want to talk or requested to go home immediately, he wouldn’t have pushed the issue. But it did amuse me that he leapt at the first opportunity to drive me so far out into the woods I had no cell service so that we could have a serious conversation, like he planned on dumping my body in the river if I said no (hmm… not making that sound any better, am I?)

So we had a good long fight and got a lot of things out in the air. He was mad at me for calling him a coward, to which I say “Don’t act like one then!” He apologized for November/December and explained why and what had happened. Then we went back to his place, he cooked dinner, we shared a bottle of wine and we’re all adults, you can figure out the rest. The morning after was slightly awkward, because we haven’t really decided where we want to go from here (which is also why I prefer to bounce at 3AM). Still haven’t!

I mean, if we’re spending the night, going on dates, and neither of us have any interest in seeing anyone else, what else is there? Suppose telling our families. I assume at this point my family knows, if my mother is still stalking my Instagram like she always does then she’s reading this. With that in mind, I did start laughing at his place, thinking about writing this down, and he asked why.

“Well, you’re every dad’s worst nightmare!”

He blinked at me. “Why’s that?”

“The tattooed biker, stealing away his little girl!” Not to mention the other things.

He laughed.