By Lucy

You’d best bet my car peeled out of the parking lot at the end of the day Friday like a bat outta hell. I told him I had to do laundry and he told me to bring my laundry over, so I just showered, threw what I thought I’d need for the night on top of my laundry, and headed over.

When I got to his place, letting myself in, he took the laundry hamper from me. I made an attempt to protest “I can do it!” and he smirked. “I know you can do it!” He paused for a minute while the gears spun in my head. I can… did I really want to? No, it was just… embarrassing? Weak? Felt wrong, in some way, to allow someone to take care of me. He wasn’t really offering so much as telling, even though I know if I had insisted on doing it myself he would let me, but it was easier to just let it happen. I nodded lamely and then took my shoes off and sat on the couch while he went downstairs. He had candles lit on the mantle, and he made me a tea after he threw laundry in.

What is this?

We chatted about work for a bit. He agreed to stay up with me, before taking me in his arms and declaring tonight was a night he was going to just listen to me.

You what?

It’s funny, I like to talk about myself, we all know that (hence blog you are currently reading). But around him, I clam up. I’m not even entirely sure why. Part of it is not wanting to bring my trauma with me, as opposed to all the times I say memory is an ocean and I am a boat on the waves. I want to be fresh and shiny and new around him, free, unbound.

Of course, you can take the Italian out of Italy, but you can’t take Italy out of the Italian, so he still talked more than he listened, but there was definitely a different vibe to the night. He cooked dinner, pasta with Nova Scotia scallops, and we had another bottle of wine and stayed up late into the night. I’d decided to spend a couple of weeks sober, but I always break my rules at his place. He always gives me bread and bits of cheeses he personally brought back from Italy.

We didn’t get up until 1 in the afternoon. He surprised me by not only having a breakfast available for me, but sitting down to eat with me! One of my biggest complaints last year was that I usually had to leave to acquire some breakfast and he’d never come with me because he doesn’t eat breakfast. But since I was there, he’s gotten into tea (everyone discovers tea through me!) so he had some tea and little pies with canned whipped cream for breakfast. I hung out until 3 and then I decided to head out. I went home, splashed some cold water on my face, then fell asleep again.

It’s interesting how things have changed, within me, with the simple admission that I love him.

I’ve been in love before (obviously, I was married), but I’ve never been a girl about it. I always tell people “don’t try to find my soft squishy center, because I don’t have one”. I want to be strong and resilient.

I spent most of last year afraid the Vagabond would find out I was in love with him. It seemed silly and immature, to have such strong feelings, when I’ve always striven for cold detachment. I couldn’t imagine anyone would love me if I wasn’t unbreakable.

I still don’t have a gooey caramel center to uncover, but there is this idea in my head now. I am strong. I’ve moved across the country, I’ve gone to other countries on my own. People in my profession tell me they’re impressed by the work I do, because scaffolding in the mills is the hardest, dirtiest job besides formwork. I worked 12 hours a day for four weeks with no weekend off. And he knows all this, we’ve worked together. He’s seen me kick ass and take names for 12 hours without slowing. I have nothing to prove to him about strength.

Even this past weekend, he swept me into his arms for a cuddle because I was angry about something, and murmured into my hair “You don’t need to bark at me. I won’t hurt you.”

So who am I… when I’m soft? Vulnerable?

I’ve been upgraded to baby. Last year he called me girl, which I protested until he pointed out it is just a generational thing. The 60’s, ‘groovy, baby’ and all that jazz. I learned to love it. But now he calls me babe or baby and it feels like an upgrade, because girl is a nickname he gives to women, but baby is a term of affection for me only!

I asked him to come to my next doctors appointment. We got into a discussion of why, and the first answer is no, I’m not scared. I’ve walked down the cold empty hallway to my surgeries and laid down on the metal bed as they strapped me down and put a mask over my face. I’ve had surgery fully awake! There is nothing about doctors that scares me anymore. Part of it is practical – he’s just gonna ask me what the doctor said anyway, might as well be there. But the true answer is that I want him to be real. I want the doctor to ask “who is this” and tell him “this is my boyfriend!” I’ve been daydreaming about telling people at work because I want a visceral reaction. I can talk to my friends about it all I want, but they’ve never met him so it’s as meaningful as talking about characters in a book. I want him to be part of my life. I don’t relish the secrecy.

After my nap, I went to the store to grab groceries, then put my laundry away. In the midst, I got a text. The boiler had been delayed ’til 11. They’d pay us extra for the inconvenience.

Because why would I expect otherwise?

I needed to get out of this tiny room, so I texted Hanuman and we went down to Boulevard for a walk. The river was swollen and raging with all the rain. After completing a loop, we lingered at the park, talking until the cold evening wind was too much for me.

There was not enough sleep to prepare me for this boiler tear-down. I was deeply, soul-achingly exhausted. Me and Hanuman stopped at Timmies on the way back to his place, and I grabbed a coffee. Eventually I could delay it no longer and went in.

The boiler was delayed again, which is par for the course. I was feeling relieved, thinking we’d only work til 7 or 8 and then the day shift would come in, but then the other shoe dropped – there was no day shift. They had moved everyone to this boiler tear down. We were staying until the boiler came out.

The room exploded in anger. It didn’t even make any sense – spoiler alert, we didn’t get into the boiler until some time between 1 and 2. They could have asked us to come in an hour early on days and started hammering out the boiler at 6AM! Was the 4 or 5 hour difference really that critical? No, it wasn’t! But this mill wants everything done yesterday and the big kahuna doesn’t push back on it because our pain is money in his pocket. We were short-handed too, because he’s burned a lot of bridges. There’s a reason most of us prefer the four hour drive and week spent in Dryden over something fifteen minutes away in town, and it’s not just the money.

Well, none of us were walking away now. We sat around shooting the breeze in the lunchroom until the call finally came in, like firemen. Or Ghostbusters.

For whatever reason, they made the little man the big shot on the boiler chain, and he’s yappy and high on his own supply. I prefer to be on the ground, but he sent me up the chain anyway. The chain went fine for about an hour, then the lengths I’ve been pushing my body caught up to me. I felt a crack in my left shoulder and it released what I was carrying. Fortunately I had a good grip with my right hand, but I couldn’t get my left hand to obey me properly after that.

But we’re short-handed and there’s already barely enough of us not to have any gaps in the chain. No way I can asked to step out. So I pushed myself through.

I got lucky. We didn’t have any more decks, and after that lift was done Tyler yelled down “One down, one out!” I obediently moved to the next level, but neither Jay nor the girl wanted to move from where they were, so I just went to the ground floor with the little man.

What does a boiler look like on the inside, you may ask? It looks like H.R. Giger drew it. The heating pipes run up every which way on the walls, like the inside of the engineer spacecraft.

Every boiler has something stupid about them. This one, the access was under a thick chunk of pipes about 4 feet thick, 3 feet of space vertically. So passing any gear shorter than 6 feet meant either bending down to reach under the pipes, or getting on your hands and knees. Big shot wanted to be the one reaching up to grab the gear from above, and have me pass it out the hole. Which… fair enough. Not that he’s any taller than me, but I’d rather be passing horizontally than vertically.

We got a pretty good rhythm going and gear was flying out the hole as fast as they could tear it down. Then we stopped for a half hour break. When we got back, they put the girl at my spot at the bottom and had me outside. At this point we finally had a bit of wiggle room in the guys available, so we had ourselves spread out to make sure gear went away as neatly as possible. Decks to the left, braces and ledgers to the right, stands straight out the boiler.

After our second and final break was when chaos ensued. At this point it was well and truly daylight outside, and all of us were exhausted to the point of being intoxicated and delirious. I expected to be outside hauling gear with the rest of them, but we had been reshuffled – they wanted some of us tearing down the ashpit hoppers. Tyler put the little man outside and asked me specifically accompany him into the boiler.

Well then! I didn’t really want to go back into the boiler, but I would just for Tyler. I view every interaction with him as an audition for moving up within the company. I want to see Newgold! I want to see Musselwhite! Atikokan, Kapuskasing… all the places!

He had me resume my previous spot of passing gear out the hole. He went even faster than the little man, and since we were down to 4 lifts, there were more guys to tear down than chain. Tired and hurt as I was, I pushed myself to keep up with his pace. More than once he asked me if I needed him to slow down, and I said no each time. I finally asked him “do I look tired?” and he said “no, but usually I’m too fast for anyone to keep up.”

Gold star!

Eventually the damned thing was done and out and we were able to stumble out into the sun at high noon, sucking back grateful lungful’s of fresh air. It was a gorgeous day; sunny, not too hot, but none of us would be able to enjoy it.

We were so tired they were offering to drive us home so we wouldn’t get in an accident. I declined – I want my car at my place, and once I was out in the sun I felt wide awake. I went home and collapsed in bed without even having a shower. I meant to nap for two hours, but ended up sleeping for four.

I crawled out of bed and had a shower. I noticed that either it was so dry in the boiler, or I got whacked across the face and didn’t notice, because I had a split across my nose and lip. Nothing exciting enough to take a picture of, but there was a bloodstain on my pillow. I made myself stay up for a few hours and took some sleeping pills to make sure I slept through the night.

The next day was sunny and hot. The perfect day to be stuck at the top of recaust!

Oh, did I say perfect? I mean worst!

The roof of recaust looks like a movie set for Mars. For whatever reason, lime dust builds up there. There were sweeping dunes of white dust across the flat roof. The structures up there, like exhaust vents and lifting beams, were coated in layers of calcified lime up to an inch thick in spots, looking soft and pillowy as rime frost. Except that rain causes it to solidified, like concrete, so our hammers could only chip away at it. Every stray breeze threatened to throw quicklime into our eyes. There were no bugs or birds. With the hot sun baking down on us, it was the most inhospitable place I could think of to work. We had a nice view of Mt Mckay, though.

All they wanted was an access to some sort of conveyor belt, but it was coated with hardened lime, so we had to build a platform around it so they could chip the lime off and remove the panels. We also had to contend with either using the gear stored on the roof, which was covered in a half inch of lime that would need to be chipped off so we could use it, or make the trek downstairs for fresh gear. Oh, and we could only use steel, because quicklime eats aluminum.

We used a mix of fresh gear and gear from the roof that didn’t look too bad. I put on some sunscreen, although I still got a touch of the sun on my nose, but after noon the sun moved behind the digester and we had shade for a bit. None of this was helping my near-permanent case of sniffles. At a few points I put a mask on, but mostly the airborne dust was kept to a minimum.

We only did 8 hours, the first sign that layoffs are coming, but I’m not arguing. Eli texted me, so after I showered and changed, I picked him up. We grabbed Timmies and went to sit at the Marina and chat for a bit. He talks with a lot of bluster, but it’s clear from the stories around the mill that he’s burned a lot of bridges and had it come back to bite him in the ass. The last few years have been rough for him, and it’s hard to say he doesn’t deserve it, much as I enjoy his company. But he’s not done anything to hurt me (yet). I offered to drive him back home, but he had something he wanted to do at my end of town that he refused to tell me what it was.

Tuesday we started an hour early for the cold shut. Not sure why that was really necessary, but whatever. Gear up and go down to the substations. The builds there are always pretty simple – 4 by 7s, one lift up, just so they can reach the contacts. I did this one mostly by myself, although Ray reached over and helped with a few spots when I was struggling, because his was next to mine to the point that we shared a ladder between the two builds. The toeboards gave me trouble – toeboards are thin and flimsy and get banged up pretty easily, and then they bind when you try and put them in.

Our next build was a pit over by the gravers. They didn’t actually tell us what it was called; the foreman who showed us the job jokingly called it “the masturbation chamber”. Once everyone had finished making their jokes about it, we realized we still had no idea what to call it on the paperwork, cuz lord knows we couldn’t call it that on there! It was just a stair tower, easy enough except that the builders had to descend a ladder to the bottom, and then all the gear had to be roped down. It also doesn’t smell good out by the gravers. That’s where all the water in the mill is treated before it can be released back into the river, and as you can imagine it’s all kinds of funky.

I ran into one of the hole watches who’s been around for quite a few of my builds (because a pit in the ground is still a confined space where gas can settle). He prompted me to realize I haven’t posted any artwork on here. Well, I haven’t been drawing! In my last room I had enough space on my desk for my keyboard and a drink and that’s it. Once I get this room sorted, I can make some fresh stuff. Also, Preston, I searched for your Youtube channel and couldn’t find it. You should attach it in a comment below!

We finished the job shortly after 1 and had only 2 hours to kill ’til it had been 8 and we could go home (hour early start, remember?). They said there was a big job coming up and asked us to stay over, but we waited and waited… almost two hours. Then they came in and told us.

Penthouse of C boiler.

Yes, where those exhaust fans are. The very top of one of the tallest buildings on site. And you may say, “so what? That’s what the elevator is for”.

There is no elevator.

It’s a cold shut! No electricity!

They say it’s eleven floors, but that’s only technically. There are a few places where it skips a floor because one is not needed, so it’s actually taller.

And another thing, if you can set aside walking more then 11 flights of stairs. There’s no gear up there!

When we pointed this out to the foreman, he said the job had to be done during the cold shut because C boiler couldn’t be fired up without this work being completed. Also, they had a 300 foot rope and a gin wheel.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

Away we go, up over a dozen flights of stairs (14 according to my Fitbit) with two 300 foot ropes and a gin wheel, and a cooler of water cuz none of us were coming back down until this job was done. The girl insisted on operating the gin wheel herself and immediately tangled the rope, which took an hour to untangle (still not feeling great about her!). Fortunately, there was another scaffold there we could tear down and cannibalize for parts instead of waiting for the gear. We still ended up needing some sent up, but we had a good chunk of the build done before the gear was sent up so we had a head start and not much downtime.

Despite the boiler having been shut down for nearly 24 hours, it was still really, really hot at the top of the building and we were all sweating through our coveralls. We were entirely reliant on headlamps, which, when most of the flooring in the boilerhouse is grate flooring, casts a lot of flickering shadows and phantoms, and makes it hard to see. At a few points we just turned our headlamps off and worked in the dark cuz it was easier. 4 hours to finish the build.

When we got back to the trailer, they only gave us an extra half an hour as a thanks.

The day before and that morning had been fairly light, but my left shoulder was still bothering me from the boiler overnight. On this build it turned from an ache into a stabbing pain in the left side of my chest. If either of my chemo drugs had been cardiotoxic I would have been seriously concerned I was having a heart attack, but they aren’t.

I woke up in the night almost screaming in pain from the damage I had done to my shoulder. I took some Tylenol and texted the boss that I wasn’t coming in. I really wanted to – I was pretty sure I’d be laid off on Friday – but there wasn’t any glory to be had in crippling myself for an 8 hour shift. I slept in and took myself to the float tank place first thing after breakfast.

My new doctor called in the afternoon with my MRI results, which confused me. Why did he book a follow-up appointment if he was just gonna call me and tell me? He said they looked good and sounded confused by it. I guess he’s just so used to Desmoids being a death sentence it was weird to see I had recovered from one.

They came out with a trailer for Moana 2, which I am tentatively excited for. I don’t have much faith in Disney sequels, let’s be fair. Moana is the only recent Disney release I’ve watched, mostly because my ex-husband had it playing in the living room. I usually turn my nose up at adults watching children’s’ movies, especially if they lack the nostalgia factor, but it grabbed me.

Partly the fact that it’s set in the Pacific Islands. You guys know I have a special spot in my cold, stony heart for them, because I’m going to New Zealand in the winter. But I also like that it’s just a rehash of The Little Mermaid, minus the twue wuv bit. The spirited young woman forging her own path, but without yearning for a man it becomes, in my mind, a story mirroring my own wanderlust.

“How Far I’ll Go” is my favourite song from the movie. It reminds me of Captain Jack Sparrow, at the helm of the Pearl at the end of the first movie, smiling and cracking open his compass.

“Now, bring me that horizon.”

How far will I go? Let’s find out!