By Lucy

My mother had a friend named Angie. I think that’s safe to say.

Angie was a troubled soul. She always had a new boyfriend; I remember clearly one me and my brother nicknamed “Mr. Donald Duck” because he could perfectly imitate Donald Duck’s voice. He was friendly and gregarious. We never saw him again. Him and Angie broke up because he wouldn’t leave his wife.

She bleached her hair and smoked cigarettes and she liked guys with motorcycles. I remember questioning why she didn’t just buy her own if she liked going on a ride, and the answer that she liked belonging to the man as well. That was when I decided I’d buy my own motorcycle. Not even 10 years old and I’d already decided I didn’t want to be defined or owned by my partner.

One day, Angie just stopped coming around. There’s probably a reason, but I’m not privy to it. And to be honest, I never understood why my mother was friends with her. They had nothing in common, and Angie was always having problems.

I think about her sometimes. Cuz I’m not like them, the lost girls who want to run away with a bad boy, and be saved, or save them, or whatever. But they are far more common than I am. And I wonder now, if Angie was one of my mother’s friends from when she was married to a biker. A leftover. How many biker friends did my mother have? Did she ride on the motorcycle? Did she enjoy it?

Rob asked me something the other day… why I dislike my parents, something like that. And I replied, my mother used to be a sparky. An electrician. And she planned, supposedly, to keep working even after she had me and my brother, but she stopped and became a full time housewife instead. Sometimes she’d say to me, aren’t you glad I stayed home to raise you?

“No.” Rob said immediately.

“Exactly.” I replied.

They were supposed to have it all, they were supposed to be the revolution. No more sacrificing careers for kids, women could do whatever they wanted.

And then they stopped. They got pregnant and they stayed home.

Now I’m the only one at the job site.

One of the cleaners stopped me the other day and asked if I was a scaffolder. When I said yes, he broke into a grin and said “Wow, I’ve never seen a female one before!”

No, I’m not glad. I’d rather have walked home from school in the rain and made myself peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and known my mother was out there, kicking ass and giving the boys what for, instead of what she became.

Tuesday (Was it Tuesday? I’m losing track of the days now) we were back up on the second floor again.

Since the boss had been here and brought down the hammer, I didn’t want to risk the ignoble fate of being fired for not wearing a mask. I was applying a bandage to my nose to protect my delicate skin from the abrasive cheap mask, when Duff came from nowhere and yanked me from my seat.

“Come on, I’m tired of this!”

“Tired of what?”

Me hurting myself, apparently. He hauled me to the boss trailer and told them I wanted a respirator.

Technically I had a respirator and a fit test, I’d brought mine with me. But the cartridges they have here don’t fit mine, and I had no proof of said fit test. It doesn’t take long. The health and safety lady handed me a respirator, then cracked open a vial of smelly stuff. Head up, head down, side to side, say the alphabet backwards. Still can’t smell anything? You’re good.

As I took the mask off, she thrust the vial of smelly stuff towards my nose. “Can you actually smell it?”

Can I smell it? You practically shoved it up my nose, I should hope so! The smell was acrid and burned, and I fled to the garbage can in the corner of the room to wretch. Fortunately breakfast did not make a reappearance.

The respirator was much more comfortable on my face. It also had the unfortunate side effect of completely silencing me. No one could hear me with it on properly, and it is no simple thing to remove the harness from beneath my hard hat and around my bun. With ear plugs in and safety squints on, it was like I had stuck my head in a fish bowl. The other masks all had a quick release button so wearers could talk without removing the harness, a feature that was curiously absent on mine.

Up to the second floor, then. The main corridor through the scaffold is just wide enough for two people to pass side-by-side, and it quickly became a scrum. We were cutting, passing gear, and it was chaos. I found a ladder and scrambled up it. If I kept moving, eventually I’d found a crew who wanted my help.

There was a group of four guys up there. They had the casual confidence of twenty something’s who’d just made journeyman and felt pretty invincible. They were more than happy to let me tag along, which I did for most of the day. At one point, someone decided to climb down by grabbing the end of the plank I was sitting on, hoping to use me as ballast for him lowering himself down past the fulcrum. Unfortunately for him, I do not weigh near what he weighs, and the board tipped up like a seesaw. It was only quick thinking that stopped it from dumping both of us on the deck below.

We were just planking and plywooding again. Towards the end of the day, they started getting really bored and drawing penises on the bottom of the plywood so whoever did the dismantle would find it. They pressured me to draw one, and I did just to shut them up. They kept badgering me afterwards, so I made my excuses and left. Peer pressure only goes so far with me. Fortunately, everyone in the corridor was all worn out. I found Duff and helped him with a build.

It’s been interesting to get to know him better. It wasn’t really me and him a lot last year, mostly me and him and Stu, and I was tired and anxious of people finding out my secrets. He was also distracted by his own personal problems.

Here, he’s free to “go squirrel” as he calls it, and I have an almost psychic ability to know what he’ll want. It goes beyond just being good at scaffolding – at one point when I was down the hall, another apprentice misheard his cut for a toeboard at 48, when he wanted it at 42, and I called it. Am I just better at reading lips, or hearing his voice over the din? Perhaps. The scaffold flew up around us.

The next day, we were pulled to dismantle a scaffold that the cleaners were done with. It was a large room and had taken two weeks to put up, so it would take us a week to tear it down. The biggest task would be…

Ok, so there is lingo in the industry. Any large platform of planks is usually called a “dance floor”. I’ve learned getting a full 7 days paycheck is called a ringer. Handing down a tube with too many rights on it is called a “Christmas tree”. Etc.

The biggest task will be tearing down the dance floor. There was forty 7 foot decks and forty 10 foot decks, with plywood to match. We also had several 30 foot trusses to reinforce it.

The tear down is steady. The builders – dismantlers? – will pull everything up and put it in rough piles, so when we get into a chain there isn’t any stopping and starting. I had to teach the other apprentices how to chain because none of them had ever done a job this big before, which is presumably why Duff put me down here with them. Although at one point, he did fly down the scaffold to chastise me for sticking my head out (no sticking your head out in a chain, lest you lose it! But Thunder Bay has poor discipline and I’ve fallen into bad habits).

James got sent away from the scaffold entirely. He refused to put his harness and lanyard on, and they were high enough there would be no walking away if he fell. I was starting to lose interest in talking to him at all. There’s something very off about him.

At lunch, the cleaners had started cleaning the loading bays, so we were being evicted. They had some trailers set up for the cleaners and we’d be allowed to eat there – not that it mattered much, most of the guys still go to their car to eat.

I was surprised that my most consistent lunch companion is Justin. He is an oddball in the sense that he seems normal, which means he’s the strangest person on site. We’re all a bunch of whacked out, avaricious adrenaline junkies, there is no normalcy here. But he’s one of the few not making mysogynistic or racist jokes, and he’s good conversation. He offered for me to rent a room in his basement – only an air mattress, not that I mind. Plus I’d get free dinner and possibly leftovers, and a proper fridge. One of my few gripes about this hotel is that the fridge is uselessly small. It’s hard (although not impossible) to eat healthy without fridge space. I took his number with intent to seriously consider it.

It’s been raining off and on for days now. The dirt lot is a mud pit. The giant zoomboom they have to move gear keeps tearing large ruts in the softened earth, some so deep they come up to my waist, and the water stands in them. All of our boots are so coated in thick mud they look like someone dipped us in cement. I feel terribly guilty about the thick clods of mud I trail into the hotel, but I can’t clean my boots well.

The first zoomboom driver is interesting. He has Nova Scotia plates, and he looks like my dad if you tilt your head and squint, so he’s probably related to me somehow. I told him my family is from Digby, and asked him if there’s any work back home. He said I’d be doing three times the work for a third of the money. I’m curious why he has Nova Scotia plates when he told everyone he travelled from Ontario.

He got cocky with the zoomboom’s tank-like capabilities, drove it out into the back 40 and got it stuck in the mud. They had to get another zoomboom to tow it out and he was relieved of duty.

As we were taking a smoke break/ water break / it’s-hard-work-and-we-were-tired, leave-us-alone break, a thunderstorm rolled past us like a speeding car. It left just as quickly as it came.

I heard the throaty roar of a motorcycle.

Not just any motorcycle. This sounded exactly like the Vagabond’s, I’d know it anywhere.

It came peeling around the corner, the owner deftly ignoring the deep ruts and thick mud. He came to a stop around the back for some reason, and jumped off to talk to some of the guys there.

I stuck my head out. It was not the Vagabond, but it was the same model of bike. How cruel is that!

The man turned my way as I heard Duff calling from inside the building. I was torn between immediately attending to him, and approaching the mystery man, who braved mud with a shiny Harley.

“Lucy! Come! Here!”

Gah! Maybe Duff is my dad! As I ran back inside the building, I thought I heard the mystery man call my name.

Duff was up on the scaffold, and gestured for me to join him. As I went up the stairs, I noticed Mystery Man had walked up to the bay doors.

“What are you distracted by?”

“Some guy just drove up through the mud with a Harley!”

“No way, no Harley could make it through that mud.”

“He’s down there!” I pointed, but the man was walking out of sight already.

“Oh, that’s my friend Butch!”

“Why is he here?” I suppose that also might explain why I possibly heard my name. I can’t imagine Duff not mentioning me.

He shrugged. He tried to explain to me something about the scaffold, but I wasn’t paying attention. My mind was back in Thunder Bay.

“Here, I’ll show you! You’re tied off, aren’t you?”

Before I could say “no, I’m not even wearing a harness”, he whacked the wedge.

What he had done was adjusted a check clamp a few inches below the clamp that was holding this corner of the deck up, then released the clamp holding us up, so we fell a few inches before the check clamp caught us. The effect to someone not paying attention, however, was that I felt like the scaffolding was falling to the floor and I was going to die.

I fell to my knees shrieking. When I realized we weren’t falling anymore and I was safe, I broke into laughter so loud and hysterical it sounded like I was bawling my eyes out, and Rob came over to check if I was alright.

Duff took the opportunity to teach another apprentice how to raise the deck back up. I ran outside, but the Harley was gone.

The sun had broken through while I was inside, and a beautiful double rainbow had appeared! We stopped and appreciated it for several minutes.

The next morning, as I was heading out to the car, Duff was throwing all his stuff in his truck.

“What are you doing?” I bellowed.

Obviously, packing to leave. He had decided, basically overnight, that he wanted to go back to Manitoba and grab his camper. He could not be persuaded not to.

Well, rats. I had booked my car to get looked at today, with him driving me to and fro, and he knew it. It only made sense, we were staying at the same hotel!

Not only that, I realized as we got back to the dismantle, it meant that he had organized the work how he wanted it done, then functionally left me to oversee it, with zero formal authority.

The guys started grumbling how he had left us to chain 10 foot decks, as if he was lazy and dodging hard work. I pointed out that he had abandoned his “daughter” to the ten foot decks as well. He’s just his own worst enemy – he gets a thought into his head and he just has to act on it NOW!

Chaining ten foot decks.

Chaining ten foot decks.

Ye gods, do I hate this!

Chaining more ten foot decks.

Worst still, I was left to accept the decks from above. Both the big, strong men who were left to follow my orders refused to put on a mask, and technically weren’t supposed to enter the building without one. I finally pulled one of them, promising to deal with the health and safety chick if she happened to come by. She likes me, apparently just because I possess breasts – whenever she sees me, she offers me fist bumps and says “hey sista!”

At lunch, one of the guys volunteered to drive me to the garage, as his buddy worked there. I confused the garage with both my Ontario plates and Ontario phone number.

I got an unpleasant call a few hours later. Apparently, I had lost both the front struts and the rear shocks (for anyone mechanically inclined, they were the originals and the car is at 170’000 kilometers). The tires were cupping, badly – considering in Thunder Bay not even a month previously, they were not bad enough to comment on. I had also damaged a couple of knuckle bushings on the rear control arms.

I asked what needed to be dealt with before I could make it back to Ontario, and he said the shocks – the struts were not integral to functional operation of the vehicle. But I couldn’t get the alignment fixed without the struts being changed, and the tires wouldn’t survive the trip back. He also wanted to look into a way to change the knuckle bushings without swapping out the entire control arm assembly.

I asked to call him back and called Duff. I was finding it hard to believe my car needed that much work when I had just been at the shop, and driven over a thousand kilometers in one day! Since Duff had most recently looked at my car and seemed mechanically inclined, he seemed like a good place for a second opinion. He said all that seemed likely, although he was skeptical about the tires needing replacing.

I called the shop back and explained to them that I was in town for a few weeks for work, so nothing was urgent. They said the shocks, struts and alignment would only be 2 grand, which wasn’t even my entire first paycheck of only 4 days. Easy, do those then. Buddy said he would keep looking into the knuckle bushings and get back to me.

Back to work.

I envy the rest of them. They fly up the scaffold, harness on just to satisfy the health and safety lady, graceful and sure as if they had wings. Like sailors climbing the masts and rigging, nothing but feet and hands touch the gear as they ascend. Big, burly men in thick, steel-toed boots dance across tubes that are only 2 inches in diameter, lifting and handing down a ten foot, 50 pound piece of gear with no visible strain. The core strength and balance puts high-wire acts to shame.

One day I’ll join them.

When I have to tap out of the chain, I know there’s a problem. I had debated taking Friday off – Saturday and Sunday, being double time, were to be worked at all costs – but I didn’t want to book it off if Duff was off as well. Someone had to keep these yokels on track. Yet my arms are screaming at me and my head spins from the pain.

One of the bullies wandered by, tool-less. I teased him about it.

“Where are your tools, man?”

“Noticed how [so-and-so] isn’t here today? I’m taking his place ’til he gets back.”

So, you’re temporary foreman. It leapt to my mind. “Can you approve days off?”

“Yes.”

“I want tomorrow.”

He glanced behind me, to the stack of ten foot decks. “Tired? Yeah, done. I’ll go put it in the book right now.”

“For real? You’re not fucking with me?”

“For real.”

The end of the day brought a new headache. I was carless. I had assumed I could get a ride with one of the six other people staying at the same hotel, but none of them were in today, curse my luck. As everyone walked out to the parking lot, my eyes fell to Scott. He had loaned me knee pads on the first day, surely he would help me now.

“Scott! Can I have a ride!” I yelled.

He nodded, barely turning around to glance at me. He shoved a melange of stuff off the back seat so I could wedge myself in to it.

It’s curious. I expected most of the guys here to be like Duff. Country music, part-time farmers, cigarettes. But most of these guys listen to dubstep/ rap/ hip-hop. They all trade and pass around candy-flavoured vapes and discuss their favourite pot brands (which, admittedly, is standard for Canada. Rich noted that almost every street corner smells of pot). Scott lit up and soon the car was full of smoke. I’d have a wicked nicotine withdrawal headache once I left this job – the best way to get all the gossip is to stand with everyone while they smoke. Which means second hand smoking, effectively.

As I walked into the lobby in the evening, the clerk stopped me. “Did Duff check out?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Aww.” Her face fell. “I miss him.”

I grinned from ear to ear. I thought she seemed giggly when he was around. I debated asking if she wanted me to pass along her phone number, but decided I aught to ask him first. I texted him in the elevator.

“The clerk misses you.”

“I have that effect on women.” Was the cocky reply.

My arms were in even worse shape than Thunder Bay. I could barely lift them to strip my shirt off. Actually, I had to brace myself and wrench it over my head, screaming aloud, and I was surprised no one knocked on the door to see if I was dying. I soaked in the tub for an hour before hauling myself to bed, my arms too sore to use the laptop at all.

I slept in ’til 7, what a treat. I dressed and went downstairs for the free breakfast I had yet to partake in, standard free hotel fare. I had some of the automatic pancakes, a yogurt, and a couple hardboiled eggs. Then I went back up to my room and ran another bath while I waited for the muscle relaxers to kick in. No float tank place in Regina, or at least not one I could find.

I climbed back into bed and tossed and turned until noon. I felt hot – was I sick and running a fever, or had I overworked myself that much? I played around on the computer a bit and walked to the store when the pain wasn’t so bad, to grocery shop. Boy was I glad I had hastily booked today off. I couldn’t imagine I would have been functional at work.

The shop called me. They had found a workaround for the knuckle bushings, but they’d need to keep the car over the weekend. Fine, I can swallow the cost of a taxi once.

The Vagabond had been quieter since he had arrived at the new job site. Obviously he wouldn’t text at work, but also since he woke up at 4, with the time change he was going to bed as I got off work.

Ordered a drive the next morning.

They had moved the improvised changeroom to the other side of the loading bay. This meant a moment to track down my hard hat and toolbelt, both fairly easy to find. The knee pads were lost – it’s not like I could have marked them to find them when they did not belong to me. I decided I’d just wait for them to show up. Maybe Scott had taken them back.

They had torn down quite a bit of the scaffold in my absence. But we had been told to slow down. The guys interpreted “slow down” as “put the pedal to the metal for an hour, then stand around smoking for an hour”, as opposed to slow and steady. Then the mysogynistic sex jokes came out.

Yup, ok, I’m done.

I took myself down to the yard. One of the people there was the kid who had been bragging about “firing” Duff, now thoroughly chastised for it. He apologized profusely to me for no apparent reason. The other guy was taciturn. I learned later his name is Nick and he can be chatty once you get to know him.

We puttered along in the yard for a bit before I took over. We were sorting out the gear from the tear down, thrown into racks as a mélange. This build was all systems, oddly, and it was being sent away, so it needed to be sorted into racks and banded.

Dylan is confusingly strong – he looks like a regular slim twenty-something, but he can throw 3 ten foot planks over his shoulder like a bag of flour. So he was just walking gear across the yard with no plan. I made a plan for how to organize the racks and relayed it to our new zoomboom operator, a strange man with a single cross dangling from his right ear named Noah. When Dylan protested, I pointed out his current plan was “walk gear across the yard and throw it wherever”.

There was not a cloud in the sky all day or a breath of wind. I slathered myself in sunscreen at every break. It’s funny, the Vagabond is so bronzed, and I’m pale as milk next to him. I suspect he would prefer I had a tan, but my mother is a redhead. I don’t tan, I burn. And then freckle, like a banana.

The ground had finally dried from the constant rain last week. There was still quite a bit of water standing in the ruts, and it was starting to grow algae. It smells dreadful.

The Boss was still around. He’s a tall, burly man. Thick arms, clean shaven, close-cropped hair. He always has shades on. Something about him makes the hackles on my neck stand up, but I can’t put a finger on it.

Duff’s truck broke down. He wouldn’t be back tonight as expected.

I approached my other option, Rob. He agreed to pick me up in the morning as well. He drives a beat-up old minivan, the window rolled down so he wasn’t hotboxing me like Scott.

My Soylent order has gone missing. It was marked as delivered, but the clerk had no packages delivered today. I was out of breakfast, and I didn’t even have the car to make a Timmies run. I emailed them, somewhat annoyed and knowing I wouldn’t get a reply until Monday at the earliest.

Well, Duff said they put out some breakfast early enough for him. And I have some coffee yogurt, my favourite. I can make it work.

“When’s Duff getting back?” Someone complained.

“He isn’t coming back.” James pipes up.

My eyes shot up.

“Yeah, he quit!” James adds confidently.

It was Sunday morning and I was exhausted, standing with a bunch of guys having a smoke before work. I wasn’t in the mood for bullshit. “Who did you hear that from?” I asked him sharply.

“People. Uh, from Duff himself. Yeah, he texted me.” He stumbles.

“Oh, really? So if I text him right now, he’ll confirm this?”

“Who are you? You can just text him whenever and ask him his plans?” James snarls.

“I’m his daughter, remember?” I replied dryly. “You’re just mad you just outed yourself as making up rumors, cuz everyone here just heard you do it.”

Too tired for this, I wandered back out to the yard to work. The Boss was there. I looked around for something to do, quick-like. No standing around in front of the Boss. I noticed a bunch of bins with a random assortment of gear in them.

“Mind if I organize the bins?” I asked. He might want me back at the dismantle.

“Nope, go ahead. Let Noah know what you need.”

Excellent. There was about a dozen bins, in two rows of six. Like playing Rush Hour, or a sliding puzzle game, the first task is to make an empty bin. Which bin is least full, or which has most of a thing and can be easily converted to that type?

I puttered away at that for most of the day. It was nice to have a simple task to handle, while my mind worked its way through its own knots.

Towards the end of the day, I had fully sorted all 12 bins and run out of work in the yard. The wind kicked up a lot of dust, and it coated my layer of sunscreen and sweat like I had been ineptly tarred and feathered. There was supposed to be a legendary thunder storm rolling in tonight, perfect for walking home in. I went back to the dismantle.

“Can you drop me off at the movie theatre tonight?” I asked Rob.

“Like I’m a taxi!” He exclaimed, half-jokingly.

“You can say no and I will just get a taxi.” I laughed. “But it’s just around the corner from the hotel. It’s actually closer than the hotel.”

“How will you get home afterwards?”

“Walk?” I shrugged. “It’s not even a click.”

“I will.” He said finally, with a grin. “What are you going to see?”

“Bikeriders.”

Eventually the day ended and we headed out. As we pulled up to the theatre, he shifted in his seat.

“I want to say… text me when you get back to the hotel, if that’s alright. So I know you’re safe.” Rob says, somewhat sheepishly, looking at the dashboard.

“Yeah, that’s fine.” The usual sarcastic reply in my head; you might as well look after me, my own parents don’t want to.

That’s not true. They did want to look after me. They wanted to lock the pretty little bird in a golden cage, so it would sing on command.

Hopped out of the car. The theatre is not crowded. They have the new kiosks where you pick your seat, so I pick the one at the back, behind the stairs. Popcorn and a drink. When I stomp into the theatre, despite it being ten minutes past four, the advertisements are still playing. I throw my stuff on the other chair and run to the bathroom, then back again. Kick my boots up, recline the seat, curl up with my popcorn and drink as the lights go down.

The movie was good. Jodie Comer’s character is good as a framing device, although she still annoys me by trying to convince Benny not to ride anymore. Not enough Norman Reedus, which is a real tragedy. I wonder if they cut more of his scenes, cuz it seemed like something was missing.

Very 60’s. It was definitely made by someone who has an appreciation for bikes, bikers, and the way the culture has evolved over the years.

I love the opening narration. “Since I’ve met Benny, I’ve see the inside of more courthouses, jails, bars etc. It can’t be love! It must be stupidity.” You and me both, sister.

If the movie has a failing, it’s that we don’t get a sense of why Benny and Kathy like each other. Someone says early on that Benny has a reputation for crashing his bike, but he never crashes or even seems unsteady on the bike. It would have been good if they established that he stopped crashing because of or with Kathy, that would give a reason for their swift and fiery romance.

I also hate the ending. C’est la vie. I still recommend the movie!

I like the juxtaposition of the wild but ultimately harmless “original” bikers, who just want to drink a couple beers and dance to rock and roll, and the Vietnam vets, who quickly move from smoking dope to harder drugs, and have a chip on their shoulders. Motorcycle culture has always been close to military culture, the original bike riders being World War 2 vets. Kathy notes with amusement that the guys who eschew the rule of law make up all kinds of rules amongst themselves, but it’s much the same for a vet – there’s the rules of civil society, and then there’s the rules of survival, and it can be difficult to switch from one to the other. Things have changed with modern wars, and biker culture with it. The search for new horizons. The so-called “war on drugs”. Pop psychology.

I wanted to join the military at one point. I would have been good at it too. My surgery at 19 ended that dream, but I still have a tendency to hang out with vets. They can sense that I understand them, the scars under my skin.

I walked out to the parking lot. Angry clouds had rolled in, but fortunately no rain yet. As I walked towards the highway, my nerves faltered.

Maybe I shouldn’t walk along the side of the highway. Except I could see the hotel and the grocery store from here, not even a click. My other option was to order an Uber, for such a short distance. What would the Vagabond do?

He’d laugh at me for hesitating.

I thought back to the story Rob told me this morning. If someone stops me, I’ll just sass them and keep walking.

I walked to the edge of the field. A path revealed itself, worn through the grass by other feet. Fellow vagabonds.

I smiled.

I walked through the grocery store, grabbing what I needed like it was nothing. Paid and left. Why was I even worried? I was doing nothing wrong, they could even search my bag. Plus, I’m a pretty white girl. No one ever questions us.

Wide shots of hot, muscular bikes rumbling across the quaint plains visually mark the tension between the steely masculinity the men want to project and the quieter souls who lurk underneath the shadows they cast. 

Robert Daniels

I’ve been working on a few things when I have time. The Vagabond’s birthday is coming up at the end of August. I’m trying to find Italian lessons as well. Duolingo is all well and good, and I can read and write Italian fine, but the problem is my pronunciation, at least as far as he is concerned. Italian is slow and melodic, and I talk like a second hand car dealership trying to convince you to sign on the dotted line before you read the contract. I need a person to teach me.

The Vagabond was still refusing to plan anything and it was wearing on me. I finally lost my temper and he said that driving up to see me here was probably a pipe dream.

So the next plan was flying down to visit him. I had a plan in my head – a quick flight, 100$ for no checked baggage, just a carry-on… easy, right? If I could, I’d book the flight after work, so I’d only need two or three days off.

It was not to be. The flights for next week were jacked up in price – Canada Day long weekend, everyone is travelling. And almost none of them were in the evening. And almost every single one had a 3 hour layover or more in Winnipeg.

For several hundred dollars and at least 6 hours spent waiting at the airport, I might as well drive back! What a waste of freakin’ time and money!

What do I want…

I’m tired. I’ve been on since the beginning of April and the week off I had before this was not very restful. I still have more paperwork to sort. And I’m not travelling for vacation. I work 12 hours and then drink in front of the computer before bed. I can’t stop drinking myself to sleep, cuz at this point I’ll have a few sleepless nights to detox and I can’t afford that with these hours. There isn’t even enough hours in the day to do anything else around Regina. They’ve been telling us to slow down for days now and I’d bet they’d love someone to volunteer for a layoff.

And… at the end of the day, I miss the Vagabond. I’m allowed that, aren’t I? I had fun commiserating with the guys about our partners not wanting us to travel, but to a certain extent the reverse is also true – it’s not like I want to miss him. I had half a mind to hold off until he begged me to come back, even as the guys told me I shouldn’t go back just for him. Well, it isn’t just his feelings under consideration! I miss him as well.

So I decided I’d ask the Boss for a layoff.